Startup : But what does the competition do?

Do you know that your idea is also a "good" idea? Or not yet? >here

If your idea is a great answer to an existing problem, if your project has potential, you may be wondering where to start.

If you have read this article >here, you have already started. We talked about benchmarking. Let's go further, because this method will allow you to situate your offer in the commercial landscape.

Benchmark yourself!

Do you know who you are addressing? Certainly, you've had the idea.

Good, benchmark yourself!

How much effort, time and money are you willing to put into your result and why?

On this list, don't make a dream, just think about what is achievable and how it is achievable.

You have already started your benchmark. Now, you will contact your colleague or your neighbor provided he has the same needs and ask him the same questions.

Quickly, you can make a google form where you describe your proposal, your offer and you write a series of questions appropriate and specific to the universe you plan to conquer.

If you have three people, you'll see a potential shooting window appear. If not, you may have missed something. Iterate, that is, learn.

Benchmark the products, the right products

Will the product fulfill a wish of our future user? What solutions does the user use today?  How will my product make his life easier? What price range should I consider?

These simple questions we asked ourselves at Meta-API.io

The intention of our APIs integration project came from Mathieu Rasse, the tech lead of our platform.  Mathieu wanted to go away for a weekend and book an immediate departure. One thing leading to another, from pages to open tabs, the need to create a transversal service for the tourism business channels became obvious.

Fortunately for him, three years later, he didn't create a marketplace for travel and vacations but a SaaS platform for on-demand API integration.

Benchmark is a very generic term, we will focus on the product benchmark because our idea must become a product.

In this spirit, the benchmark must help you to refocus on a use. For me, as a designer, a start-up creator is a creator of usages.  In this role, the creator must analyze both what he wants to do as well as how to do it well. Let's take an example: we may want to cook dishes but we can serve them, on the spot, to take away or to deliver at home.

With the positioning of an offer (price, range, type of customers) the creator will frame his intention so that it meets a target: his users.

What is the cost of other solutions? What is the offer that I improve? Where are my sources of inspiration? On these three crucial parameters, a product benchmark can quickly give answers.

Before launching a product, comparing yourself to a leader in your market, an indirect competitor, and a successful solution for inspiration is rich in learning.

With the Meta-API.io team we have tested and used many sites offering the valuable service of not bothering with API integration: Bearer, Zapier, RapidAPI etc.

We were able to clearly identify our added value: providing a service that is both more robust and more open to development flexibility. We also had a price range and were able to better define our personas.

However, by visiting commercial successes in even distant industries, we also found inspiration.

For example, for user experience design we also diagnosed very powerful SaaS solutions offered to graphic designers such as AdobeXD, Sketch etc. And that's how we got inspired by the Figma conversion funnel.

Also, faced with the movie catalog pages displayed by Netflix, we understood that our catalog of connectors to solutions and data was our real content, our rapid integration service was a container.  The coupling between data access and data integration defined us: at Meta-API, we pass the dishes between developers.

By analyzing practices in sometimes different spheres we advance our offering, a little inspiration sometimes really makes a difference.

In addition, identify the size of your market, don't underestimate the habits it has generated and define the means to facilitate these uses with your good idea.

But our story has only just begun because the Benchmark is a method to continuously analyze our market, our opportunities and our positioning.

Better to tell simply that a good benchmark is only a method to build from your curiosity.

Let's be curious again, and read our next article (soon).