Getting a hold of the competition
One reflex you must have when you start a new project, is to check the competition, how it’s working, how healthy they are, etc.
One red flag that must arise from this, is “no competitors”. There is no such thing as no competitors. Do you believe Facebook was the first on the market? Do you think Internet Explorer was the first? Is your product the first on the market? No, no and certainly no.
If you don’t find any competitors, it means one of two things:
- The niche is not viable
- You haven’t correctly defined your product.
I really hope for you that you are on option 2, and if it is, you should start by re-analyzing the market by updating your vision. Maybe by changing the definition of your product, you will discover a saturated niche and all your hopes will start to dry out.
That’s what happened to me with SellDom. When I first started working on it, I was aware that making a platform to sell unused domains was not the first of its kind.
I was already aware of competitors like Sedo, Flippa, GoDaddy auctions and Namecheap auctions.
Even though these are big players in the market, I let myself think that I could start targeting a specific niche of this market, more specifically the “Indie hackers”, those who buy domains for side projects or the next big things, but never works on it and finally let the name die.
Moreover, when you are motivated in a project, you tend to ignore the facts and minimize the risks. “Competitors? Yeah but not much! And the current ones have shitty design! It will be easy to beat them!”. Oh boy, you are wrong!
So the wrong me started working on SellDom, full of hopes that it would be possible to gain some market share out of those competitors. Once live, I started to search for ideas on how to get customers, and while searching, I varied my terms a bit on Google and discovered more competitors than before, including Undeveloped.com, Namejet, Snapnames.
This gave me a big motivational drop and I started to think about dropping the project already! After only a few weeks online, a thousand dollars spent on it…
But that’s the things with projects, it’s not always great, otherwise, everyone would do it. It’s hard, it’s harsh, and you have to hustle to merit it.
So I slept on it over the weekend, calming my bad thoughts and thinking about ways to overcome this first issue.
I came back fresh the Monday, and on my inbox was sitting a mail from my designer letting me know he worked on some great parts of the project and gave me a few awesome screenshots of SellDom along the way. Even though he knew I had doubts, he still continued to work on it and brought me some incredible changes!
And this is the key! Even though it’s hard, even though you are starting to loose hope, never stop what you are doing, keep on fighting, because, in the end, it’s only those who are still standing that win.
Wants to be a part of my experiences on growing SellDom? You can share your ideas on how to get visitors/customers, and I’ll implement them, share my experience and the results with you!
