Back when we started on Thymer we considered the market. In fact, we asked ourselves: "do we want to enter a saturated market?". But then we realized that we just assumed the market was saturated, but we think the evidence points to the contrary.
True, there are a lot of competitors. But surely the number of competitors alone doesn't mean the market is saturated? The market isn't saturated until you can choose between 4 or 5 products that are all great, and that all suit your needs well. There may be hundreds of email services, but Gmail put them all to shame. Sometimes taking just a slightly different approach can make all the difference.
At this point only few of our competitors have great products, and even fewer are truly successful. Or to put it another way: in another 5 years we expect all the products to be radically different. The market hasn't matured yet (like Word Processors have), which means the market leader of tomorrow probably hasn't incorporated yet.
Or we can look at it from another perspective. Because task & project management apps attract the GTD (Getting Things Done) crowd, people will happily try out your product, blog about it, and so on. So in a way entering an established market makes life easier for us. We don't have to explain what we do, or what software as a service is -- people know what to expect. We just emphasize what we're good at and we get people to give Thymer a test drive. If they love Thymer they may buy it or recommend it to others.
So people know roughly what to expect when they hear of "another task and project management app". From that point on we just have to exceed their every expectation. That's of course easier said than done, but we don't expect it to be easy.
Contrast this with marketing, say, a new search engine. People would ask: "Why do I need this?" or "What's wrong with Google?". Even if your search engine _is_ objectively better people will still compare what you do to what Google does at every step. "Why don't you have a translate link?", and so on. Because there are a good number of competing task and project management services the comparison becomes much more nuanced. "So you have tags like Gmail, projects like X, and teams like Y. That's nifty!". That makes our life pretty easy. Imagine what marketing something entirely new would be like. I wouldn't know where to start.
If you're interested we could write some more on our blog about this; explain our point of view a little better.
Back when we started on Thymer we considered the market. In fact, we asked ourselves: "do we want to enter a saturated market?". But then we realized that we just assumed the market was saturated, but we think the evidence points to the contrary.
True, there are a lot of competitors. But surely the number of competitors alone doesn't mean the market is saturated? The market isn't saturated until you can choose between 4 or 5 products that are all great, and that all suit your needs well. There may be hundreds of email services, but Gmail put them all to shame. Sometimes taking just a slightly different approach can make all the difference.
At this point only few of our competitors have great products, and even fewer are truly successful. Or to put it another way: in another 5 years we expect all the products to be radically different. The market hasn't matured yet (like Word Processors have), which means the market leader of tomorrow probably hasn't incorporated yet.
Or we can look at it from another perspective. Because task & project management apps attract the GTD (Getting Things Done) crowd, people will happily try out your product, blog about it, and so on. So in a way entering an established market makes life easier for us. We don't have to explain what we do, or what software as a service is -- people know what to expect. We just emphasize what we're good at and we get people to give Thymer a test drive. If they love Thymer they may buy it or recommend it to others.
So people know roughly what to expect when they hear of "another task and project management app". From that point on we just have to exceed their every expectation. That's of course easier said than done, but we don't expect it to be easy.
Contrast this with marketing, say, a new search engine. People would ask: "Why do I need this?" or "What's wrong with Google?". Even if your search engine _is_ objectively better people will still compare what you do to what Google does at every step. "Why don't you have a translate link?", and so on. Because there are a good number of competing task and project management services the comparison becomes much more nuanced. "So you have tags like Gmail, projects like X, and teams like Y. That's nifty!". That makes our life pretty easy. Imagine what marketing something entirely new would be like. I wouldn't know where to start.
If you're interested we could write some more on our blog about this; explain our point of view a little better.