Sizing up the competition for your business idea
March 28th, 2006As I wrote in the post about internet business ideas, it is important to do a quick scan of competitors before getting too excited about your brilliant business idea. However, even if you do find someone doing EXACTLY what you planned to do, it isn’t quite time to throw in the towel.
In early 1998 Leah and I were mountain biking at the Stevens Creek mountain bike trail in Modoc, SC when we came up with the basic framework for singletracks. Leah had her own mountain biking homepage at the time called Mudhunny that listed directions and descriptions of trails we had both ridden but was limited to just those trails we had experienced. Our brainstorming led us to believe there should be a website that offered mountain bike classified ads, product reviews, trail information, forums, etc. for a national audience. Thus, singletracks was born.
Since neither of us had heard of sites like MTBR.com or Dirtworld.com we assumed that nothing like this existed at that time (it did). Had we known this, as would-be entrepreneurs we probably would have passed on the idea since it was already being done well. Our naivete allowed us to get a product built and deployed. By the time we had a product, we were committed to the idea and the threat of competition really didn’t phase us. Almost eight years later and singletracks is still around (and poised to pass Dirtworld in terms of the number of trail listings).
Once we recognized that the competition existed, it was time to differentiate ourselves. Stay tuned to hear the rest of the story…
