Image by Jennifer Morrow via flickr
Written by Eric Gockel
Competitive analysis and features that your users want and need are right at your fingertips.
If you’ve ever spent any time browsing the Zaps on Zapier, or looking at a competitor’s Uservoice forum, you’ll find plenty of ah-ha moments.
Now, you shouldn’t abandon your own brand’s voice and mission and merely copy what everyone else is doing. However, here you can find what your competition is not doing, and that’s an advantage.
If you run a CRM web app, like we do, and there’s a feature on your backlog you’ve been thinking about implementing, what better than seeing your competition publicly state that “this is not something will be happening in the near future.”
Discover enough of these and you might find yourself at a competitive advantage. It’s surprising what little missing feature may make users switch platforms when they find one that has what they’ve been looking for.
Similarly, if you see competitors have flagged ideas as Planned or Started, and your app has them already, or are easy to add if they make sense, by all means leverage this and promote the fact that your app has these features.
With Zapier, if you’re not familiar with them, you can connect your favorite apps and automate workflows. It seems many companies use multiple apps to get their jobs done, and most apps don’t always do 100% of what you need them to do, leaving you with workarounds and band aids.
Zapier lets you wire up your favorite apps, provided they have APIs, to fill in the blanks that you’re manually doing now, cutting and pasting and whatnot, to get your jobs done.
Going back to our CRM example, if you have an app and see that a competitor’s CRM app has Zap’s connecting them to Google or Mailchimp, you might want to look into your own API and see if you can provide similar services within your own application without requiring your users to also use Zapier to get the job done.
Image via flickr