Hi James - thanks for your kind words, yes I hope so too! I saw on twitter that your sister is working in the medical frontlines, I wish her and everyone else working for us right now our sincere thanks and support for what they are doing.
Competition is scary James, I won’t deny it - and actually, a bit like democrat and sausages, the least you know on how it is made the better (churchill?). Which means, if I do read blogs or follow a twitter update on a competitor I can’t help but feel that twinge of panic in my stomach that suddenly it’s all going to come tumbling down around us. So sometimes I just ignore competition and get on with my life - feels better!
However, when I do think about it, here is my basic approach
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Know what you need your competition for - some of it is (although you won’t believe it) actually good for you. People like to have other tools to compare with. If we didn’t have over 200 competitors then we couldn’t be one of the top 3 tools on G2
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Competition is also there to remind you of the problem you are solving - there are 7 billion people on the plant - they are not all going to use the competitor’s tool just because they manage CSS or something. You can go after your customers because you know you have a good product and something they want.
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For YCBM, we have always been a product-led and customer-centric company. We are immersed in our customer experience of our product and therefore even if someone else decided to go with acuity or calendly or whoever, I know many others choose us because of what we do - our customer service and customisation are two differentiators I know make a big difference.
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I spoke once at MicroConf a few years ago about bootstrapping - I laid our all our numbers and spoke candidly (as you have seen!) about our experience.
When I got off the stage I found myself talking to two CEOs of other bootstrapped scheduling tools. I had a mini internal panic and quick review had I said anything that they could take advantage of?? And then I thought to myself, building online scheduling tool is hard - people have high expectations, and very specific needs. If one of these guys can do it better, fantastic, the world’s a better place. We had a really nice chat and I felt better for having met them and we shared our experiences.
In reality 99% of the success you achieve is because of what you do, and what you make of it - it’s not because you’ve found some secret sauce that another competitor doesn’t yet know about.
The opportunity is always in your hands - not theirs. 