Ask HN: just found a big competitor for my niche. What do I do?

[leanstartupnoob]

I have been talking with some local martial arts studios about building tracking software for their businesses using a SaaS model. As part of the research process I stumbled across this company:

http://www.mindbodyonline.com/ http://www.inc.com/inc5000/profile/mindbody

On one hand I feel like my solution will be a better fit for my customers, but this company provides a very compelling and similar solution that is already built.

Has anyone been in a similar situation? How did you handle talking to customers about the competitor to learn how you could do a better job?

[michael_dorfman]

What's the problem, exactly? It's a rare (and usually unprofitable) niche that has no competition, and if you don't have competition when you start, you'll likely run into it later.

You already say that your solution will be a better fit for your customers; if that's the case, it should be simple for you to draw up a mental list of differentiators that can constitute your "unique value proposition", and pull these out when a prospect asks why they should choose you. (Hint: price is not always a great differentiator.)

If you run into prospects who are already using the competing solution, ask them how it's working out for them, and what kind of things they wish it did differently.

[leanstartupnoob]

I'm actually happy to find this competitor because it validates a lot of my thinking and confirms that a market exists for this type of service.

At this time the other company has a more "feature rich" solution already built which is very similar to what I would provide. My product is basically vaporware today.

I'm wondering how to approach my customers about this other site without pushing them to that solution. Sounds like you are suggesting to use a strong list of differentiators. That seems like a good idea.

Talking to some of the other guy's customers sounds good too.

[evanwillms]

For many customers the issue is not features, it's pain avoidance. If you do just one thing, but better/easier/faster than the established competitor then you can approach customers on that basis. Bonus points if it allows them to save money, especially via employee effort, compared to the "feature rich" competitor.

One awesome book that's helped me with this is "Spin Selling" by Neil Rackham. It's a straightforward method to having productive sales discussions and is based on a quantitative grounding. Their approach is discussion based and a co-exploration, so you're just talking to uncover needs instead of pushing your product. Go check it out.

[ozziegooen]

Competition is only real when a significant number of your potential customers know of it. It sounds like a relatively small percentage of people know of mindbodyonline (obviously the groups you have talked to haven't). So the only danger is if both that company and your company become huge; and that's not something to be worried about now.

[HerraBRE]

Even if the products are very similar, you can still compete on price or customer service - or just marketing.

If you get there first and/or make some deals with organizations (martial arts clubs tend to talk to each other a lot and organize themselves into hierarchies), you could still carve out a chunk of the market.