🏳 Failure criteria: now I do have one

I have been working on Riddey for quite a while. This week, I finally recognized that I need to set up a failure-criteria to avoid spending infinite time and resources on the project.

The idea came in early 2020: create an easy-to-use, online whiteboard for the masses. There were no genuinely excellent ones out there at that time since the market was tiny. But due to COVID-19, it has grown from $10M/y in 2019 to $1.4B/y in 2020 and is predicted to expand to $3.1B in 2026.
Because of this, the whole space became very competitive: now I track roughly 60 competitors, and a new product pops up every week. Even though this domain is hard: you have to deliver a SaaS with a good graphics editor that supports real-time collaboration at the same time. All three areas are already challenging alone, but together...

Since the market is very crowded, it is crucial to stand out somehow. So positioning is the key to success. I spent a lot of time figuring out what makes us different from others in the last two weeks. And today, it finally clicked: our UX is unique.

For a long time, I did not want to accept that this can be a differentiator. But then I understood that, for a productivity tool, it could make a huge difference.

So how is it different? While every other player uses a toolbox to allow the user to select from the tools, we came up with a clever way to reduce the required clicks and movements. Thus we could remove the toolbox from the UI, making it much lighter. Also, we rely on ML to make the whole drawing process more natural, even with a mouse or a touchpad.

Why am I talking about this? Because my failure criteria is related to this uniqueness. We are planning to launch our public beta later this year and see if we can confirm our hypothesis about the superiority of our approach. If we cannot, then it does not work pursuing this product anymore. No VC is pumping millions of dollars into our company, nor do we have a 1000 person organization. And to be the 100th whiteboard is probably does not worth it.

What do you think?