They are targeting the same market and the application has the same features.
From what I have read so far about them they have been very successful (both financially and with creating a community of users) and the application is gaining traction. While this somewhat validates my feelings about the original idea in that it has been a great success for them, I am unsure what to do now.
Do I continue working on my own application and release it in a couple of months? I am pretty sure that there is enough market for it but I am no expert on marketing (far from it in-fact).
There are a number of older style web applications from competitors, both commercial and open source, but I feel that these are over complicated or bloated and my application is a fresh take on those with a greater emphasis on usability and simplicity (not through lack of features!) which the new competitor also provides. From research I have conducted on those they also appear to be performing very well financially.
Does anyone have any advice? Is this sort of thing normal and should I just ignore them and continue anyway?
Thanks
But when I leave SF, I tell people "I am making a photo sharing site, kind of like Flickr, but how I want it." The response I get is "Sounds Cool - what is Flickr?"
Sites like Fotolog and Photo.net and Photobucket eventually sold for way more than Flickr.
The point I'm trying to make is that if the market is big enough, there will be people who want to use your product, even if there is an entrenched competitor. In fact, your competitor may not be as entrenched as you think.
I love this: In fact, your competitor may not be as entrenched as you think.
Unless it's a game changer like fotonauts, you might want to change your game plan.
You're small and unencumbered, and if your heart is really, truly in it, bloody dangerous. Good luck.
That was YC's own Paul Graham talking about ViaWeb i think.
Edit: I'd venture to guess both are necessary, albeit to different degrees.
But even though they all do the same thing, its the way that they've implemented the functions that makes each app different, and has ultimately influenced my decision.
At this point, I have no idea what one came along first, that doesn't matter to my decision, and I didn't just pick the first one I found, I reviewed 5-6 before making a choice.
Another point is, that after your initial release hopefully you'll get a user base who will provide you with feedback and ideas, its up to you how you act on that feedback. You may react to your users differently than your competitors, and ultimately that too will distinguish you from them further.
Good luck!
Web apps are easy for users to try out for a while. So build a couple of differentiating features and see if a subset of the (apparently lucrative!) market tries your site and sticks with it.
If you were wanting to be a category-killer then it doesn't sound like your market is suitable for that. So if you're playing "Go Big or Go Home."; you should find another market.
Basically, if you are going that route, you want to be the 80-ton gorilla in your market, you want to be first, biggest and most; you want to be Amazon, or eBay, or Google; not booksamillion, or ask.com.
From a distant perspective, it doesn't really matter if you build a world-changing, industry-creating, market-dominating company or a niche lifestyle company.
But if you aim low, you'll hit low.
1. Respond to all user emails within 24 hours or less - even if it's just to say "thanks" or "this should be released next month". Not only will you know exactly what your users want; they'll tell your friends how quickly you responded. And of course, don't ever ever use form responses/letters.
2. Keep your burn rate super low. If you do that you're a cockroach - no one can kill you.
Ask yourself this question. Will your product be substantially different from this competitor's product?
If yes, you might want to do something else. Like what you said, this competitor has growing traction. It'll be difficult for you to break the momentum especially if you provide nothing different.
If you really want to fight with this competitor well, you must offer something different to the users. Eg. tumblr or posterous is like a super-easy lite version of wordpress. That's why they're gaining traction. There are probably XXX number of blogging systems out there that are similar to blogger/wordpress and they just can't break through. Those that broke through differentiate themselves well from these existing services.
dropbox is not like the hundred other online storage site. Their interface is brain-dead simple compared to the competition.
Will your product be so? That's the question you have to ask yourself.
I'm not saying this to be a spoilsport but to help you prevent wasting your precious development time.
- Learn from your competition and differentiate yourself from them
- There are competitors all the time. So learn to live with them and out-execute them.
- Being late to the party is not a problem as long as you execute well (See dropbox)
Another good example is Box.net. They were in a crowded space. They were not first but they differentiate themselves from the competition by offering an easy + social UI that makes sharing fun. It all boils down to execution.
Good luck with your project!
Then AOL announced they were going to go release the same thing. We had pretty much everything but the user interface done.
Like the man said, "In a situation like this, there's a high potentiality for the common motherfucker to bitch out". We bitched out.
A few months later, AOL dropped the product. Akonix and IMlogic, two companies that didn't bitch out, went on to gross something like 30-40MM in revenue each. I stopped paying attention to them; I assume they exited nicely.
Your competitors don't decide whether you're going to succeed. Your judgement and execution do. We probably would have failed even if we kept moving --- our hearts weren't in it. Is yours? If you have to ask whether you're going to keep going, maybe you should do something else.
That being said, from the sounds of it, the competitor seems to be very visible in the market. Given that, can you see that there is something that they're not doing? Is there are group of users that are under-served? Do you figure one might surface? It looks like they've got you beat feature wise, but can you go the other way even further? (Super simple?) These are areas that you can explore.
At any rate, keep going. You idea has been validated. It's a big world out there, odds are in the next two months you'll understand that there will be room for you, them, and probably a few others.
Good luck.
Like others have said, learn from them. Figure out some need that they're not addressing and sure up that niche and try to grow from there. That may actually lead you to a point where you're not going head-on against them, and even if it doesn't it'll give you some runway before you're really going one-on-one.
As someone else has already said, learn from your competition and make your product better as a result.
If the idea you're working on is a good one, then you're almost bound to have competition. So I see competition as a sign that I'm on the right track.
Keep at it! You just have to make your implementation a little bit better than the other guy.
There's one danger in learning from them: don't become fixated or intimidated. What you have to offer is your passion for that "fresh take", which is still your original idea, and is still real, and is still needed by people.
It will turn out that your "fresh take" is not identical with theirs - non-identical features, non-identical audience. It could be that yours is better.
Marketing is important - if you are "far from" being an expert, one way to gain experience is to have a go.
I want to encourage you, but courage is only needed because of the unknown. A start-up is high-risk, with many risks and many ways to die. A competitor is just one of them. But fortunately, the plurality of risks doesn't really matter, as you can only die once.
This sort of thing happens all the time; few ideas are truly original.
If you think there's a chance in hell, give it a go. Otherwise you'll always wonder 'what if...?'
I mean look at eBay, they are in world known, but their user base is only 144 million people world wide. Sure it sounds huge, but in reality its just a tiny portion.
As long as there is no first comer advantage(i.e. how eBay pretty much has a monopoly on auctions), you can launch a decade later, and still manage to get up on top(i.e. Google)
