Are You Playing in a Crowded Space?
28 Feb 2011
People often tell me that we are playing in a crowded space — project collaboration. In my opinion, with globalization, anyone-can-build-anything in the Cloud, almost everyone today is playing in a crowded space whether it’s in mobile, web apps or desktop apps. There are tens of hundreds of apps for everything.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with playing this game.
As for us, people often weigh one project collaboration product similar to the other since they might have similar features. Its true that all project collaboration tools have Projects, Milestones and Tasks. The difference is in the flavour of the product and service. There are multiple car companies each manufacturing a car — but their approach, design, user experience and brand is completely different. They can co-exist and prosper.
In my opinion it is ok to play in a crowded space as long as you are solving a problem using a set of principles that your users/customers understand and the target audience is large enough. It is absolutely OK to not invent something new but to take an existing process/service/app etc. and improve upon it.
I personally like mass-market products (project collaboration, helpdesk, email marketing, crm, analytics) that have a large market and can be fairly generic. There is so much you can do with them once you build your initial customer base.