Your idea is not unique - Do your homework!
This post has most like been written again a thousand times and still it is always as important as it was the first time.
Still many first time startup entrepreneurs fall victim of their own mind in thinking that their business idea is totally unique and unheard of. With this presumption the actual competition research is left thin which turns into surprises during the later stages of the idea development.
Please all you out there: Don't think your idea is unique. Really, please don't.
This said you should not automatically think that finding competitors is a bad thing. For me at least the presence of competition only validates the market and customer pain.
So where should You start the research then?
When you start looking for your competition you should of course first list and define search words related to your startup and the industry. When you have done this you can move forward to the actual searching.
Obviously the first option is to start by using Google. This gives you nice glance about the activity around the industry and your specific keywords. Don't forget that the Google trends is also a good tool.
For more startup specific information sources there are many good ones. You should use as many as possible and really create a full picture of your competition landscape. Below is a list of good information sources:
Crunchbase
Angellist
Quora
YouNoodle
ChubbyBrain
Venturebeat profiles
Killer Startups
SpyFu
TagURLs.com
So you know Your competition - Then what?
If you go thoroughly through the above list you should at least start to have some kind of picture who are the other players working in the same field as you. This of course is not enough. When you have your competitors mapped out you should be able to somehow categorize them in a meaningful way. For this there is no one solution that fits every situation. Below are some ways for trying to make sense of this whole categorization issue.
First thing to do is to open the Excel spreadsheet or take the pen an paper and start listing product and service features. Create a list where you have all your competitors and their product features listed in one file. From there you can start comparing them to yours to see what is your differentiator against others.
You should also check what people are saying about your competitors. What are the features they like and what do they hate and why. This allows you to gather great deal of insights about the customers.
You can also go through the competitors business models and look if there are some unique features that are working good and which you should learn from.
The same time you are looking in the differences you should look into similarities. This helps you to position your own startup towards competitors that are already in the market and help validate your product assumptions.
After you have done all the research the information should not be left to rot in your drawer. There are many tools you can use to keep yourself updated about what your competitors are doing. One very simple one is Google Alerts. Just put it to alert about hits with the name of your competitor or your business area. Google for more good tools to keep yourself updated.
Hopefully this post gave you some idea and tools for your competitive search. Also please comment and add more good sources of information if you are using a source not mentioned here.
Writer: Toni Perämäki
Founder & Community manager at Boost Startup Farm
