When Laura Roeder started her startup, MeetEdgar, in 2014, she was late to the social media automation party.
HootSuite (2008), Buffer (2010) and Sprout Social (also 2010), all had a significant head start, name recognition, and had raised millions of dollars in venture capital. And these are just a few of the dozen or so startups that were already building in this space.
But Laura had a key insight from her time running a social media consulting company that the big players were missing. Over and over again, her clients, who were mostly small businesses and solopreneurs, told her how they struggled to consistently create new content, share it, and engage with customers across various social platforms.
The gap in the market Laura noticed was that, while the existing solutions allowed users to schedule content, they did so in a manual, one-off manner. Laura's clients didn't have the time or resources to spend constantly writing new posts and scheduling content. They also created a lot of evergreen content, or content that remains relevant for a long period of time. Laura knew that only a small percentage of users would actually see the content the first time it was shared, and that sharing the same content multiple times was an effective content marketing strategy.
Instead of creating a copycat product competing directly against the large incumbents, Laura made two decisions that were key to her success:
- She targeted small businesses, bloggers and solo entrepreneurs, whose problems she understood well from her consulting days.
- MeetEdgar included the ability to automate the scheduling of evergreen content, allowing users to recycle their best work on an ongoing basis and continue attracting new eyeballs.
Focusing on small businesses meant Laura could simplify the product, solve a specific problem, and avoid building many of the features that enterprise customers expected, like complex tracking and analytics. This allowed her to launch faster. It also helped her to be crystal clear in her marketing about the benefits of her product and the problem it solved, which drove very targeted traffic to her new startup.
Often times entrepreneurs think they need to build every feature their competition has, and then some, in order to be successful. But the best way to test an idea for a startup and establish a foothold in a market is to have a unique point of view, focus on an underserved niche, and solve a specific problem better than anyone else.