Super simple. No matter the industry, you can beat the competition with AI + blockchain written in Rust.

I still remember when all it took was synergy and outside-the-box thinking.

And an amazing team: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*TZ-QFPLJjt470c3pc7...

Me myself and I, go team go

Or if you want to get really big, PHP.

Don't reinvent the wheel, just use SQL.

It is spelled XML actually. Geek jargon is hard to get right sometimes.

Kids these days. Clearly not familiar with the glory days of let-stuff-everything-in-xml of the early 00's.

please dont turn this into reddit please

They don't use Rust.

Don't forget deep learning!

VR! It's all about VR!

Don't forget AR!

and RR!

ARR is really the big one.

Which server would you use to host it?

Hint: It's a trick question

Serverless of course ;-)

I remember the days when you had the terms "Server" == software and "Server Class Machine" == machine you run the server on.

An AWS Lambda program is therefore a server!

  "What does it take to... join the same market space?"

Speaking on the SAAS space. IMO the bar for entry is getting higher every year. It's getting easier and easier to build apps, and the number of developers keeps growing.

What does it take to join the same market space? Here's some strategies:

1. Find a niche that is being ignored and really needs your specific product. This is getting harder to do.

2. Raise money. One way to build a good product is to throw good developers at it.

3. Give yourself a longer runway. Think years instead of months.

4. Buy an existing business, and run it yourself.

   "Are there cases where there is only room for one player and no matter what you do, you will not be able to steal any sizeable amount of market share from them?"

Definitely. If you go very niche, you'll find areas where there is a strong competitor dominating small a space. It might not be worth entering the space because the market is so small.

>>Speaking on the SAAS space. IMO the bar for entry is getting higher every year. It's getting easier and easier to build apps, and the number of developers keeps growing.

The flip side of the coin is that demand for software is increasing, as software is "eating the world". This is why average salaries for software developers have been increasing: growth demand is outpacing growth in supply.

All of those are viable if the audience exists along the spectrum of power users.

Another alternative is to just offer features better -- better support, better reliability, fewer bugs, etc. Better support being the most impactful value you can add.

Those are all nice and good value propositions, but at the end of the day you need to sell better. You need to get past the gate keeper and deliver a pitch that makes you seem amazing. Being better is clearly an advantage. but without the pitch, no one will care.

If you can offer better support and better reliability, you can even get away with charging a lot more money than your competitors.

Position yourself as a purveyor of premium goods, hand-crafted using genuine leather with a personal touch for each customer. Make the competition suddenly look like cheap knockoffs, the kind that serious people should never even consider buying. Convince people to pay for the privilege of buying from you instead.

This strategy doesn't work in all markets, but when it does, it does wonders.

If you could deliver more value at a lower cost than your competitor (without sacrificing your profits of course), I don’t see why you couldn’t compete.

Short answer: let the data do the talking. How big is the market? Have you driven paid/organic traffic to a landing page? Have you tested any funnels? Have you gotten feedback your prospective customers?

You can do all these things with a minimal investment.

It doesnt even need to be lower cost, if they understand the business. We compete with a lot of startups (im not at a startup) that build their entire case on 'you are our entire client base, whatever you want, we can build' where our approach has to weigh up all client requests and build towards what we think the best overall solution is going to be.

For those clients its beneficial to them to go to someone new that will cater to their exact wants

Find a differentiator. Often simply the UX differences can be enough. Look at the CRM space for example. Salesforce is a collosal mess from a UX standpoint, so companies like Pipedrive can do pretty well by specifically not being Salesforce.

You can 9ffer the same features at a higher price and succeed. It's a big big world out there.

Execute better. It depends on the idea what this means, but in general your product should be a better choice for the customer than the competitor's. You probably won't be able to achieve that for all customers, but the more you convince you are better for them, the more market share you will have.