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Why I am building a product with a tiny market

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Re: Why I am building a product with a tiny market

#51

Post by tsergiu »

habosa wrote: post #50
jdnier wrote: post #40

I fed it a favorite regex... Bravo. Unfortunately, the permalinking fails with this particular regex, or I'd include it here. The visualization is so large, it more than fills my large screen. Still, pretty cool to see it render instantaneously and to watch it match example text. The regex is described here: http://www.cs.sfu.ca/~cameron/REX.html It will match either text or XML markup (it's used to tokenize XML), so…

Wow. How the hell do you (OP) get it to render so fast? That was instantaneous as far as I could tell. I've seen websites take 5x as long to add a to a ... I'm really amazed.

Heh, your browser does most of the hard stuff :) I'm not quite sure what others are doing that it's slow.

Re: Why I am building a product with a tiny market

#52

Post by littleidea »

Nothing about what has been built or blogged makes me believe this person really understands products or markets.

The logic of the points that are being made is flawed, starting with repeatedly conflating building a product for a small market with solving a small and simple problem. These are not the same.

In general, solving problems for small markets is just as hard as solving problems for big ones.

My advice is, at the level that you understand what to build to get to market, go after the biggest fastest growing markets you can.

Re: Why I am building a product with a tiny market

#53

Post by tsergiu »

littleidea wrote: post #52

Nothing about what has been built or blogged makes me believe this person really understands products or markets. The logic of the points that are being made is flawed, starting with repeatedly conflating building a product for a small market with solving a small and simple problem. These are not the same. In general, solving problems for small markets is just as hard as solving problems for big ones. My advice is, a…

There's no need to be so aggressive.

I think you misunderstood my argument. That may have been entirely my fault; I'm still learning to write.

Small and simple problems are rare in large markets because everybody is chasing after them. The low-hanging fruit get picked very quickly, and you need to produce more to reach the bleeding edge.

By contrast, smaller markets have more low-hanging fruit simply because there are not as many people picking them.

Re: Why I am building a product with a tiny market

#54

Post by scribu »

Paul_D_Santana wrote: post #25
notahacker wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easi(er) to own a niche market, but it's also more likely that anyone decently positioned to compete with you can wipe out your profits with small changes to their product or pricing strategy Not all niche markets are small in terms of revenue/cost either: there are product niches worth millions (or even billions) whose actual feasible customer set barely makes it into double digits. But when the niche is that s…

That is true, but something else to focus on: with smaller niches, the learning that takes place is often much higher and faster, and that is invaluable too. My app is the absolute niche of niche ( https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pauldavids... ), but I learned A LOT , especially about the official Android publishing process. I don't care if it doesn't get used by many people, because my target marke…

I think most people building products (as opposed to OSS) are striving for profitability.

Re: Why I am building a product with a tiny market

#55

Post by qingu »

icebraining wrote: post #48
downandout wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4. You could ask for donations to support the site. If you learn nothing else from Wikipedia, learn this: Begging annoys users and isn't particularly successful. He is far more likely to make money selling a premium subscription to corporate users. He can even just say "site is free for personal use, and corporate users must pay $495/year". You would be surprised at how many businesses are paranoid enough about compl…

If you learn nothing else from Wikipedia, learn this: Begging annoys users and isn't particularly successful. As far as I know, Wikipedia fundraising efforts have been very successful. They got $25 million dollars just last year. http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Wikimedia...

According to Alexa.com, Wikipedia has more traffic than Amazon.com. You said Wikipedia raised $25 million last year. Amazon had over $60 Billion in revenue last year. Obviously Wikipedia is a not-for-profit organization and that's good. Just saying that compared to their user base, they are not making a lot of revenue.

Re: Why I am building a product with a tiny market

#56

Post by marcamillion »

littleidea wrote: post #52

Nothing about what has been built or blogged makes me believe this person really understands products or markets. The logic of the points that are being made is flawed, starting with repeatedly conflating building a product for a small market with solving a small and simple problem. These are not the same. In general, solving problems for small markets is just as hard as solving problems for big ones. My advice is, a…

>In general, solving problems for small markets is just as hard as solving problems for big ones.

Surely that can't be right.

The very nature of a small market, implies that the solutions are easier - because of less competition, so less innovation is needed, therefore lower return.

With larger markets, not only do you have to solve a problem - you have to solve a problem better/different than your competitors.

Not all solutions are created equally and not all solutions solve the problem in the way the customer wants.

It's harder to separate the signal from the noise when the customer doesn't know what the solution should look like - and when the competitors don't know either.

Quite often, in a large market, many competitors exist largely because no 'significantly better' alternative exists. Think about all the crappy desktop software (from the 90s or early 2000s) that many small businesses still use.

In a smaller market, you are more likely able to get away with simpler solutions - e.g. a CRUD web app, versus having to come up with a more sophisticated solution because competitors have already squeezed as much out of CRUD apps as they can.

Re: Why I am building a product with a tiny market

#58

Post by downandout »

icebraining wrote: post #48
downandout wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4. You could ask for donations to support the site. If you learn nothing else from Wikipedia, learn this: Begging annoys users and isn't particularly successful. He is far more likely to make money selling a premium subscription to corporate users. He can even just say "site is free for personal use, and corporate users must pay $495/year". You would be surprised at how many businesses are paranoid enough about compl…

If you learn nothing else from Wikipedia, learn this: Begging annoys users and isn't particularly successful. As far as I know, Wikipedia fundraising efforts have been very successful. They got $25 million dollars just last year. http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Wikimedia...

Yes, and as the fifth most popular site in the world, that is a pittance. They could be making billions with unobtrusive advertising. Given their traffic, the fact that they only raised $25 million last year means that nearly all of their users ignored their pleas for help. Further, when they do their begging, it is very obtrusive and disruptive to the user experience. Where alternative revenue models are available, begging shouldn't even be a consideration.

Re: Why I am building a product with a tiny market

#59

Post by dogweather »

_lex wrote: post #8

I don't think a visual regex debugger is a tiny market- it's every programmer who doesn't totally understand regex, or who will have regex that he needs help decoding. This is probably close to 99% of programmers.

Yes, but: I can't remember the last time u wrote a comes reflex. I've since learned to use an xpath parser, for example.

Re: Why I am building a product with a tiny market

#60

Post by Ensorceled »

littleidea wrote: post #52

Nothing about what has been built or blogged makes me believe this person really understands products or markets. The logic of the points that are being made is flawed, starting with repeatedly conflating building a product for a small market with solving a small and simple problem. These are not the same. In general, solving problems for small markets is just as hard as solving problems for big ones. My advice is, a…

In a small market the MVP will be more salable than in a larger market; regardless of the complexity of the MVP. That's the OP's point.

Any other reason you think this person has no understanding of markets? Because so far you've got nothing.

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