Hey all 👋

Charlie here!

Today I’m going to convince you to just go ahead and build that product or feature you’re thinking of.

Even if you’re up against strong competition.

This week in IdeaHub…

• Competition is a good thing: Beehiiv shows us it never hurts to be late to the party…

• Niching down: How to start small and differentiate your product.

• The underrated differentiator: One thing every big SaaS is failing at that you can guarantee to beat them on.

Let’s jump in… 👇

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1. Competition is a good thing

When Beehiiv launched in 2021 war had long been raging in the email marketing space.

MailChimp had already amassed more than 10 million customers and been acquired by Intuit for $12 billion.

Plus - ConvertKit entered the race in 2013 and was already delivering over $2 million in MRR.

And countless other smaller platforms either failed or were acquired along the way:

ExactTarget, TinyLetter, iContact, Campaigner, Constant Contact, Vertical Response, Emma, Mad Mimi…

Would you build an email marketing platform knowing this is what you were up against?

If you’re like me - probably not! But if you’re Tyler Denk and the Beehiiv team, you make it work…

So the moral of the story is:

No matter if you’re up against the likes of MailChimp or a handful of $1K MRR bootstrappers…

…build something people love and nobody can stop you.

2. Niching down

Say you have some experience in email automation, maybe you’re a fan of what Beehiiv are doing…

You can’t go head to head, so what do you do?

• Pick an underserved customer segment

• Refine the core features to solve a specific set of problems

• Market your solution to the nichè

For example: ‘Beehiiv for Indie Hackers’.

With unique integrations to communities like ProductHunt and revenue visibility platforms like BareMetrics.

This would help us share our #buildinpublic journeys, and celebrate when we cross new revenue milestones or launch a new product.

But you can also nichè down through features, keeping the customer base the same, and focusing on solving a smaller more specific problem.

For example:

Email Marketing → Cross-promotions → Finding cross-promotion partners.

You could build a platform that allows creators of any guise to find and collaborate with others and grow their audiences.

3. The underrated differentiator

As big SaaS platforms grow, they all encounter one problem at some point or another:

It’s difficult to scale customer service.

It’s why so many incumbent SaaS platforms get a bad rap from their customers.

So whatever you’re building - obsess over your customer’s experience.

Forget transactional emails and write everything from scratch.

Engage with as many as you can on X and create a relationship where they feel like they can reach out whenever they want.

Make them feel special and reap the rewards. You’ll see:

• Increased organic feature suggestions and feedback

• Word-of-mouth will become a measurable growth tool

• You’ll learn 10X more than just watching your Stripe dashboard…

That's it folks! If you found this interesting, check out my newsletter below:

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