I posted this last night at 2am, but I don't think many people ended up seeing it. My last post did much better than I expected, so I think I'll post a little more often and focus on some important topics for startup entrepreneurs. I truly enjoy writing these posts because the feedback is usually pretty good!
You have an idea, how do you research the competition. When you are first starting out, and when you have launched into the market, researching your competitors is one of the MOST IMPORTANT THINGS that you should do! When my team and I first had our "idea" we thought we were the first ones doing what we were doing. Not true at all. Over the past 1-2 years, we have become are very familiar with the big players in our space and 10+ startups who are potential competitors to us. Just last week we found another company that we didn't even know about with $20 million in funding. We study everything about our competitors ranging from:
1) What are their business models, and what are the big players doing.
2) What is everyone's UI/UX like (user interface and user experience). Where are they all similar, and where do they differ. We replicate some of our UI/UX based on what is working. There is no reason to reinvent the wheel.
3)Who do they have funding from. READ THIS. When we find a new competitor, we look them up on Crunchbase to see when they were founded, how many VCs invested in them, and how much they have. This is a pretty good gauge to see who the real players are. Keep an eye on them to see what they are doing. Additionally, I go on Crunchbase every day to see what companies just got funding. For starting entrepreneurs, this is a great tool to get ideas and to see what industries are getting funded. Some guy called BS on me in my last post when I said I have 20 ideas of businesses that I could start right now. Trust me, I have a ton of ideas because I go on Crunchbase EVERY SINGLE DAY.
4) Okay, so how does your competition market. Without sales and marketing, you don't have a business. Anyone can build a nice good looking app, but what do they do to market. IMPORTANT Go to SimilarWeb and type in your competitor's websites. For my industry, most traffic comes from organic search, so we invest heavily in content creation and we actually just hired an SEO team to focus on our on page SEO. We use SimilarWeb, Alexa.com, and the Google keyword research tool to research keywords that we can rank for with our content marketing. We actually wrote a blog on our website about content marketing, because we are very open with our users on how we market. This builds trust which is huge in our industry. Feel free to give it a read. SimilarWeb is also a good tool to see where your competition is buying their traffic, who they may have partnerships with, and whether or not they run Facebook ads or display ads.
5) Read online reviews of your competitors. Let the market drive your product. I have read thousands of customer reviews from my competition to see what they like and don't like. From this, we have built our product to cater to what "we think" our user want. It's certainly an educated guess, but when you launch into the market, you should listen to your paying users and make changes from there.
Once you have a grasp of your competition, you can learn from the things they are doing right, and take advantage of things they are doing wrong. Hopefully this post is able to teach everyone something. As always, I love reading the comments and learning from everyone else too. This is a great subreddit and a tool that I used frequently when I was first starting my business. I feel like it's my time to give back now.
If anyone has any questions about the topics in the post, let me know. I think I'm going to write about networking in my next post.
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March 29, 2017 at 10:57PM
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