- Your current competitors; doing a little research using the internet and looking for services and products that compare with yours. Looking at the cost, look and feel, features and support to name but a few aspects.
- Buyers; you need to understand who is going to buy from you. What need does your product for fill and what is the perceived value can they see in your product that will make them part with their hard earned cash.
- Suppliers; I struggled with this one and settled on the effect of their service or integrated product could have on your delivery.
- New entrants; how hard is it for others to join your market. What is the barrier to entry; we invariably combat this by adding features or dropping the price or both.
- Substitutes; something comes along and makes you software superfluous. E.g. floppy disks or CRT’s. Here you just need to keep at the R&D and be the next best thing!
After this start at understanding the competitive market, I think what I will do is contact each of the competitors I have identified and propose an xml timesheet standard – this could be quite fun if it’s not already been done, imagine you name on a RFC standard, mint!
2 comments:
You say that you'd contact your competitors and propose a standard time-sheet format; what would be the benefit of that in relation to the market strategy you have talked about here? How would gaining consensus, in a user hidden format, help mitigate the opposing forces you talk about? There is also an assumption that your competitors are using XML in some way - does your analysis show that to be the case?
Thanks -PJ
You write very well.
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