Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup

Chapter 45. Find Your Whitespace

Raj Aggarwal

Raj is a co-founder and CEO of Localytics, a provider of mobile application analytics. Localytics raised $700,000 from angel investors after completing TechStars in 2009.

While companies with monopolies don't worry much about differentiation, startups are not afforded that luxury. Nearly every startup must find ways to differentiate itself from competitors, whether it's through location, service, price, product features, or something else. As your competition increases, so does your need to differentiate. This becomes even more critical in a crowded market, as your product's differentiation needs to clear enough to help you rise above the noise.

In the midst of the financial crisis in the fall of 2008 and spring of 2009, very few people were thinking about hot new market segments. There were a few notable ones, however, including the fulfillment of the longtime promise of the smart phone. Kickstarted by the Apple iPhone and the App Store in early 2008, developers were busily creating apps for this new platform. We created Localytics to provide analytics to these mobile app developers. We initially set out to address a need we saw in this market, which was that the analytical data about usage of mobile apps was lousy. We worked closely with several mobile app makers from Day One, understanding what they wanted and what they were willing to ...