What are your tactics for competing against existing companies?
Well, shit.
Just found out about Hashnode, which has a beta feature I am building my own blogging platform around - write your articles in markdown, commit to your Github repo, and bam! you have a new blog article published. No need to leave the comfort of your favorite code editor <- I'm obviously targeting webdevs, etc at the moment.
Seeing someone beat me to market with this feature is a bit demoralizing to say the least 🤦♂️. Not to mention they just got over $2 mil in seed funding, and I'm just a wanna be dev lol.
I know a lot of you are going up against giants and established companies. What have been your strategies and tactics?
Thanks!
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Sounds like your idea has been validated! Double down and figure out how to differentiate.
Checkout April Dunford's book Obviously Awesome – it's about positioning your product. Amazing book, will probably give you lots of ideas on how to position or re-position your product against the competitive landscape.
She also has some talks on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=april+dunford
Ordered! Thanks Steven!
Hope it helps (it really was eye-opening for me) and good luck!
I'm not sure I understand the background on this. I've been blogging for years by writing articles in markdown, committing them to my (Gitlab) repo and bam! I have them published. Jekyll, VuePress and other static site generators all work like this if you've set up your CI/CD (or even just have them hosted someplace like Render). Even WordPress has markdown plugins which let you skip the entire git step.
What were you using before and what did it do differently?
I'd think about what was frustrating for you personally that made you look for/start making an alternative. Then go back to the places where you unsuccessfully searched for a blogging solution and reach the people there with your new one.
Thanks for reading and replying!
At this point, I don't blog. So I haven't been using anything.
I came up with the idea in September or October. Thought it would be cool to build and attractive to a few.
I've heard about others using static sites and CI/CD too. I'm sure a lot of people do this.
When starting a blog, I sum it up in two steps:
My idea is to eliminate step 1.
Hashnode seems to be growing quickly. Which tells me there are people who'd rather skip step 1 and start writing. To be fair, some of them work to set up a custom domain - and my platform will have the same option.
My target audience may or may not exist. People who don't want to do step 1 above, and want to...
Hmm... so I think the issue is that this is an "invented problem". If it's not a product you were looking for and it's not something anyone you know was looking for, then it's a lot harder to triangulate on what product exactly it is that strangers you don't understand want.
In this moment, it's rough because you don't have the understanding of marketing channels you would if it were something you or someone you knew actually wanted.
So what would you suggest?
Can you try solving a problem that you or someone you know has?
Surely there's something in your (or your friend's) life that could be improved with something you can create!
I.e, if you started blogging and found you needed a tool for X and couldn't find a tool for X, then making a tool for X would likely be a great idea!
Roger that. I def have no clue what I'm doing. But I'm having fun doing it - and learning svelte, tailwind and a small amount of the github api and auth.
For us (Tabtimize) there are actually two things we can do:
Try to create partnerships with competitors. Let's all eat if possible.
Identify the weaknesses of competitors' value propositions and make sure to do something that fills the weaknesses and go to market with it.
2.1. In connection with the identification of the weakness, you must build the solution on the weakness (the one thing/few lines of code) and sell/lease it to the competitor.
We are doing the same and actually just sharing some parts of our software out for free to competitors. It's about thinking long term and creating relationships rather than enemies.
Thanks Jay! I guess maybe I was trying your 2nd point, and now it's a beta feature in their own product lol. It was based on a user requested feature, so I know at least one person would use it lol.