Feature Tables

In my last post two posts we have been discussing competition. In the first post, I broke down all of our competitors as either direct, indirect, potential or substitutes. In my last post I discussed the five dimensions to compare ourselves with competitors on. In this post, we will look at feature tables.

To begin, draw a table with multiple columns and rows. On the x-axis, put the direct competitors. On the y-axis, put the features and factors you want to compare. We had decided that our direct competitors were HLT, Pocket Prep, and Quizlet. While you would typically just include direct competitors, I was still interested in some of the other companies and so I also included YouTube, Kahn Academy, and Kaplan.

We needed to think about why should people choose our product? We needed to look into what is important to our customer group and do some research. Common examples of features and factors are price, reliability, it has to have feature x, it must have the ability to do y, and so forth. If possible, we needed to ensure that our solution was obviously better than the others we were comparing ourselves with.

We gathered information in a few different ways. First, Greg (co-founder) and I talked about what we thought. Remember that we were each people who could have been customers of this type of product. Second, each of us had a lot of contacts that were going to have to take professional licensing exams in the near future (or had just taken one). So we asked them what they thought the most important features were. We did not mention what we were doing until we had gathered information. Third, we did a survey through Survey Gizmo.

The results determined that price, reliability, mobile, micro-learning, video, and customization was the most important. We decided that reliability would be about the value of the content, while the reliability of the technology would be part of mobile (in addition to whether the tech was easy to use, fun to use, improved learning outcomes, etc.). Having an app did not mean you were doing micro-leaning. It needed to be organized so that short study sessions were available. Video and customization were pretty obvious. Either you had it or you did not.

In parentheses are price (P), reliability (R), mobility (Mo), micro-learning (Mi), video (V), and customization (Cu).

HLT: $5–20 (P) good (R) good(Mo) no(Mi) no (V) no (Cu)

Pocket Prep: $5–20 (P) good (R) good (Mo) no (Mi) no (V) no (Cu)

Quizlet: free (P) questionable (R) great (Mo) yes (Mi) no (V) no (Cu)

Kahn: free (P) great (R) good (Mo) yes (Mi) yes (V) no (Cu)

YouTube: free (P) good (R) good (Mo)yes* (Mi) yes (V) no (Cu)

Kaplan: $500 (P) great (R) poor (Mo) no (Mi) yes (V) no (Cu)

When you line them up right next to each other, it is easy to see how much more expensive Kaplan is than the rest. In fairness, they are offering a lot more with their courses. But I might also have been kind to say that their product was only $500. Their all inclusive course was $1,000, not $500.

I put Quizlet as a questionable in terms of reliability due to their user generated content. I was sure that much of their content was high quality. But I was also pretty sure that I would be more confident in the content of the rest of the group.

All the apps have good ratings except for Kaplan. The technology was really just taking content and lectures and putting them into your phones. Quizlet had some gamification type features that separated them from the pack. They had this matching game that connected terms to definitions, for example.

The free products (Quizlet, Kahn, and YouTube) had a micro-learning focus. Interesting.

It was hard to see how Quizlet could integrate video into their free product.

Nobody had a customizable feature.

HLT and Pocket Prep appeared to be trying to scale (build content quickly) as opposed to building interesting technology. Their products were cheap, they did go after some of the same exams I was thinking of, but they did not have micro-learning, video, or customization. There was a pretty obvious place where we could be better than them.

Kahn Academy and YouTube were free and basically checked off all the boxes except for the fact 1. that students did not use their product to answer questions and measure whether they understood what they had just watched, and 2. their products were not customized to the individual student.

Kaplan was expensive, their content was good and their app was pretty bad (based on app store reviews). No customization. It had started to occur to me that perhaps these bigger players would have some interest in partnering. They were all pretty weak in mobile. You could combine mobile with either books or classes. Content would probably be the most expensive thing for us to build. More so than technology. But we would at least need to have a proof of concept app, if not more, before we could even entertain talking to them.

Quizlet was free, their mobile technology was more engaging than anything else that I had seen, and they had obvious micro-learning. Their user generated content made it almost impossible to avoid competing with them. But they could not guarantee if the content was good or even had the correct answers (if you wanted to use flashcards made by somebody else), they did not have video, and the product did not customize to you.

Was there a way for a product to customize to the user in video form in a micro-learning fashion while also being a fairly cheap mobile app? That would pretty much check off all the boxes. It seemed to me that we could have recommended videos. There would be short rounds of questions about a very specific topic, and based on what questions you missed there would be recommended videos at the end of the round. The videos themselves would not be as good as what Kahn puts out, but they would be customized to the user. This was my thinking based on the competitive research.