TLDR; I found out a competitor business is executing (almost) exactly my idea and doing it... damn well! I am at learning & prototyping phase, lightyears behind them. Does that mean I'm failing already by being too late and continuing to execute should be considered unreasonable?
To begin with, I'm not afraid of competition itself whatsoever. In fact, the bad quality of competitors' services was my opportunity in the first place.
A few words about my idea maybe: here in Poland renting a flat is very popular while finding a flat to rent is a struggle. You have to use one of the big advert sites with tons of adverts, often outdated, often repeated, often spammy, mostly with low level of readability. Hours of frustration, anxiety, impatiance every day.
So I thought of a new approach to the problem. A site/app that would be dedicated to renting flats, tidy, easy to use, always up to date. With features that me and other users (both tenants and landlords) were missing for quite a while. I started a ton of learning on web-dev, marketing, user & web design, etc. and was planning to finally deploy a minimum-value-product around March.
Then I learned about this competing start-up, which is doing exactly what I was about to do. For like 2 years now. Long story short, they've developed an AI facebook bot that does the seeking for you. You just have a short conversation in chat, answer several questions and "let me get back to you when I find something" - you get flat suggestions tailored to your needs. Easy, efficient, quick and fancy to use. No more forms to fill, no more hours spent on filtering out the spam. What is more, most of the features I was planning to implement - they do have as well. And they carry it out almost perfectly. Their service is up and running, they have quite an impressive customer base, their website is well designed, everything is working as it is supposed to.
It felt like a sudden punch into my face. All my strength and motivation have just swayed (but not fell over yet). As I said, I was not afraid of the competition itself, their poor efficiency was my opportunity, my strong value skew was my ace up my sleeve. Now it turned out my value skew is in someone else's hands, I'm left with nothing unique. Launching my product would look like an attempt to copy them, not creating something better.
Does that mean that any further effort put in my product would be unreasonable? I'm not asking the 'should I abandon the ship' question. Rather than that, I would like to ask: how do you know you should back off because your competitors are too good? Or is that the right reason to back off in the first place?
Regards
Fid
To begin with, I'm not afraid of competition itself whatsoever. In fact, the bad quality of competitors' services was my opportunity in the first place.
A few words about my idea maybe: here in Poland renting a flat is very popular while finding a flat to rent is a struggle. You have to use one of the big advert sites with tons of adverts, often outdated, often repeated, often spammy, mostly with low level of readability. Hours of frustration, anxiety, impatiance every day.
So I thought of a new approach to the problem. A site/app that would be dedicated to renting flats, tidy, easy to use, always up to date. With features that me and other users (both tenants and landlords) were missing for quite a while. I started a ton of learning on web-dev, marketing, user & web design, etc. and was planning to finally deploy a minimum-value-product around March.
Then I learned about this competing start-up, which is doing exactly what I was about to do. For like 2 years now. Long story short, they've developed an AI facebook bot that does the seeking for you. You just have a short conversation in chat, answer several questions and "let me get back to you when I find something" - you get flat suggestions tailored to your needs. Easy, efficient, quick and fancy to use. No more forms to fill, no more hours spent on filtering out the spam. What is more, most of the features I was planning to implement - they do have as well. And they carry it out almost perfectly. Their service is up and running, they have quite an impressive customer base, their website is well designed, everything is working as it is supposed to.
It felt like a sudden punch into my face. All my strength and motivation have just swayed (but not fell over yet). As I said, I was not afraid of the competition itself, their poor efficiency was my opportunity, my strong value skew was my ace up my sleeve. Now it turned out my value skew is in someone else's hands, I'm left with nothing unique. Launching my product would look like an attempt to copy them, not creating something better.
Does that mean that any further effort put in my product would be unreasonable? I'm not asking the 'should I abandon the ship' question. Rather than that, I would like to ask: how do you know you should back off because your competitors are too good? Or is that the right reason to back off in the first place?
Regards
Fid
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