[AnimalMuppet]

If you're just like the competition, you lose, because you're more of an unknown. If you want to win business, you have to have something that your established competitors do not. (And, of course, it has to be something that your customers want, not just some random thing.)

[lelanthran]

> If you're just like the competition, you lose, because you're more of an unknown.

That sword cuts both ways.

The reason the competition in a field has converged on all the same features, all looking the same and acting the same is because they were all shaped by the same market forces: that's what the businesses wanted!

If a potential client looks at your product and it doesn't look like a duck, doesn't talk like a duck and doesn't walk like a duck, they're going to assume that it's not a duck.

I've pitched a fairly simple product (still iterating on it so not sharing details) that had some extra features (not AI) to a business, and the business eventually went with a more expensive competing product, with my contact at the place explaining "The stakeholders feel that your product is for a slightly different use-case."

Yes, my product did have all the features of the competition. The added feature was low-code extensibility for the backend API. The business interpreted the API-extending-mechanism as "Something only big companies would use", not "Something we can ignore if we don't use".

Now, fair enough, this is absolutely an outlier - in most cases extensibility is regarded favourably. But, in this edge-case the audience came away with the primary impression of "Great Development Tool", not "Great User Product"[1].

Humans still have this notion that a thing has a primary purpose and multiple secondary purposes, and they'll absolutely go with the product that has, as it's primary purpose, satisfying their need, even if some other product's secondary purpose also satisfies their need.

[1] And yes, this was a failure of the pitch. For future pitches, I'll tailor to the audience, highlighting their needs and ignoring anything that the product does which isn't in their list of needs.

[Qwertious]

>The reason the competition in a field has converged on all the same features, all looking the same and acting the same is because they were all shaped by the same market forces: that's what the businesses wanted!

By this logic, we all want AI. We're screaming out for Microsoft/Amazon/Google to make all their services AI-driven.

I'm sure some customers do want AI, but mostly it's their investors.

[lelanthran]

> By this logic, we all want AI.

With AI, specifically, it's way too early to say that products with AI in it were shaped by market forces.

It takes years for the forces of the market to have an effect on what the product looks like:

1. Purchasers have to make poor purchases, which isn't known until years later.

2. Sellers have to get feedback from rejections to determine what to refine, and how, which also takes years for most products.

3. Sellers have to run out of money when ignoring the signals, which also takes years.

So, sure, maybe extra AI in $PRODUCT isn't wanted by the majority of people, but we won't actually know what forces the market for $PRODUCT is exerting until much later than 2024.

EDIT: web3 was so obviously unwanted, and yet it took about 4 years for that to reflect. It is not so clear about AI, so we can expect that to take longer to establish.

[pfarrell]

That’s what I was trying to express. We implemented the features that were unique and interesting too late. We should have led with them and build some compelling demos