other sites doing very similar things
pickfu.com
usertesting.com
feedbackarmy.com
You are entirely correct. Dan's product does have competition, and maybe the other products do have better price points. We have talked about these other offerings before our lunch discussion. Other people have mentioned this point to Dan already.
However, this post was not about Dan's product specifically, but it was about what I learned from him while he and I were talking over lunch. I did reference what Dan was doing a lot in the post, I will agree, but you could apply these ideas to pretty much any project a person works on.
My way of figuring ou what people want is to take a look at contracting jobs and etc from people and companies. They'll ask for similar features or projects and then I try to fill that need.