This lessons learned series is part of our live SaaS resource list we're
building while launching a new product.
What one lesson about competition was the most important and why?
Our number one competitor is not another company but people just carrying on
doing what they do, the slow way.
In fact, having competitors putting out marketing helps grow the market. We
might benefit from their marketing because if they educate people on a
product, those people will look for other companies that supply that same
service. We might lose deals to competitors but we can grow together.
What dumb assumptions did we make about competitors at the very start of
our SaaS journey?
It's crazy how many new competitors show up when something starts to take off.
There were probably 4 or 5 co-browsing companies at the time we started. We've
now seen a dozen launch in the last year.
We had not thought that so many would jump on so quickly and yet we've still
doubled in size in the last year. It could well be because the overall size of
the market tripled in the last year!
All our assumptions about competitors and the impact they would have on the
market were way off.
We had dumb assumptions about features too. If a competitor had all these
extra features we figured customers would not look at us the same way. One of
the things that has mattered more to customers is ease of sign up, set up and
first use and of course that first use has to be of great quality. Competitors
with resources spread across too many features and then struggle to maintain
them.
What's the one thing we did that made a big difference?
We limited new feature development and focused on the sales and onboarding
process for our existing features. We had enough leads and it turns out that,
most of the time, companies really don't understand co-browsing and how each
system is different. They're still in the learning phase so help them learn,
provide better docs and videos, provide more guidance early on.
What would we advise someone to do if they were starting from scratch?
You can position yourself against your competition. Inventing a new product
from scratch and marketing it as a new category is tough. We'd have told
ourselves to focus on the core product, getting the quality and especially the
explanation of the product right. It's a young enough market that, as long as
we rank for the word co-browsing, we'll still grow. We probably lost more
leads and money on not clearly explaining the product than anything else.
If we had a magic wand how would we use it to change our features and how
we compare to competitors?
We'd love it if all potential customers could see Upscope side by side with
our competitors and measure speed, security and quality. It helps that we are
not the oldest co-browsing company but we are not newly launched. It takes
years to get co-browsing right in terms of speed and security and if they
tested them side by side they'd see the difference. We can't state that for
every company but we know the hoops the newbies will have to jump through.
How will we use our experience for our new product?
We'll focus on the core mission of the product, The lessons learned are that
it really needs to be THAT easy to use. It needs to delight people. It needs
in-built distribution. If we focus on that then the competition will be
watching us lead the market and we can enjoy going deeper on that core
mission. We really want to see people enjoy using the product and hearing
about it, daily. It's one of the best pleasures of building something.
