Omar Zenhom argues competition proves customers will pay, making it easier to win by offering something better than existing products. Airbnb nearly failed because it had to educate the market from scratch, requiring massive funding and years to gain traction. Bootstrapped founders should target validated markets instead.
In the past 20 years, I've built 2 businesses from scratch, sold one of them, and coached thousands of entrepreneurs in the process of starting their own. And I've seen the same, the same mistake over and over again. A lot of people say, well, if I find other products being sold, doesn't that mean there's competition? Doesn't mean it's going to be harder for me to sell. No, it doesn't mean that. It means that you have validated that people are willing to spend money on that. The opposite is actually much harder. Okay. If you're trying to create a new product that no one's ever heard of, or don't really understand, it's very, very hard for you to survive in the marketplace because you have to convince people of a new concept. A good example of this is Airbnb. When it came out, no one had any idea what this thing is. They're like, what? People are going to live in my house and I'm just going to let them sleep there and they're going to be right next to me. This is weird. I'm going to sleep in a stranger's house. It's just a weird concept. And in the beginning, Airbnb, their MVP product, didn't even have a way to transact, meaning that people had no way to pay for the stay. So people actually paid in cash to the host directly. But the point here I'm trying to make here is that Airbnb, the only reason why they survived is because they were venture-backed. They had enough money to just teach people about the concept of Airbnb. It took nearly a decade before they started to get traction. So you don't have a decade as a bootstrap business, as somebody who doesn't have hundreds of millions of dollars in funding. What I'm asking you to do is to go to a validated market and just come up with a better solution to the same problem that people are trying to solve.
