Mine is mostly a mental problem, I feel like my product will never be good enough compared to others. Even right now, I'm working on a simple website for a specific niche, but there's already another website that does exactly the same thing. I feel like people will just think I copied there idea, or that they might have better content than me.
It's always been an issue for me, and because of it, I've never been able to finish anything.
> there's already another website that does exactly the same thing
I don't think there's anything wrong with this per se, but you still need something to set yours apart. For example, if the features are identical, then the price can be different. If the price is the same, then you can edge them out with features or service or get ready, experience.
Amazon won us over with price, but now there are often other places with lower online prices (often walmart.com) but we tend to use amazon more because the experience is good (although they're killing that now too, but that's another discussion).
> For example, if the features are identical, then the price can be different.
Just a reminder that pricing "cheaper" isn't always a good idea. Newbies often think they'll charge less, but without having the data competitors have of how long the product takes to develop & maintain, how much support is involved, how much advertising costs to acquire a customer, how often you need to upgrade your equipment etc.
Please make sure that your competitive advantage is not "selling at a price you can't possibly make a living from".
(Hint: being found first can also be an advantage. Even if you're not better or cheaper than the competition, if they try you first and think "meh, good enough, I can afford that", that can still get you the sale. Not everyone exhaustively researches the competing products.)
> Just a reminder that pricing "cheaper" isn't always a good idea.
That's all true, but also keep in mind that they will often charge as much as people are willing to pay so there can be room for a lower cost competitor to play. Even removing one (costly) feature and charging less could be a good option if it captures customers who didn't need that feature or wouldn't pay more than your lowest cost option to begin with.
Sometimes you can beat free! You can outlive the free / freeware competitors, because they're often not making money!
Remember Google often kills off their services. They bought Picasa & the Nik Photography Collection & made them both available for free... now Picasa is gone (even though there's a ton of customers who still want it), and Google sold the Nik Collection to DxO and it's back to costing $70 again. And Fastmail exists even though Gmail is free.
Google is not known for providing friendly personal customer service... so why not aim to get your customers saying "yeah XYZ costs more, but oh my god, they have the friendliest & most hilarious people answering their emails, and they actually fixed my problem!" You can only do that if you've got money coming in to pay for the support team (you want to pay your employees well too, right?) Derek Sivers has some great ideas on doing awesome customer service:
(Anyway, just some food for thought. Sometimes pricing cheap is absolutely the right thing, sometimes Charge More is the right thing. Experiment with both!)
I said on price. Beating service on stability and support is not competing on price - that is very much possible. You can compete with Google on both of you aim at their enterprise package or cloud offering.
You can compete on price. But definitely depends on your niche and market segment though.
There are plenty of users who are not happy with how the big companies create products. Google and Apple create for the mass market and in the process generally eschew features, functionality and quality of life improvements which a certain subset of users demand. That's why people pay for Evernote, Todoist etc even though Google/Apple notes and reminders exist. Some companies have even raised VC funding for creating calendar apps even when Google calendar exists.
If your potential customer is happy with the free product, then they were potentially never your customer in the first place. Creating product in such a niche won't be easy nor will it make you a billionaire. But there's a decent chunk of money to be made in both B2B and B2C.
I understand that, I also compare services / products and make a decision, even if one is a copy of the other, I generally don't really care about it. (Unless it's just a 1-to-1 knockoff)
But somehow with the products I work on, being seen as a knockoff is constantly on my mind.
Fair enough, but keep in mind that Oreo cookies are a knockoff. But nobody thinks of them that way because they're the best known cookie of that type and usually the first cookie of that type that someone tries. It is the original in their mind.
If your customers are introduced to all of the products in your segment at the same time, they probably won't even know who is the "knockoff" and who is the original.
Also, when I think knockoff I think of some less than desirable product that isn't as good as the "original". Even after we know that Oreos are knockoffs, it doesn't change our perception of them because they make a high quality product that is desirable (if you're in their target market).
Many products that Apple makes could be considered "knockoffs" but again, most people don't think of them that way because they do an excellent job with design and use high quality materials.
It's probably a bit of imposter syndrome, but as long as your products are great then I wouldn't worry about going to market after a competitor.
If it's "exactly the same thing", I personally wouldn't do it. It doesn't have to be something so significantly different, but it has to be a solution to some real pain points that persist on the existing solution.
On his book "From 0 to 1", Peter Thiel goes even more extreme. For him, if something isn't 10x better then the alternative solution, he wouldn't do it.
Of course, all the above doesn't apply if your goal of building it is for learning-purposes or just for fun.
Sorry, "exactly the same thing" was bad wording, it's the same concept, but executed differently. You can compare it to two tech blogs who write about the same things. Definitely not an issue, they both give different takes on the same things.
But isn't Peter Thiel's view on what's a worthwhile return on investment different to most of us (who I expect would be happy just making a decent living)
It's more of a list of resources for generating static sites. I've handwritten everything based on my own experience, so I'm sure content will be different, but the end result is the same as what others have done.
