I've heard this a statement so often it hurts: "Why would you want to build that? There are fifty bajillion of them already"!
If there is one thing I try really hard to ignore when conceptualizing a new product, it is the saturation of the existing market. If you are capable of providing innovation or clear advantages over existing solutions, with a little luck you can overcome saturation and generate a market leading solution. This has been proven time and time again as small startups topple their goliath competition because they are able to connect with the right audience. Among some of the more notable cases of this are names like Google, Dell, and Sony (Playstation). Each of these companies entered into markets that were heavily saturated or clearly dominated by a leader, and each of them ultimately ended up with the leading market share. If you are discouraged by the number of people in your space, then get out now and do something else.
The key to product development is knowing your competition intimately. It is not enough to be aware of their existence or have a vague idea of what they offer. You have to truly understand what it's like to be a user of their solution. Furthermore you need to find the lure or hook and how it captures user loyalty. Pick the top two most successful products in your market space and begin studying.
There are three easy ways to create an advantage over your competition:
- Simplify existing processes or features.
- Add missing or requested features.
- Add features that are attractive to a niche.
With the data you gathered from your competition and an idea of how you will create an advantage over their product you should start creating a feature set that will guide your development cycle. It is important not to view every feature in your competition's package as a requirement in yours. First determine if the feature is bloat, useful or somewhere in between and include it accordingly.
Before you get started working on the development process, first test the waters with your feature set. Blog about it, release a survey to existing customers or even post topics about it in related forums on the web. You may get feedback like I mentioned in the introduction to this article, but that is not what you are looking for. You are interested in a critical analysis of your product's feature set which goes in-depth about what features are missing and why they are critical. You won't think about everything on the first try and it's better to realize this now than at 80% completion.
When you begin development, start with simple prototypes and play with different concepts and paradigms. It is good to establish an elegant foundation to build the rest of your product on top of. If you find yourself repeating steps or replicating code, take the time to step back and analyze why. If your product is successful, you're going to be spending a lot of time maintaining this code, and it is better to spend the time up front to do things right than pay the price later. If you're already in a saturated segment, time to market really isn't an excuse here, so if you have to cut corners make sure you're honest with yourself about the implications.