I was just talking to a startup about their website and we were strategizing what it could become. We noodled, talked, brainstormed, argued, and finally agreed for over 5 hours and developed a sense for what we want the future site would be like.
At the end of the session, I was still feeling uneasy about what we came up with. The main reason was that it was merely a combination of what other sites were doing in part. One site would have this feature, but not the main direction for the site. Another site had people doing the activity, but in a different way. Some of the bigger sites out there also had the ability to do what we were doing, but of course their missions were much more broader and not focused like ours. Could we do better by simply having a niche, focused mission but having many of the same tools as other sites, and also competing against the fact that users were already using our competitors for that same mission we wanted them to focus on with our site?
This was the source of my unease. If there are competitors or near competitors, or even non-competitors, who allow users to accomplish the same thing on their sites, whether it is their main mission or not, AND these competitors exist already, this is a danger point. I call it “blur”.
The blur occurs in users minds when they hear about what you want them to do, but can’t figure out where to do it. They may already be doing it on some other site, by either using some existing functionality, or jacking some other functionality to get the job done.
Blur is heavily related to product differentiation. You want something to cut through the blur. When they think of something they want or need to do, you want them to think of you. Whatever functions you have must be cool, creative, and original enough to attract them to you despite being in a similar place with other existing sites.
Here is an example. Suppose you want to build a site to allow users to connect with friends. Let’s say your main interface is email, as a possible differentiator. However, as a user who hears about your offering, “connect with friends via this new way, but with email”, they’ll think all sorts of things like:
Hmm I’m already on Facebook and that works for me.
I have my address book on Outlook and email people just fine.
All my friends are on MySpace. Why switch?
I don’t have time to try something new, let alone learning it and THEN getting all my friends on it.
The problem here is that when you express your mission to users, they get caught in the blur of other competitors being able to do pretty much the same thing and you don’t have something to justify the switching cost of going to your service to do something they can do already somewhere else.
You need to find that one (or more) things that people can do on your site that no one else offers, AND is cool enough to get them to come over and learn something new.
It’s always a danger point for me when I hear of entrepreneurs who design something supposedly really cool but then I point out that people are already doing these things on other sites. I ALWAYS get pushback because they think their creation is the best out there, and nobody has mashed up the functions in such a focused manner.
It might actually be great. I’m just talking about risk here and the realities of getting users attention in a crowded space. You might actually have something that is a ton better at doing something, than for them to do it on some existing site.
I’m into risk reduction. Why try to fight with through user blur with something that isn’t shouting “Come here and try me because I’m different” loud enough? You could run out of resources and funding trying to bulldoze your way into users’ attentions. If you had several million dollars in the bank, yeah potentially you could market your way to success in a certain category.
Or you could spend a little more creative time and figure out something to build that is actually cooler and hasn’t done before, and that users will want to spend time with. Enough to get past the switching cost and try your service.
WIth that previous startup I mentioned, after 5 hours of discussion, we spent another 20 minutes talking about something that wasn’t mentioned and was something very unique in their offering. I think that 20 minutes is going to turn out to be most valuable part of that day. Because I think we added back something that would cut through the blur and thus reduce our potential risk in attracting users to our site, to do something that they could do somewhere else in general, but being able to do that one thing that they CAN’T anywhere else.
We could have gone home after 5 hours. But spending that little bit of extra time and effort to find something to avoid the blur was worthwhile and I believe, critical for the success of the company.