Launching into a crowded market - is it worth it?
Hi IH!
I've been working on Excepticon for the past several months, and I've just recently made it available to the public. Excepticon is an exception monitoring service for .NET applications and services.
You may be thinking, "Aren't there already exception monitoring services out there? Com'on, dude, this problem is solved!"
And you'd be right. This is the thought that kept me from working on this project for a couple of years until last fall when I began to think about it from a different perspective.
As founders, we tend to think that our idea has to be completely unique, totally original, and like nothing else that's out there. So we spend hours racking our brains, trying to come up with the million dollar idea that no one's thought of yet.
That's hard.
I'd heard the advice many times before on IH and elsewhere, but it took a bit before I began to internalize the notion that success can be had by launching into a niche that has existing competition as long as you execute well and differentiate yourself. It was then that I began to seriously consider building Excepticon.
Here's my thinking on launching into competition:
- Competition validates the market; people are already paying money to solve this particular pain point.
- It's orders of magnitude harder to create to a market than it is to find an existing market.
- If a problem is worth solving, someone has probably already solved it.
- The internet is a big place - if your niche is large enough, there's probably room for another competitor.
- Execute well and differentiate yourself in some way from the competition and your product will resonate with and capture a segment of the market.
So what are your thoughts? Is it better to launch into an existing market with competition, or build something completely unique?
I wrote about my reasons for building Excepticon here.
If you're a .NET developer, I invite you to check out Excepticon - there are free options available, and I'd love your feedback!
It depends on the business model, growth ambitions and differentiation.
For small businesses who want to carve out a nice in a busy market served by big players who aren't focusing on any particular corner of the market– then it potentially can be worth it with a good business model and modest growth goals.
Trying to take on big competitors in a crowded market with no differentiation, low margins and aggressive growth plans is going to be a continuous uphill battle.
I agree - differentiation is key. There needs to be some aspect to your product/business that causes a segment of users to choose your offering over the competitors'. This can be catering to a specific sub-niche, offering certain features that the other guys don't, making yourself a part of the product (i.e., partnering with a person rather than a faceless entity), etc...
Hey @Jon99 I stumbled on Excepticon from another post here that you had replied to, I was curious on the whole 'crowded market' thought process as I am facing something similar. There are a couple of incumbent players in my market who def have a first-mover advantage, so in a sense, we are definitely in the same boat. My startup uses Rollbar, and I looked through Excepticon and was trying to figure out why I would use that vs a more established product...its the same thought process that my customers would have with my own product so I am wondering what your thoughts are on this same question.
Hi Reza,
Congrats on completing your MVP - trainermade looks nice!
Good question. I don't think I've done a great job yet of differentiating Excepticon from the competition on the landing page. I need to emphasize that it is the light-weight, cost-effective, exception monitoring solution geared towards solo founders and small teams.
When solely on price, Excepticon is cheaper than alternatives like NewRelic, Sentry, and Honeybadger. Regarding NewRelic, as a solo founder I get turned off pretty quickly by the amount of enterprise marketing speak that's on their site. I really like Honeybadger, but .NET is not one of the platforms that they say they support (though you could install a third-party Nuget package and make it work, I think).
I'm not as familiar with Rollbar, but they do look like a good option for smaller operations. I like that their paid plans start at $1/mo for a small number of events - I may consider adding a micro plan like this.
Ultimately, I think I need to position myself as the best option for small bootstrapped applications and emphasize that it's indie software. Put my face/personality behind the product. This can be a differentiator (though I don't think it should be the only one) as many solo founders would prefer to purchase from another solo founder rather than a faceless company.
Also, I need to sell - do some cold outreach. Some devs don't have an exception monitoring solution in place for their apps, and I need to find them and make Excepticon the first (and maybe only) option they consider.
So those are some of my thoughts on your question. I think some of the same things may be worth a try for you. Your app is especially timely right now in that many personal trainers are trying to figure out how they continue working when everyone is in quarantine. Maybe find out how you can get in touch with them, where they hang out online, and send out some cold e-mails introducing yourself and seeing if they'd like to try your product for free.
Best wishes.
Thanks Jon, I've done a couple of simple growth hacks and its driving a good deal of traffic. It's definitely timely right now for people being more indoors, but it also takes a certain type of hustle to get online and brand themselves (the personal trainer) and some just don't want to do it. My spiel is that trainers will always be competing with the younger trainer coming into the business and they need to consider this a long term play. I feel like online training should be in their tool chest because its a business model for their future as well (beyond pandemic).
As far as exception tracking, I don't exactly know how I stumbled on Rollbar, but it's been awesome! It has been great to get realtime notices if things break, and also during testing it was super handy, its something that I can't imagine not having on my app at all. I had seen NewRelics landing page before and something just turned me off. Rollbars landing page was super easy to understand, their product was well documented and very easy to implement and use. I had not come across Excepticon when I was researching, and don't know much beyond what I am seeing on your landing page. That being said, I think 90% of my exceptions are coming from the global catcher than my try-catch blocks and that is super helpful. Its implemented on my web app and xamarin mobile apps.
Build something completely unique is hard... very hard...
Hey Jon
Nice thoughts about building a product into an existing, already well established market.
Your reasons are exactly why we build BirdSend -- an email marketing tool exclusively for content creators.
The email marketing space are filled with fierce competitors -- from giants like Mailchimp, Aweber, Getresponse, Active Campaign etc... to smaller companies like Mailerlite and ConvertKit.
So what's the difference with BirdSend? Well, apart from ConvertKit, all the others target everyone and anyone who wants to do email marketing.
What's the difference between us and ConvertKit since we're targeting the same audience -- content creators?
Apart from focusing exclusively on content creators, revenue tracking for every email sent is a huge USP for our platform... and this is where we differ.
I applaud you for having the courage to jump into a crowded market and may we find success in our own right!
Not to be rude, but honestly this sounds more like ads than a sincere advice.
It is. But I can't fault the man for his hustle.
Might even steal his idea of revenue-tracking and repurpose it for my product in my niche.