How do you compete against Amazon, Google etc?
From pumped!!! To stumped!!! =(
So I recently thought of an idea which I thought was great! I guess it must have been fairly good because it turns out Amazon released something similar only 6 months or so ago. Not to mention they've made it free. I was thinking of charging a small annual subscription.
How have you guys dealt with something similar?
Is it still worth investing time and money and pursuing it?
For those of you that already have a product and the tech giants have made a similar clone, have you over come it and survived?
Maybe @markosaric can shed some light on it. He is doing an awesome job against Google Analytics.
thanks Akash!
With Plausible Analytics, we don't try to create a product that is a clone or a full blown replacement for Google Analytics. That would be difficult to compete with. So we focus on those things that Google doesn't care about.
That means that perhaps Plausible won't be a solution for everyone who uses GA but it can actually be a better alternative to GA for many others who also care about things that Google doesn't care about:
Google Analytics is heavy and slow to load because it tracks tons of stuff. We don't do that so we've made Plausible very lightweight and fast loading.
Google Analytics tracks way too much stuff and has way too many reports that makes it difficult to use. We don't do that so we've made Plausible very simple and easy to understand even for those who are not analytics experts.
Google Analytics uses cookies, has connection to adtech and collects personal data. We don't so we've made Plausible a solution that makes it so much easier to comply with the different privacy regulations.
So you see where I'm going. We've built Plausible to be a better solution than GA for those site owners that care about speed, usability, privacy etc.
And then we make that very clear in our communication. Just take a brief look on our home page and you will quickly understand how we compare to and how we're different from GA https://plausible.io/
I just want to agree with this from the point of view of a very happy Plausible customer.
Google analytics is free. It’s also slow, horrible to use and doesn’t respect the privacy of my visitors.
When my Plausible trial is up, I’ll convert and gladly pay them each month for something that could be free if I used Google.
Don’t be afraid of the big tech giants. If you have a compelling offering then people will give you money precisely because you’re not them.
thanks Dave!
These responses have definitely made me rethink the view on competing with the giants.
Guess I better stand grinding =)
Smaller companies have a big advantage big corps don't, and they should double down on that: customer support. When having a problem and dealing with a giant, it's very hard to reach an actual person, and remedying it takes days, if not weeks. When dealing with smaller companies, you can reach a person who works there (and not a call-center in India) and fixes your problem in hours. That's one hell of an advantage.
When dealing in the B2B space, quality beats market share. Business goals are often quantified and as long as you can make those numbers look prettier, they will stick with you. Big companies such as Google and Amazon pump out a lot of products, but most of the time they are bloated, slow, hard to use and filled with bugs that don't get resolved in a timely manner (look at AWS: more than a hundred services, but people complain about the usability and bugs of 75% of them).
For consumer market, it's hard because nowadays, consumers expect free and their decision making is sentimental. If they don't like the color of the logo, they might not do a purchase.
This has happened to me several times....
You have to create a learning curve for your competitors....and then lead them down the wrong road....
..the advice for niche is good...EXCEPT...what happens when FAANG decides they really like your niche ?
What happens when they move in and you bet the whole farm on that niche ?
You need a better plan than niche focus
understand that this is CHESS NOT CHECKERS.
Social media intelligence has become very important as business and personal brands have learned that there is a wealth of information to be found on social media about competitors , rivals ,frenemies .
Using social media to discern the digital footprints of competitors brings xxx benefits to your endevours .
A competitors digital footprint can reveal to you.... where they spend advertising dollars , who their clients are , unknown phone numbers & emails ,new product introductions , areas of interest , website content , cash flow issues , customer demographics , new locations planned / closed , business trip locations , contacts & networks , technical data , product recipes & methods of production , vendors & suppliers used , statements made by former employees & more ....These revealing subjects can be found on the web and all throughout social media...if..you have the right tool set & know where to look .
EXPLOIT their own weaknesses using these free intelligence gathering tools...
The opportunity to secure ourselves against defeat lies in our own hands, but the opportunity of defeating the enemy is provided by the enemy himself - Sun Tzu
https://github.com/eth0izzle/the-endorser
LinkedIn recontool
https://github.com/arch4ngel/peasant
TikTok Intelligence Tool
https://github.com/sc1341/TikTok-OSINT
TikTok trend analysis tool
https://github.com/claudiobosetti/TikTokTool
***Live, generative visualization of global social media activity.
https://github.com/USCcorpuscallosum/newsglobe
**visualizes user reviews from different social sites on a certain topic
https://github.com/bhavanacse/SocialMediaReviewHarvester
facebook profile recon system
https://github.com/pun1sh3r/facebot
Instagram Intelligence Tool
https://github.com/sc1341/InstagramOSINT
Social media scraping / data collection library for Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, Pinterest, and Tumblr APIs
https://github.com/ScriptSmith/socialreaper
Facebook insights
https://www.facebook.com/help/268680253165747?sr=1&query=insights&sid=0MqeSup2DIoNSV4Ochttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Finsights%2F
FB audience insights
https://www.facebook.com/business/insights/tools/audience-insights
FB Page Insights
https://www.facebook.com/business/pages/manage#page_insights
Twitter Analytics
https://foller.me/
Twitter Trends Map
https://www.trendsmap.com/
TweetDeck
https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/
Keyword Tool for
Amazon
ebay
youTube
Instagram
Twitter
PlayStore
https://keywordtool.io
PINTREST
https://analytics.pinterest.com/
Pintrest Image Tools
https://pablo.buffer.com/
Pin Groupie
https://pingroupie.com/
https://analytics.pinterest.com/
**Scan forums & boards
http://boardreader.com/
Intelligence gathering tool
https://github.com/lanmaster53/recon-ng
Threat Intelligence Chat Bot
https://github.com/cylance/CyBot
Linkedin Learning
https://github.com/mypan/linkedin_learning_courses_downloader
automate connections with personalized messages
https://github.com/mariiio/linkedin_connect
Xing.com employee tool .
https://github.com/MarviMalware/Xinger
reddit data viz
https://github.com/utkuufuk/reddit-scraper
Incredibly fast crawler for OSINT.
https://github.com/s0md3v/Photon
Information gathering tool
https://github.com/twelvesec/gasmask
A social media assistant.
https://github.com/rysmith/hashrobot
Data visualization: a map about Facebook page news (by D3js)
https://github.com/yukonborealis/World-Facebook-Page-News-Map
Interactive infographic visualizing the size of different social media networks.
https://github.com/ArjanJ/social-circles
spiders to crawl instagram posts
https://github.com/h4t0n/instagram-scraper
Quick Instagram search tool
https://github.com/propublica/qis
The idea is to figure out what they are doing & come up with features and products the competitors would take months in committee to even agree on.....let alone to start building
https://threejs.org/
https://observablehq.com/@d3/gallery
Codepen.io
ANYTHING OPEN SOURCE
In the mean time...you can add things they dont have in a day or so
https://github.com/victordibia/handtracking
https://github.com/TalAter/annyang
Hope that helps
Nice list
You can't compete with them head on (same broad feature sets). They probably have multiple teams working on it, whereas you are alone. As others pointed out, you have to find a niche and focus on that. Let me offer three good reasons for it:
I know this because I was in the same situation. I built a no-code, general-purpose web scraping tool, only to find that this industry is way to competitive for a lone indie maker. So what do I do now? Building a spin-off product on top of my platform, which focuses on one use case: remote developer jobs aggregator.
So take this as an example and I wish you the best! Oh, and don't give up! ;)
Hmm, I feel like even if Amazon are doing it, you may be more nimble than them, and potentially be targeting a completely different audience
I wouldn't be disheartened. See this as validation that there's a problem there worth solving!
Agree with @Hari Ragupathi. Find a niche community who would benefit from your product. Focus on them. Amazon is not going to listen to them and their suggestions about how to better make the product fit their needs. You will (I hope) and that's how you win. Then you grow.
ALl the best!
I think your best bet is to focus on a specific niche/industry/demographic/etc.