How to tell people your product is really different than the other tools they know that market themselves similarly?

What Am I Missing
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#4: FYI’s co-founder and CEO, Hiten Shah, (@Hiten) lists the often unnoticed alternatives one has to contend with. (Source)

If you don’t pay attention to what’s already out there, you’ll accidentally become a copycat product or start several steps behind everyone else in your space. There’s just too much competition to build blindly.

So who are your competitors? Competition isn’t just about the companies that do exactly what you’re planning on doing. It’s not even just about companies that have similar features to yours.

  • Direct competitors – Companies that do something very similar to what you’re building. These companies are solving the same problem for customers that you’re going after. They may be targeting a broader or more specific set of customers, but if you share similar features, they are direct competitors and you should be including them in your analysis.
  • Indirect competitors – They offer different features than you are building, but they are servicing the same customer. They could be building a product that wasn’t originally created to solve the same problem as you, yet it’s being used for that. Or they could be solving the problem as part of a larger solution.
  • Alternative solutions – The most common alternatives to software products are manual solutions. Spreadsheets, checklists, pen and paper solutions, books. Even hiring consultants or contractors to do something for you is a common alternative. If they aren’t using software, people are solving their problems through one or more of these alternatives.
  • Multiple tool solutions – When people don’t have or choose a single software solution, they find ways to solve their problem by stitching together multiple tools. They could already be solving their problems using tools like Zapier or Google Spreadsheets to help automate manual processes.

Researching and analyzing your competitors is all about one thing: understanding your customer and their challenges. And you don’t have to build anything at all in order to learn what problems customers have and how they are solving them today.

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