#competitorsanalysis

Competitive intelligence or competitor analysis services help companies to evaluate or analyze competitors' products / services, pricing, marketing strategies, etc.

Building Upon last week's findings, we have decided we should explore our competitive landscape, and get inspired from similar services (either similar in content -- Parents' communities etc,  and in the kind of service they offer-- such as dating apps and babysitter finding)

I believe one of our main learnings from using our competitors as a validating tool, was realizing that parenthood can be a very different experience, and that different parents hold different approaches and values when it comes to their parenting style, and their needs for and from a community can be very different.. We sometimes tend to stereotype our target users, trying to categorize them, and I think it's important to remember that we're actually designing to what most of them have in common, which might be far from a perfect understanding each one of them, but provides a fairly good understanding of them as a group.

Another interesting finding, yet an expected one considering what was just said, was that "moms" didn't like being tagged as ones, and thus referred to as if they should be interested in certain "shallow" issues ("I don't care about celebrities").

We found that being busy as only parents can be, friendly and organized UI should be a key feature of our product -- or any product designed for parents ("don't let me spend time -- I go in, I find what I'm looking for, and I'm out!") 

We learned that being highly connected and accessible (through other platforms like Facebook or Google search) is, other than the "word of mouth" probably the best way to get to our target market (probably because there are so many existing platforms that host "moms' forums. That also  -- that one of our main challenges is to figure out how to outshine them all.  

Parents trusting parents and supporting parents was another meta-theme that repeated in those user testings, though it seems like in "circle of moms" and the openness/share level of some communities can make some users raise a brow, and even distant and alienate them.