When you can't compete with product, compete with service

To set your company up for success, you need to have unfair advantages:

◾ Having an edge in a growing market
◾ Being a top expert in a specific domain
◾ A product that is 10x better than the competition
◾ A monopoly, making it hard for newcomers to compete
◾ Access to effective and sustainable acquisition channels

But let’s be realistic: it’s still hard to catch up with companies that raised hundreds of millions and hired tens of engineers to work on their products.

That being said, you can still carve out a niche for yourself, by competing with your level of service instead.

Here’s how we mix product and service at Superdocu:

◾ We help users get set up, create their first workflows, update their domain or SMTP settings, etc.
◾ We compensate for missing features with manual work: exports, duplication, user management, etc.
◾ We walk users through their other tools (eg. Zapier, DocuSign) and help them create useful automations
◾ We reduce turnaround times to a minimum
◾ Most customers have my WhatsApp number and can contact me whenever they want.
◾ We answer requests 7/7 (but not 24/24 😴)

It’s not scalable, but we haven’t scaled yet anyway 😅

Lesson: as a software start-up, when you can’t compete with your product, you can still compete with service.