Why I shutdown Skedlo
Skedlo was a very interesting project and I decided to shut it down with heavy heart. I think there is a line between acting in a cluttered market vs a saturated market.
When I realized that the only way I had to be noticed in the that market was to start copying functionalities from other competitors, i just started feeling that I was putting a lot of effort in a problem that was very well solved already by other competitors. Was that really worth it?
Also, my timing might have been wrong as well. When I released, other 2 platforms doing basically the same thing released pretty much at the same time. It was like fighting each other for every single user. It felt like pretty toxic to me.
Lastly, security implications. I come from a strong security and threat modelling background and I know that social network related tools are the most targeted platform by hackers and malwares for obvious reasons. That's mainly because such tools cannot guarantee the level of security needed to hold customer credentials. As your platform grows the chance of being hacked grows linearly, this is true in any market, but the issue is if you get hacked in that specific market, you expose the social life of your customers... Again, is it really worth it?b
Hey there, founder of Zlappo here, as you know.
Thanks for the post. It finally shed light on why you decided to stop working on Skedlo.
I'm not sure that's necessary, honestly. I thought that was necessary too, but it isn't.
You should focus on your own users, otherwise you end up building features for other people's users.
You can never compete on features anyway. Not in 2020.
Everyone is iterating rapidly these days, so if you add one feature, even if unique, it gets copied very quickly.
It's a race to the bottom.
You can't do everything too -- you have to pick and choose what features you want to add, otherwise: 1. you overstrain your resources, and 2. you build a Frankenstein of a product that's unusable and clunky with superfluous features that exist solely to differentiate competitively instead of based on users' needs.
Oh, tell me about it. Every customer feels like a battle to win over, needing to explain yourself why you're better than X or Y platforms, and when you finally win them over, whoopdeedoo it's $10/mo (in my case) added to my MRR.
It feels like fighting for scraps. (You burst on to the scene with $5/mo pricing, which I knew instinctively was a mistake, no offense.)
The mistake you (and I) made was to just suddenly show up in the self-improvement niche, where obviously one competitor already had a very strong foothold, even before they began the service, let alone after.
The truth is there are plenty of fish out there. I've noticed so many of my users and customers coming from places I've never even dreamed of, like consultancies, non-profits, organizations, universities, photographers, authors, scientists, niche sites, etc. who found value in what I was building. Not just affiliate marketers/Twitterpreneurs.
People whom I've never consciously marketed to started discovering Zlappo and becoming loyal customers for months while still offering valuable feedback.
I also have enough customers switching over from my main competitor, so there's definitely a reason for that, and I focus on that reason, instead of worrying about achieving feature parity with them or anxiously spying on their product to see what they're up to.
My take
My opinion is that competition is everywhere. I don't think you can avoid it in 2020.
Start an API, there are tons of services out there.
Start a CRM, even more.
Start a marketing automation, are you kidding?
Part of your skillset in 2020 as an entrepreneur is dealing with competition. I myself have also learned tons about competitive positioning in the past year.
That said, it looks like the correct move, AstroIP looks really good, and I didn't know you can obtain so much information from an IP address.
Who are you targeting this service at?
Good question..
A big difference between AstroIP and Skedlo is the target audience. While for Skedlo it was marketers, advertisers, social media managers, which is a very difficult crowd to deal with, as you said they require you to explain yourself over and over for weeks before even starting using your service, for AstroIP is mainly Developers!
Dealing with devs, might be more challenging, but most of the time they know what they want, they try your API and they can make a decision by themselves.
The way I see it is that if the developer is senior and comes from a big company and he is happy with the service, that's where you start growing.
This puts me in a much better position since I am developer myself, I finally know what my audience want and mainly, I know how to talk to them!