I’ve received quite a few emails lately from people who are concerned about competition and how it’s a factor stopping many people from starting a business. This is understandable up to a point, after all you want to give yourself as much chance of success as you possibly can. However, I’ve come across people who are almost obsessed with the potential competition to the extent that months and even years pass without them getting started. It’s an interesting subject so let me expand on that…..
To oversimplify things, there are what I call 2 types of product:
those that I call “zero-sum” products and those that aren’t.
By “zero-sum” I mean there will be 1 “winner” only, and 1 or more series of “losers”. The potential customer will in all likelihood just buy one product in that niche at this moment in time.
For example…..
Suppose you are looking to buy a new laptop for yourself. You look at the specifications, price, bundled deals, different shops etc. You have now narrowed it down to a choice of 3 laptops – let’s call them Laptop A, Laptop B and Laptop C. You aren’t going to buy all 3 are you?! If you buy Laptop A then that is the “winner” in this “zero-sum” game, and Laptops B and C are the “losers”.
When I was running my offline business, virtually ALL of my products were “zero-sum” products. I was selling into a highly competitive market. Our brand was relatively unknown and expensive. Retailers were certainly not falling over themselves to buy my products; they were already stocking comparable products to MOST of what I was selling.
For virtually every sale I had to “persuade” customers to buy my product as opposed to someone else’s. There would be one winner (hopefully me) and several losers. Nobody was going to buy my product AND someone else’s.
If I had done what all the so-called marketing experts (I’m talking offline here, not online) advised which was to do a full “competitor and market analysis” I would never have got started.
The market was saturated, I was too expensive, people only buy known brands etc etc. The usual nonsense from people who have “studied” marketing at university and can’t see beyond “brand awareness” and “focus groups” – ever wondered why these people who “know so much about marketing” never take their own advice and launch their own product?
Anyway I didn’t listen to the advice, I as good as ignored what my competitors were doing and found my own angle, my own niche. There is ALWAYS a way in. Instead of looking to REPLACE my competition, I sold my products as being IN ADDITION to them, i.e. complimentary. (I did a few other things as well but let’s leave this post on topic).
Within a few years I had about a 45% share of the market – by focussing on what I could offer to the market, NOT by worrying what the competition were doing. And this was a whole series of “zero-sum” products – almost 10,000 of them!
What does this have to do with you or I?
Well, the reason we are here is that we want to make money on the internet, right? And making an educated guess, most of us here want to do that by selling “info products”.
Here’s the great thing about info products – they are most emphatically NOT “zero-sum” type products! This is why…..
You probably found my blog or Ray Johnson’s blog in the first place because you were looking for information about making money on the internet, right? Maybe you’ve bought one of Ray’s products?
Let me ask you a question – if YOU have ever bought a “make money” type product have you only ever bought just the ONE product? Unlikely. Ray Johnson isn’t really competing against John Thornhill or Robert Black or Mike Filsaime or Andrew Reynolds or anyone else selling this information.
You and I have in all likelihood bought several information products from different marketers. If people are searching for information they WILL buy different products from different sources. This is equally true for “non-IM niches” and equally true for offline businesses.
I’ll give you an example from my own experience. Back in 1998 I moved into a brand new house, the reason I bought that particular house was that it came with a relatively large garden. The garden was only turfed – no landscaping, no plants, nothing else just lots and lots of grass!
At that time I had suddenly developed an interest in gardening and I wanted to design and create my own garden from scratch. I had virtually no experience of gardening, and certainly none of landscaping or garden design – just a burning desire to create my own garden. So what did I do?
I bought gardening books – lots and lots of them, over 50 in total! I wanted ideas on a subject I knew NOTHING about, and for me this was the way of finding out. Much of the content was duplicated (sound familiar to IM products?!) but it didn’t matter. To the untrained eye those gardening books were competing against each other (“zero-sum”) but actually they weren’t – I bought ALL of them.
Over the following 2-3 years I designed and created my garden – complete with stream, waterfall, pond, patio and a summer house – great fun!
About 12 months ago I sold that house. Whilst going through all my stuff I found the 50 plus gardening books – I hadn’t even opened them in about 8 years; in fact I’d forgotten that I had so many. I’d spent a lot of money acquiring the information I needed, did the job I wanted to do and then never referred to them again.
So – the lesson from all of this is….
If you are selling information products, or if you want to start selling information products then congratulations – you are in a “non zero-sum” market. Just because your customer bought a similar product from what you THINK is your competitor last week, doesn’t mean that they have stopped looking for information on that product. They are just as likely to now buy from you.
Get started TODAY – and focus on what YOU can do differently instead of worrying about the competition!