marketing, competitionI have found some more competition for the app I was looking to build. The competitors are offering essentially the same service I was planning to and in at least one case, more, at about the same price point: $89/year.
Of course even if I was the first person to market with the idea, competition would eventually pop up. So I’m not concerned about competition in general. But with such low price point to start with, I’d be looking at a very quick race to the bottom.
I suppose I could go for an advertising model (it’s a content subscription service), and make the app free?
The general question is how do you decide if there’s too much existing competition to bother entering a market? I’d appreciate input on my particular case as well.
EDIT
The app/service is text to speech for educators, students and to a lesser extent, indie ebook authors. Upload a text document (.txt, .pdf. .doc) and get a .mp3 of the content.
The problem is, I think, that competition can’t be judged only in a quantitative manner (more / less). More important is a qualitative one - depending on a case, of course.
Mowzer gave you very insightful hint, which leads to the question: in what aspects you compete with others? what are values of all the products in general? where you want to compete? why they should choose you?
With all these questions considered thoroughly enough as seen from the eyes of a clients, it wouldn’t matter much whether there is only 1 or 10 apps competing: the usual scenario for almost exactly the same product is that the 1st product (if counting by sales) attracts majority of attention, 2nd place is usually much lower than the first, not mentioning the rest of the list. Therefore, the more important thing is to find aspects and niche in the field you wrote an app for that make you outstand from others. In other words, think where there are aspects that differentiate you in terms of value for a consumer. Then you’ll be first in your category - and consequently, promote (not just by ads, but also by a text in marketplace, or wherever you sell it) it in such a way that results from such identified advantage.
UPDATE: Considerable, obvious general aspects are:
As you see, there might be quite a lot of possible advantages, and this list is definitely not complete. But I woudln’t recommend picking them at random: it’s important to find the strategic ones which really matters - for real users.
In brief, the competition that may seem to be so, could be not your competition at all: if they have an advantage in different aspect than yours, clients would judge them as no competitive to your app. And the chances are that they will judge your apps in very small amount of time - and won’t even be aware of this fact when the opinion was created in their mind. It’s a pretty transparent psychological process.
TL; DR: You should be fine. No need to worry about competition in the text-to-speech space: the growth factor should outweigh the competition factor.
Note: This answer depends on one important inference: that speech-to-text, and speech recognition are easily derived from a core text-to-speech capability. If this is not true, indicate so and I will revise my answer. However, this, as written, should give you an idea of how I would frame the issue.
How do you decide if there’s too much existing competition to bother entering a market?
In general, a growing pie makes room for new eaters. But a shrinking pie leaves people hungry so every eater needs to fight to get full. In other words, the competition analysis is coupled to the growth analysis. They are complementary components of your overall strategic opportunity.
According to this article, the industry is expected to grow at an average annual rate of 40% thru 2024 to exceed $5 billion. That is significant growth potential.
the global market for this biometric modality will grow from $249 million to $5.1 billion by the year 2024.
My opinion is that text-to-speech is an enormous growth space and if you have an opening (vis-a-vis technology, business contacts, marketing relationships etc.) you should enter that space no matter what the current competitive field looks like.
There are also so many spinoff product ideas that can be leveraged from the core tech it takes to develop a product of the nature you describe, that even if competition in the space of this particular (current) product imposes downward pressure on margins, new high-margin opportunities should arise during the life cycle of the current product.
That last paragraph was an eyeful. Let’s restate that. If the current product fails to yield a high return, you should have new product opportunities you can pivot to.
The space is ripe for growth. IoT. Driverless vehicles. In general everything tech is moving toward text-to-speech (and speech-to-text) which I am inferring is easily derived.
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