Make Something

Competition

What you should have now:

- A name
- A short explanation of your app
- A list of the problems your users are trying to solve
- Your reason for doing this
- A list of users that we will target
- A persona (based on user needs) for our first set of users
- A user journey map for our first users
- A list of assumptions and ways to de-risk those assumptions
- A short description of your MRP
- Feature Sets (v1, v2, icebox)

Objectives

  • Look at your competition, and how your solution compares
  • Focus in on your Unique Sales Proposition

Tasks

  1. Who are your competitors?
  2. How did you search for these competitors? What specific job were you trying to do when you were searching? How were you limiting your search?
  3. What are the main problems your competitors solve? (i.e. What jobs are the users doing when they are using your competitors?)
  4. From your list of jobs that you’ve written in part 1, go through your competitors and rate them on a score of 1-10 how well they do each job, and how hard it is to complete each job
  5. What are the ‘table stakes’ jobs that all competitors are doing for their users?
  6. What are some features from your competitors that you would like to replicate?
  7. How do you solve the problem differently from your competitors? What is your USP (unique sales proposition)?

Task (with instructions)

1. Who are your competitors? (10 minutes)

We’re going to spend 5 or 10 minutes listing our competitors. This is something that could take an infinite amount of time, but we really want to limit that.

When trying to find competitors, imagine that you are searching for a solution to the problems you have listed. You want to focus on the actual problem you are solving for your customer.

It’s best not to use sites like AngelList — we want to think like a customer would think. Using AngelList and similar sites might give us a look into the future, though, so that’s okay too (i.e. these companies may not have made it up the search engine results yet, etc.)

If you already know of competitors, be sure to include those as well.

Also think about how are you currently solving the problem? What are your substitute solutions? Try not to be too narrow in your thinking — think about solutions to the problems you’ve listed, not just solutions that are similar to yours.

You might want to use tools like uberSuggest to find similar search terms that people use.

While searching, keep track of the search terms you used for part 2.

2. How did you search for competitors? (2 minutes)

This is important in really understanding the problem that we’re trying to solve. What are the keywords that you used? What search terms did you use?

3. What are the main problems your competitors solve for each user?

You want to think about the main problem that each competitor is solving — is it different than what you are solving?

4. Rate your competitors on how well they solve each problem, and how easy it is solve that problem using their service

From your list of problems that you’ve written in part 1, go through your competitors and rate them on a score of 1-10 how well they solve each problem, and how hard it is to solve that problem using their service.

The easiest way to do this is to use a spreadsheet, with each of the problems listed on one axis, and each of the competitors on another.

We want to see which problems are most important and are being satisfied best.

(If you aren’t a user of the product that you’re creating, you’ll want to make sure you verify these assumptions through user testing, interviews and surveys.)

5. What are the ‘table stakes’ jobs that all competitors are doing for their users?

These are jobs that all of the competitors are doing for their users. These are things you will want to make sure to include in all forms of your app, including your MVP unless you can be sure that they are not significant to your users (i.e. through user surveys and interviews, but more likely through user testing)

6. What are some features from your competitors that you would like to replicate?

Take screenshots and write notes about the specific features you think are useful. Think about how to improve these features, or to narrow them down to distill just the most valuable parts of the process.

Add these features to your v1, v2, or icebox feature list.

7. How do you solve the problem differently from your competitors? What is your USP (unique sales proposition)?

You really want to test your assumptions here — is the problem you’re solving really important enough for someone to be looking for a new solution? Can you easily sell your app based on one main point? What is that main point? How does that change your MRP?

Outputs

- A list of your competitors
- A list of keywords and searches your customers might use
- A chart showing which problems your competitors solve and how well they solve them
- A list of table stakes jobs
- Your USP