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Comment by wiradikusuma | Hacker News Reader

"What significant advantage are you offering over existing ones that you are cloning" -- I keep hearing this. How do people answer this? Because, let say you add feature X that Trello doesn't have, but since they're bigger than you, they can simply add feature X as well.

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Just adding features is a deadend. Look for things Trello wouldn't want to do. For example, features specific to a subset of customers. Larger companies are not able to focus on specific smaller segments because people in charge won't have the attention span to handle that many, but you can survive with just one. Another example is addressing some scenarios with fewer / simpler features. Established products cannot remove features, hence even simple uses cases end up over-complicated over time.

Trello itself is the perfect example of "remove features to serve simpler use cases".

All sorts of business and development process tracking software has existed for decades. JIRA, FogBugz, PivotalTracker, MS Project, and so on.

Trello got rid of 90% of their features, and just kept "list of lists of short text snippets". That makes it great for planning small software projects, but also shopping lists, travel plans, or sales pipelines.

Notice that I said "Advantage" and not "Features". Users don't care about features necessarily. They care about how it helps them. If a feature helps them, then it is a good feature. If not, then it won't matter. Figuring this out is the hard part of running a business because every user is different.

Well, you have to have a value proposition. "We're cheaper" is usually not very effective and it gets you the worst possible clientele. What people mean is "Tell them why they should buy from you instead of your more-established competitor, because price alone is a sorry value proposition".

Products that start with nothing more than price differentiation will eventually be pushed into a separate niche, which better serve the more price-sensitive customer base. Knowing this, it will be easier to gain clients if you can identify something you can optimize ahead of time. The smaller businesses/clients that will depend on your product will really value this and feel like they're being served well by your product, and not like they're the fodder in a price war or that they're using a bargain-basement, barebones product.

People do not feel proud that to be stuck in the bargain basement, so they're less likely to spread your product through word of mouth if you make it seem like a discount version of a well-known competitor.

As an entrepreneur, you just have to get a sustainable foothold somewhere and you can take everything else from that point. Optimizing a system for a price-sensitive audience is a good way to get started because the bigger guys are trying to leave that audience in the dust and they're usually very appreciative of the tools you're supplying.

Then you have to think bigger. If you are cloning Trello for example, have it have a different UI that is more useful for a particular niche, but that they can't simply add because they would alienate their existing user case. Make it better by doing things that the competitor can't or won't do.

> but since they're bigger than you, they can simply add feature X as well.

You can just look at Google to see that it does not work all the time, Google could have replicated Watsapp, Facebook, Instagram but they failed. They even failed with Google Video and had to buy Youtube.

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