Going against a multi million $ company

Question

I've found an idea that I'm passionate about (data science and marketing), and I was searching for existing services and found atleast one. If I built this service, Optimonk would be my direct "competitor". The service is 'automating pop-up discounts and upsells'. Now, I'm only building one of their features and have some ideas that can potentially improve on their existing service. I looked up reviews for their website on trustpilot, and except some "customer service" complaints could not find anything else.How do I objectively know if I should commit to it?

warrenm · Accepted Answer

This is a [relatively] simple decision ... albeit with some [possibly] not-so-simple factors:
- could you work for them and make them better with a better payoff? (I see they only officially have a Customer Success Manager opening in Hungary right now - but most companies will hire someone who'll make them better even if the opening is not "officially" open, presuming the expected payoff is high enough)
- how long will it take for you to build your "single feature" competitor?
- do you have any [potential] customers lined-up to try your new service?
- can you (as a single developer) handle any/all support, sales, etc issues that will arise if your service gets used (before you get enough money to hire more staff)?
- do you have any other differentiating factors in what you want to build vs what is available - locale, industry segment, etc?

camhart · Answer

Building the product is the easy part when you're an engineer. Selling the product will be the hard part.
A business requires both.
The fact there's a competitor actually reduces your risk because it shows the market does exist.

halfmatthalfcat · Answer

> I've found an idea that I'm passionate aboutThis is all you need. Continue to iterate on the idea. You haven't even made it yet; maybe you'll never finish it, who knows. You are way too early to be thinking about competitors. Just have fun working on something you like.

CharlieDigital · Answer

I worked at a startup that found it's traction competing against Calendly when it was already well established. Company eventually made it over $3m ARR and then started expanding into other functionality and today, is very, very different from Calendly.
I was chatting with the COO a few months later and he said that the key is that you just have to be "1000x better" (exaggeration for emphasis) than the competitor in some key way. In the case of Calendly, the problem is how clunky it is.
The gist of it is that yeah, you can't compete against the multi-million dollar incumbent directly, but you can do one thing way better than they do and that might be enough to pull away some customers.

Going against a multi million $ company

Building the product is the easy part when you're an engineer. Selling the product will be the hard part.A business requires both.The fact there's a competitor actually reduces your risk because it shows the market does exist.

> I've found an idea that I'm passionate aboutThis is all you need. Continue to iterate on the idea. You haven't even made it yet; maybe you'll never finish it, who knows. You are way too early to be thinking about competitors. Just have fun working on something you like.

Building the product is the easy part when you're an engineer. Selling the product will be the hard part.
A business requires both.
The fact there's a competitor actually reduces your risk because it shows the market does exist.

> I've found an idea that I'm passionate about
This is all you need. Continue to iterate on the idea. You haven't even made it yet; maybe you'll never finish it, who knows. You are way too early to be thinking about competitors. Just have fun working on something you like.