Similar to what people said don't worry the competitor validates your b-model and focus on your product not your competitor
In addition, remember to treat your competitors as frenemies. http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2010/12/27/why-you-should...
There's much more to learn about your space than you probably think and they've already been in the trenches and might have gone through some pain points you can skip.
Location: If they're national, I'd focus on being local. Look at the way Yelp did things in taking on Zagat, Citysearch, etc by focusing on a core market to build that strong loyal set of powerusers that on average were way more engaged (# of reviews per reviewer).
Lastly, I'd consider trying to figure out the competitors cost model. A lot of times many startups that are well funded get that larger funding round because they're looking to scale which means they're spending extra on marketing or sales. Some startups as such are focused on ramping up a sales team. If that's the case, you'll lose playing the game the way they're playing it (ie: groupon vs a local copycat clone since it might work locally but u'll never scale). Try to figure out different methods to do this, price model, sales model, marketing model (guerilla marketing vs traditional marketing), or whatever that will make you more unique and more cost-effective.
Gluck
I completely agree about the execution aspect. At another level to me the value of acquisitions comes from understanding how you will increase the value of the product. At the consumer product level look at what P&G did with Swiffer. They knew with their marketing and distribution they saw a little diamond in the rough.
I'm guessing the opportunity the people within Google saw at the time they were competing for acquisitions was the same thing. Maybe one saw a diamond in the rough while others saw the diamond as being complete and thus those differing perspectives led to different executions post-acquisition.
I think it was Jon Steinberg from BuzzFeed in a recent interview with Marc Suster mentioned that the hard part of recruiting is that you find so many sales guys who really want to be a business dev guy and so many engineers who want to be a product guy. What you really need are craftsmen, which I completely agree with him on.
But beyond that, I actually want enrollments to go up even more to create even more noise and change how interviewee assessments are made. I feel like that's what it will take for recruiters and hiring managers to focus their attention on platforms where the most engaged people of their crafts are. Not in the campuses of Stanford or a smaller community college, but rather in some online forum where people of all ages and geographies interact.
YC has started this with contribution to HN being a factor of admittance, but I'd like to see more of that happening in other fields as well such as mathematics and physics while using stackoverflow, quora, disqus, etc as the platforms to find the next will hunting.
While I completely agree that flat vs a vertical hierarchy should be assessed from organization to organization, I tend to prefer flat structures mainly because they allow for the culture to mold perception of progression over an existing structure itself. What I mean by this is that if you have a structured way for internal progression (usually vertical) people mold their perceptions around that ladder no matter how much you try convincing them otherwise.
You can clearly see this being played out within the big 4 accounting firms (I recruited for them and from them). Within the firms its extremely vertical in that progression is dictated largely by how long you stayed until you hit partnership where its strictly vacancy. Thus, you're basically looking at steady yearly promotions until you reach being a senior manager after 6-8 years within the firm.
This is where I was able to take the most senior people usually in a seasonal manner pretty easily. This is because after being a senior manager you really have only two trajectories within the firm, associate partner or partner. The AP is basically a position they created to please senior managers who sounded too old and weren't good enough to be partners. So what you generally see is 3-4 hotshot senior managers all vying for the 1 partnership position that will be available that season/year. Inevitably I'll have 3/4 partner potential senior managers leaving because they know they're better off leaving the firm and going to an industry position or worse a competitive firm. They already know the stigma of being an AP.
Thus, you don't simply see attrition at the top level, but the attrition of the very best at the top level and the rest being APs. What's worse is those guys who are the best usually have a loyal following within the firm. Well guess who gives me a call after placing that senior manager as a hiring manager where they're building a team? Now you see an attrition of even better people who you were probably underpaying at junior positions leaving the firm for better pay and better hours. The only guiding light there is you're hoping that senior manager becomes their client in the future.
Thus, you see a system where the highly vertical nature of the structure led to a culture where attrition was the norm. While it might be naive to think so, I think being a flat structure might give a better chance for the culture to shape that perception of the promotion and have them "feel" it rather than perceive it.
I agree that you should play around with price, but I also believe Zed could be leveraging his free tutorial to market another service later on.
For example, while this isn't an intro to python book, Michael Hartl's Ruby on Rails Tutorial I think provides an excellent revenue model for authors.
Basically he provides a free online tutorial that he cross-subsidizes with charging on the premium screencasts and pdf/hardbook editions. I read the tutorial myself in a few days as a beginner and eventually was convinced to buy the screencasts to get a better visual understanding. If it wasn't for the free text I would never have known about Michael's skills and would definitely not have paid for it.
You also have extremely experienced industry leaders providing free screencasts and podcasts educating others for free but in turn increasing their own exposure and overall deal-flow. In the case of coders, you could expect guys like Ryan Bates and Charles Wood to increase their consulting/speaking engagements, where in the case of vc's and angels like Mark Suster and Jason Calacanis I would expect better deal-flow of up and coming startups.
As such, before resorting to price elasticity, I like the general idea of working through cross-subsidization to figure out alternative revenue streams.
I wonder if having an Ipad-enabled EHR system will be a compelling enough proposition to migrate practitioners from existing experienced vendors with a track record. I would imagine if you already have a system, even if it is an old expensive legacy system, you would not switch simply because of an IPad enabled device.
Even if there are other benefits associated with it such as being SaaS-based and cheaper/more secure, the conversion rates I would think would be low when there already exists free cloud based solutions and open-source solutions which they haven't already converted to already.
Thus, this makes me think the target market would be the pen & paper crowd. I'm curious to see what the conversion rate is for this crowd since this seems like a tough crowd to convince.
Even in scenarios where the EMR/EHR system is completely free (either through pricing plans or government grants) you don't see many of them moving away from the pen & paper which signals price might not be the most important factor here either.
To me this leaves overall usability and learning curve which I'm not sure if DrChrono necessarily promotes as their pitch seems to be portability.
I'd like to see how their product matures to tackle that issue since in my opinion their competitors really aren't other EHR vendors as much as the huge pen & paper market that's a much larger share of the pie.
I think when deciding the go stealth or not you should decide what you have more confidence in: you or your idea. In general be positive and have confidence in yourself and your team. You know that your first idea won't be your best idea. If you find there's no competition and you are all alone your idea probably doesn't work and you will find something better eventually. If you meet competition, you just validated the market anyways and grew the whole pie. At that point its about believing that your team can out execute the competition.
Awesome to hear you're taking the dive, especially when coming from a consultancy. My co-founder is from Accenture and he's looking to take a LOA in few months as well. I did a similar thing 3 months back when leaving my job as a head hunter. It just dawned on me one day when I had to grab lunch with a candidate I was placing vs a meeting with prospective alpha user who was calling about the idea I was conceiving over a paper mock-up. Being the business guy it was the best move for me. Before that move I had trouble recruiting co-founders outside of my friends. My co-founders are now all people I've met through networking in trying to achieve a similar vision rather than simply being a friend and convincing people to join up with you. More importantly, my co-founders are now 3 other engineers to complement my business skills. Going full-time put me fighting right in the arena rather than commentating from the stands.
I think I've come a long way even in the last 3 months going full-time when thinking about the stupid things I did 5 months ago. Basically I was about to pay with my initial co-founder/roommate $20k to prototype the mock-up. Instead I've picked up coding (even at what I consider the old age of turning 27 but what the heck i'm in this for the long-haul) and found 3 other engineering co-founders who are all contributing to bootstrap and have instead $20k surplus to start with now.
Strangely enough, I offered equal equity as well but they said I should keep more of it since I'm full-time and invested more time into it up to that point. Furthermore, even though I never pushed it on them, two have approached me already to go full time starting the summer to pick up the pace as they've begun to get more excited about the idea. Now we're on our way to launching an alpha in 2 weeks!
Oh, and to note the paper mock-ups did wonders. If I had paid to outsource the project with all the iterations I had done up to that point based on the usability testing I would have easily paid triple. Thankfully, we haven't had a need to pivot yet from the responses, but we definitely have iterated a whole bunch since even three months ago which I could never have imagined I would have found out if I never left the job.
If you ever wish to chat and exchange ideas/stories email me anytime. Best of luck!
I completely agree that price is a function of perceived value. However, this scenario smells like they are misleading consumers in a legally grey area.
This somewhat reminds me of the case a few years back about the scam of daily contact lenses. Basically it was revealed that the daily contact lenses from Bausch & Lomb and Johnson & Johnson were exactly the same as the weekly/monthly disposables which pissed a lot of people off and got them sued.
Not sure but wasn't there a recent backlash about processors being crippled and then "unlocked" for higher power if they paid additional fees?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-357082/Contact-len...
this article holds especially true for non-technical entrepreneurs deciding which language to choose. while the supply of developers may be lower for languages such as ruby or python, you find a much more enthusiastic crowd of developers who in general seem to already have graduated from another language such as php. thus, from a business non-technical background, by choosing an enthusiast type language such as ruby it made it easier to narrow down quality developers with the right mentality as a technical co-founder than say a language with a large supply of developers such as php.
I think that "one thing" you identify is one of the most important abilities in determining business success. Those who refined their ability to properly communicate, think critically, and analyze problems have built a transferable skill set that cannot afford to be learned at the workplace. So in my opinion, they've got plenty of options. You could easily go the business consulting route where they specifically look for people with those traits and eventually have them specialize in some field. From there you could easily transfer to any industry job you specialize in for a comfortable living. The more ambitious could use those skills to build a startup and surround themselves with the right mix of a math or science backgrounds to create a business.
In addition, remember to treat your competitors as frenemies. http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2010/12/27/why-you-should... There's much more to learn about your space than you probably think and they've already been in the trenches and might have gone through some pain points you can skip.
Location: If they're national, I'd focus on being local. Look at the way Yelp did things in taking on Zagat, Citysearch, etc by focusing on a core market to build that strong loyal set of powerusers that on average were way more engaged (# of reviews per reviewer).
Lastly, I'd consider trying to figure out the competitors cost model. A lot of times many startups that are well funded get that larger funding round because they're looking to scale which means they're spending extra on marketing or sales. Some startups as such are focused on ramping up a sales team. If that's the case, you'll lose playing the game the way they're playing it (ie: groupon vs a local copycat clone since it might work locally but u'll never scale). Try to figure out different methods to do this, price model, sales model, marketing model (guerilla marketing vs traditional marketing), or whatever that will make you more unique and more cost-effective. Gluck