Competition isn’t scary, it means there’s an opportunity

I was researching various tools for finding and learning about competitors recently and I realized that ever since my business got going, I’ve been a lot less concerned about competitors.

Competitors used to scare me.

I used to read about similar services and think, “Well, now that idea’s taken, time to move on to another one.” Because this other company was out in the market, they must have already gobbled up all the market share and now I’ll never catch up.

I used competition as an excuse to abandon so many ideas early on. I wanted to be unique; to be the only option; otherwise, how could I as a small upstart ever compete?

The Truth: Competitors Mean Market Validation

As I started and committed to Draft.dev, I realized that competition was actually a good thing. While I didn’t want to compete directly for the same customers they had, the fact that there were a few other competitors meant people were actually paying for this service.

No matter what the armchair quarterbacks on Hacker News and Reddit said, this was a real opportunity with real customers paying for similar things. That’s a good sign.

Don’t Compete on Price

At first, I based my prices on my lowest-priced competitors. This was naive.

After a few months, I realized that your pricing dictates the slice of the market you will get. Price yourself the lowest and you’ll get the crappy customers none of your competitors want. Price yourself the highest and you’ll be perceived as the “premium” option.

I wanted that premium route because higher prices means more room for margin in the future, so I kept raising prices. Pretty soon, I was higher than some competitors in my direct market and lower than those who served an enterprise client base. This little niche seems to work well for us today.

Compete on a Niche

Finally, instead of looking at direct competitors as a threat, I’ve started to see them as potential partners. We perform a very niche service while most of my competitors have broadened out as they’ve grown. This means they’ve watered down and complicated their offerings.

So, I niched down hard:

• At first, we would write any technical content
• Then it was just blog posts
• Then it was just blog posts for developer marketing teams
• Then it was just blog posts for developer marketing teams at early and mid-stage startups
• Then it was just blog posts for developer marketing teams at early and mid-stage startups who already have topics in mind

Now when someone asks me about my competition on a call, I’m happy to share what each of my competitors does and how we can do one tiny slice of work better by hyper focusing.

I hope this inspires you to get out and start something, regardless of your competition!