Dear Farillio reader,

On 25th February 2021, you asked our amazing expert partner Joshua Bicknell:

"Can your tool tell me if there’s competition and what it looks like? I've tried to start two businesses before, and I thought they hadn't been done before – but both times it turned out that they had. It made me too anxious to go ahead with them. Does Validate give them any kind of incentive or look into anything like that? Can it help in this sort of situation?"

And Joshua said:

Be mighty always, Farillio

Transcript:

“I think going back to the earlier question and answer, the fact that this person has found some competitors is a good thing. You shouldn't be scared by that, as we said it shows that there's a demand and a market for this. It's thinking about what they can add here. What can they do that's a little bit special, a little bit different to create value for customers? Unfortunately Validate can't tell you magically whether you have competitors, but what it can do is take you on a simple journey to help you find the answers to that. So, in the testing section we give you ideas for different ways that you could test, one of which is doing research. We give you tools for that, things like looking at Google trends and looking at what people are searching for example, to see what's current in the market, through to doing interviews with customers, which I think would be the most powerful way of really understanding if there's competition. The best question for that is asking do people have this problem and how do they currently solve it? How they're currently solving it is exactly the competition that you need to try and work against and add more value, so that they come to you instead. I think the answer to this will always be try and talk to customers. Try to figure out who they are and just have a good conversation with them. Listen and understand: Do they have this problem? Do they have this frustration? What are they doing right now? Then think about how you can solve that better. If you can solve it better, it doesn't really matter what all the other competitors are doing because they're going to prefer your product or service and come to you.”

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