This is an alternative to the traditional "landscape analyses" you'll see out there. Instead of focusing on searching for "perfect" competitors, I like to see what I can learn from all kinds of products. Then, I structure my analysis around the specific categories of product strategy that I'm concerned about validating: things like problem solved, target audience, value prop, growth strategy, business model, and tech enablers. I think this approach helps us more effectively understand and articulate the biggest risks in our planned product strategy.

Tactically, when I am gathering information for this analysis, I look out to other companies (both possible competitors and other), think about trends in the market, talk to some experts (often through network referrals or cold outreach), and then synthesize a point of view on how this affects our product idea.

Our target audience was sales professionals who needed to manage their contacts. Here, I was particularly interested in other companies that might play in the same space (either now or possibly in the future).

Our user problem was about contact management. Here, I was particularly interested in other companies that operate in the same space.

These insights are more qualitative but came from my discussions with market experts on networking.

We felt that a key challenge would be getting users to share sensitive information with us (in order to provide them with some sort of value based on the information), so we were looking for examples of other products that had done that.

This is a great example of how we were able to look beyond the contact management space to get learnings from other domains. In this case, Mint's success getting access to sensitive financial data made us feel more confident that our users would be comfortable sharing their contacts' information.

Here's an example of looking out to the market for both "good" examples (things that are perhaps work mimicking) and "bad" examples (missteps we want to avoid).

aka "how we will make money"

Based on the comps in the market, after our analysis, this is the place we felt most vulnerable and therefore where we ended up focusing our first validation efforts.

There were also a bunch of technology tailwinds that I kept on hearing about from experts, and I wanted to catalog them here.

Ada Chen Rekhi

Sachin Rekhi

When building an MVP, I led an analysis to understand the competitive landscape and identify risk areas for Connected, a personal relationship manager for sales professionals.

: We had an idea for Connected, a personal relationship manager for sales professionals. We were in the process of outlining our initial product strategy for the company and pressure testing it before building an MVP.

: As part of our initial ideation, we needed to understand what else was out there in the market and what we could learn from them. 

We decided to orient this exercise around the big categories of risk in our product strategy.

 We used this artifact to document what we learned along the way and share among our small working team.

: Based on this analysis, we identified some serious business model risks (since we had trouble identifying competitors that had been successfully able to monetize their products) and growth strategy risks. Therefore, we focused our next validation efforts on trying to figure out these two parts of the puzzle. In particular, the business model risks were urgent because our planned solution would be expensive to maintain.

Direct and indirect/possible competitors: Plaxi, Xobni, Act!, Goldmine, Highrise, Salesforce

Highrise, Act!, and Goldmine are all paid products that successfully target sales professionals and referral-based service professionals.

Salespeople are closest to the money and are likely to be the most willing to pay for Connected. However, it might be worth also considering marketing, sales, biz dev, real estate brokers.

For now, it doesn’t seem like we need to worry about Salesforce as a competitor for this target audience; they are not concerned about the low end of the market, especially individual users.

Prior generation contact management apps have gained massive user bases: Plaxo 50M users, Xobni 6M users, Act! 2.8M users, Goldmine 1.5M users. It feels like these enrollment numbers are evidence of underlying user pain here.

Many sales professionals have tried but ultimately abandon contact management tools because of the large manual effort of keeping contacts up-to-date. To effectively retain users, we’ll need to keep this process as automatic as possible.

Beyond simply keeping contacts up-to-date, it's important to create functionality specifically to help people maintain their relationships. Since relationship management (not just contact management) is the real underlying pain, we need to focus on that in our value prop.

Mint has been able to convince users to give them access to their financial accounts in exchange for the aggregation value they provided, which is similar to what we want to do with contact management

Mint has built a large email newsletter list with the Mint Life blog, which they marketed their initial product to. We could launch a similar Connected Life blog focused on relationship management best practices.

Plaxo's aggressive viral marketing via messaging to people in their address book caused it to grow quickly. But this same strategy ultimately undermined user trust, causing significant brand damage.

Virality might be difficult amongst sales professionals who have no incentive to share their personal advantages.

Also, it’s unclear how to scalably reach the right professionals that would be willing to pay for this.

Xobni has failed to find a viable business model - they are failing to monetize because people are unwilling to pay for an Outlook plugin.

Plaxo sold to Comcast before generating a meaningful revenue stream.

Highrise is getting most of its revenue from teams.

Act! and Goldmine have never really transitioned to subscription pricing.

Big questions about what kind of business model would work in this space.

AWS's cloud computing infrastructure might make it possible to process large quantities of communication and contact data in real-time and merge them to automatically create a clean and comprehensive address book

APIs are becoming available to access data from web services (could see a world where we could connect to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn)

It sounds like OAuth is becoming the standard for third-party authentication. This might mean we don’t have to store usernames/passwords, which might give users more confidence in granting access to their contacts’ data

New product landscape analysis at Connected

Context

Sign up to see more