Just ignore the competition

My wife had an interesting idea for a website. Someone pointed her to an existing site that does pretty much the same thing. I had an interesting idea for a website. A blog post pointed out several others that are working on the same problem. Does this mean it’s time to abandon these ideas? Not necessarily.

When I built my “big successful site” I was building it for three reasons:

1. I wanted to play with some new (to me) technology - Java servlets at the time
2. I wanted to start a site that might make a little extra money
3. I wanted to fill what I though was an unserved need

Those were actually my motivations in order. Not really the best way to launch a business but this was essentially a hobby when it started. After about a year of development and quiet launch I discovered that there was another site that was working in the same space. They had a big head start in terms of content though it was all manually edited html pages. What I had built was a CMS that had very little content.

Though this other site had a big headstart in terms of content and traffic it was being run purely as a hobby with no monetization in mind. I contacted the authors and eventually worked a “partnership” where I took all their content and imported it into my CMS. All for free. Certainly not an arrangement that many will be able to accomplish.

My point however is that if I had researched a bit better and discovered the competitor I might not have started the project in the first place. There are certainly areas out there where you’d be insane to try to assail an established leader - don’t go and start a new search engine or online bookstore. Google and Amazon respectively own those spaces.

If however you see a need and survey some other and they see a need then don’t let the existence of an established competitor necessarily dissuade you from building a product to meet that need. If a large enough portion of your target market isn’t aware of an existing solution you may still have an opening. If everyone needs widgets and someone is selling widgets but only 10% of the market knows they exist you can happily grab a piece of the remaining 90% that is still not served.

I’m not certain that I’ll ever work on either of the two projects I mentioned at the start but if I decide against it, it won’t be exclusively because a competitor exists.