Ideas are cheap. I have 101 ideas. An online software for Real Estate Managers (my father is one of those, and is complaining from time to time about his administration), a “what shall we eat today” subscription website (my wife asks me every day what we shall eat today), or a “financial coach program” subscription website (I consider myself as a good investor of my own time and money with high ROI).
Developing a software product is super easy these days. There are awesome frameworks like Ruby on Rails or awesome teams using Ruby on Rails that can do that for you. Server and bandwidth are cheap. Unless you are inventing a software to launch rockets to the moon, or a search engine that can beat Google, you can consider the development of your platform as the most easy part of starting up a product company / SaaS business / eCommerce shop / ….
However…just having ideas won’t bring you far. And a very sexy product without a market or without marketing either. Execution is everything.
Most success stories are existing ideas with better execution. Almost every single idea is already taken. But that does not mean that you can’t do it better. Try to find a space where there is more room for competition. Then execute better. That means:
- Blog more then the competition.
- Constantly talk about the client’s problem you solve.
- Better SEO.
- Put a face on your product, stay human.
- Better support to your first customers
- Build a simple product with few features! People love simplicity. Don’t overdo your competition with lots features.
- Public and simple pricing of your product. Don’t scare off your customers with a sales guy.
- A simple sign up process.
- Bi-weekly releases and tiny product updates. It makes your customers so excited.
- Make sure you can onboard a customer in 10 minutes (100% SaaS) to a few days (some products require some basic integration setup with the client’s backend, but still that doesn’t mean sending an army of consultants for several months).
- …
There are a lot of ideas covered by companies that:
- Don’t put public pricing on their site.
- Have a wrong infrastructure that needs an on-boarding process of weeks if not months.
- Don’t bother about SEO.
- Have a 90’s looking product sales website.
- Release updates every year instead of every week.
- Make it hard for the customer to sign up.
- …and still they have customers and are making good profit!
Those companies are solving the right problem, but in the wrong way. I call them low competition markets. There is competition, but you know you can do better with little effort.
Don’t search for the uncovered niche market. You won’t find it. If you feel that you are in a low competition market, then go for it and execute better then competition.
Hey, if you like this post, you should tweet it! Writing this blog post took an hour, tweeting it will take you a second…