Differentiating an Indie Product
For most indie tech businesses, tackling an existing market is easier than creating a new one. Instead of trying to convince businesses to grasp (and use) a completely new product category, many indie tech founders have instead chosen to build products that improve upon existing options in the market.
Great question - the truth is that what gets deemed an “improvement” is highly subjective. For example, if your focus is on privacy, then Plausible Analytics is easily an improvement over Google Analytics. But for a large marketing team, Plausible’s smaller feature set is hardly an improvement. It ultimately depends on what the customer’s main focuses are. If you can differentiate your product in an area that your target customers care most about, you will be able to convert.
Mailchimp is by far the leader in email marketing. In their 2019 annual report, they claimed to have over 60% of the market share and over 12 million customers. Despite those staggering numbers, this scenario smells of a ripe opportunity for indie founders; those 12 million paying customers are unlikely to all have the same focus.
