Today has been pretty stressful for me as I got to see two of our potential competitors I never spotted before. Part of my role within Pocketsmith is to conduct competitive analyses, so you can imagine my surprise when I got to know that there are some people out there right within New Zealand starting similar businesses to ours. But after this first impression, I realized that we shouldn’t be (too) scared about the competition for a few reasons.
- As you develop your product, you will conduct research on your market. Consequently, you will always discover new people/robots/aliens developing their own application. If you haven’t found any potential competitors, then spend more time doing research!
- Their applications don’t necessary fulfill the same need and/or don’t have the same way to fulfill these needs. In fact, they are very few case of two exactly similar web-based applications. Facebook wasn’t the first to play in the social networking market but it eventually became super popular thanks to a clever implementation of its concept by Mark Zuckerberg.
- Your competitors don’t necessary compete in the same market. In fact, their primary target can be very different from yours! For example, many firms in New Zealand limit their activities to the local market.
- One of your competitors is doing well? Then do better! Actually, facing early competition is a great way to test your determination. It is never easy to keep going when people are playing the game but the PocketSmith team believes in its capacity to reach the top!
In this case Jason, James and I have tried to adopt a professional attitude (I said tried)
- Don’t freak out
- Share your feeling with your business partners
- Make a list of your potential competitors
- Conduct a competitive analysis
- Use business tools (SWOT, Porter’s Five Forces and that sort of action) to analyse the situation. And tell you that you finally make good use of the $25K you invested in your education
- Enhance your strengths. Emphasise your success factors.
I hope this advice will help you people facing the stress of competition! Actually, if you believe your application will soon compete with the latest kickass web app from elsewhere, you are on the right track 
Tags: business, competition, competitors, stress
