Feeling too late to the party with your idea
You have an idea, you search for competitors and find there are 10, and they all have a great website, and professional looking product, funding and a sales team.
I think many founders have experienced this situation. Here is a list of different ways to deal with it...
Negative: "10 competitors is a lot!"
Positive: "Looks like a proven market. I don't need to educate the users."
Negative: "I missed the first mover advantage"
Positive: "9 other products did too, are surviving and users are probably switching between them"
Negative: "How will I ever differentiate myself!"
Positive: "This product is possible to build! It might be worth talking to some of the existing customers and see how good the solutions are"
Negative: "All these founders are smarter than me!"
Positive: "Stop assuming everyone is so much smarter than you, idiot"
...
How do you manage your thoughts in this situation?
It's not about too late. It's about "can you bring something new/innovative to the table?" If not, you can forget about people switching over to you.
10 is a good number of competitors. It's 50-100 that you really have to worry about. For example I wouldn't recommend starting a CRM unless you really have something special that sets you apart.
There's probably a lot of places selling pizza in your area.
People choose their favorite and there's room for everyone. You just need to become someone's favorite.
Correct! Incidentally, I'm a big fan of pizza but still waiting for my favourite to arrive in Copenhagen...
This is funny because my product will be the first of its kind (that I know of) and I'm having those thoughts of "Oh, there's no one else out there so it must not be proven market and therefore I'm set up for failure." I think everyone experiences these kind of negative thoughts no matter the product, experience, and/or competition (or lack thereof) that the person is getting into. These negative thoughts can be leveraged to further improve your product and help mitigate these concerns that they generated off of.
Totally agree. It's also a case of picking your poison - do you rather fight with competitors or fight with educating the customers!
Very intrigued to hear about your product now! Building something brand new is always very exciting.
I'm still a bit new to IH and don't have a sustainable business, but here is my view on it:
When you see that there already are other people on it, it's not necessarily a bad sign. What's important is to study the competition and see if something is missing from their product, for example, if it's the case, you have a starting point for your business!
Also, if you have no competitors, it can be as hard as having many competitors as you are maybe the first one going down that path!
Really like your product idea btw. A certain real problem being solved. Must be an interesting challenge selling something which is essentially risk mitigation - I guess you can learn from all the insurance guys!
Hey thanks! This is my first product as I'm quite new to this whole entrepreneurship as I said :) It started as an idea that I thought could be interesting, but I see it more like a "tutorial" to get familiar with all the technology I'm using. I'm having some trouble to get my first users but still working on it!
Yep, exactly right, perfectly put!