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independence5 unconnected · 4 more authors in those circles
applies to

b2b and consumer, no audience needed

confidence

high

evidence

10 claims · 10 articles · 4 receipts

window

2011-12-19 → 2024-06-09

5 builders who never spoke to each other

Read rival products as proof the market pays

Live competitors show budget exists and that better resourced people already checked the space, while an empty category is more often a warning than an opening. Assume you have competition even when no software matches yours, since the manual process is the incumbent.

The method

  1. 01

    Treat existing competitors as proof the market has budget. If several businesses survive in a space it can probably carry yours too, and an empty space is a warning that smarter and better resourced people already looked and passed.

  2. 02

    Treat existing competitors as proof the problem is real, and treat an empty category as a red flag worth investigating rather than an open goal.

  3. 03

    Worrying about existing competitors is largely wasted energy. Taking an established idea and improving one part of it is enough.

  4. 04

    If your idea does not exist in the market yet, the likely explanation is that there is no market for it, not that you are the first to see it.

  5. 05

    Do not be discouraged by an entrenched first mover: the eventual market leader is usually a later arrival.

What it returned

  • The author reports becoming more suspicious, not more excited, when a problem has no existing solutions, since the likeliest reading is that it is not a real problem.

  • The founder was initially anxious about the competitive market and concluded it mattered far less than he expected.

  • Google, the iPod, Dropbox, Excel, Dell, Facebook and Cisco all came after someone else invented their category and all ended up leading it.

  • Six copywriting products were named as commercialising the same underlying language model at once, among them Writesonic, Copysmith and Headlime.

Sources

the second source

Three plays a week, for the phase you are in

No roundup of links, no news. Three tactics more than one builder arrived at separately, with the numbers each one returned and the disagreements left in.

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More in positioning

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the second source

Three plays a week, for the phase you are in

No roundup of links, no news. Three tactics more than one builder arrived at separately, with the numbers each one returned and the disagreements left in.

963 corroborated plays to draw from · 3 a week

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