Should you choose a competitive market or an untapped one?

Every Friday, we’re answering your questions about business, startups, customer success and more.

Happy Friday!

This week’s question comes from Jure Žove, who asks:

I’ve told this story on the blog before, but early on in Groove’s development, a fairly well-known VC asked me:

Why on earth would you want to enter this space? You’ll be fighting an uphill battle against huge players. Zendesk, Desk.com, plus an overcrowded market of smaller companies.

And he was absolutely right – our customers had dozens of options.

But that was exactly why I wanted to get into this market.

Fifty other companies trying to solve the exact same problem?

Fantastic. I’ll take that over trying to convince people of a problem they didn’t even know they had.

The frenzy of customer support software companies shows that it’s a problem that people want solved.

Plus, we don’t have to be better than Zendesk. We just have to be better than Zendesk for our specific audience.

Groove isn’t right for everyone, and neither is Zendesk. Or Uservoice. Or Desk.com.

But by building the best damn support software possible for our specific users, Groove can become the no-brainer best option for enough customers to still achieve our goals as a business.

A competitive marketplace means that there’s a need for a solution, and there’s no way the biggest players are solving the problem for everyone. There’s almost always a (potentially profitable) niche to carve out, with the caveat that you can’t simply build another solution; you must build a better one for a targeted audience.