I'm jumping into the saturated market of URL shorteners. In this video I discuss why and my strategy to succeed.
I'm going to build the initial framework of a shortened URL service. I already have the shortened URL portion working for in-house purposes, but I'll be enhancing that and creating a more commercial version so I can start marketing it as a SaaS.
I'll be coding in PHP, JavaScript, SQL and using the Wizards Toolkit which is a low-code development environment.
While coding I discuss the business aspects of creating a SaaS and marketing basics. How to pick a niche and choose what to do to be Different and Better when in an oversaturated market.
First step was reviewing the competition... and there is a lot of competition in this market.
Before starting a company always clearly define your intent and goals. Otherwise you can easily get side-tracked by the minutia and spend hours, days or months working on aspects which are not really important.
My goals for this SaaS are prioritized as:
- attractive finished product to showcase as a "Built by Wizards Toolkit"
- good solid analytics for use by my own company
- commercial quality SaaS that generates some income
If this takes off and starts earning a lot of money, that's great. But that's not the primary purpose. When I started reviewing the competition I realized I don't want to focus and compete with the ones that offer the most advanced features and functionality. I love the analytics portion and want that for my own needs, so I don't want to just build the bare minimum URL shortener service either.
Note, if I was building this as my hopeful sole source of income I would spend at least a week analyzing the competition and their marketing strategies and I'd put a whole lot more time into designing my pricing structure and marketing strategy. What niche I would go after first, which features have the most google searches, and I would poll customers of other services on what they like most or least about the competition.
But that time investment is not in line with my primary two goals. So instead yesterday I spent 90 minutes reviewing the competitions' website and the pricing/features analytics that I had a colleague put together. Then I went fishing so my subconscious could consolidate and absorb the mass amount of information to settle on a master plan.
Lots more details are in video.
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