What is the current situation on the market?
Looking at the Fetti app, it’s not rocket science and we are not creating a “blue ocean” of a new technology, and actually even rocket science is no longer a complicated business structure where it was available to “rich” governments. When looking holistically at the market, there are plenty of websites, forums, chats, groups and individual apps. Everyone, everywhere saw what we have seen that there is a gap in the market for a particular service or providing information. This however has turned into a logistical nightmare, if you want to find a particular answer you need to join that particular niche community and if you were like us that have multiple interests, would end up with a marketplace full of apps, chats and forums. This takes a lot of time to manage to get simplistic answers.
What is the current situation with the apps?
There are plenty of apps when it comes to the niches, for example, Yoga, Karate or Hair appointment, all of these are great opportunities for an individual business from their perspective of providing a niche kind of service. There is also of course, trip advisor, yelp or google to search for a service that you need. But the problem resurfaces on two individual components, whereby
- Too much information and you would rely on the recommendations by Google/Yelp/Trip advisor users
- Too many apps to be held on your phone for singular service that may no longer be needed or outdated
There is another hidden third part, people are still willing to use the service that they have heard from word of mouth or recommendation by those that they physically know about.
Therefore, what we are facing these days, with the easier access to technology, the market has been filled with apps and yet there are seldom ones that are focusing on combining everything into one singular use.
What is the current situation with the forums?
To date we have counted over 300 forums/chats through Whats app groups, Facebook Groups and Telegram channels that are addressing the lifestyle in Turkey. The other interesting observation that came through is that most of the chat participants have an average of 5-10 groups in common. The newbies that do come across either of the chats, forums or groups are always interested in the same topic or the information and always get randomized answer without actually answering the question:
Recent anecdotes,
A lady has just arrived in Turkey and has a couple of children. She has posted a question to recommend her the best international school and people started to respond with the names of the schools in various precincts. Then there was a slight argument between the existing members on which one is better than the other while pointing out that some of the named schools charge lower fees and therefore considered as not as good. This anecdote purely shows the points of the forums, everyone has an opinion but there is no real unified answer and conclusion for me was that the lady has just wasted half a day of her time reading the responses.
We have come across some of the forums that have over 100k members and these forums offer an option of buying advertisements including the banner. The package deal was fairly good for less than $50 per month and can post up to 60 times per month with the daily limits of 2. However, upon further investigation and observation we have quickly realized that the deal may not be as sweet as there are other 100s of other businesses that buy it and therefore you are becoming just another spam in the forum. The forum loses its potential benefit other than just hoping that someone will see something important from you.
What is the current situation of the available information?
As discussed above, there are thousands of websites, a few 100s of forums, chats and posts. There is ofcourse an availability of SEO which drives the answers based on whose website is the best structured while googling rather than whether the information is up to date and correct. All of this and the above just puts further strain on a user to get right information in a short period of time, the businesses hoping to get the new customer through their door and the companies hoping to present their brands in a structured manner to get to their target audience.
What we are trying to say here is that the information is in fact available, in some services or products it is very well structured and presented while in others it is really hard to find the answers or the services that would be able to attend to your immediate needs. The other important point to mention that we see this a lot more often that there is a lot more information that is available in Turkish language but cannot be found in English for example while the users that are speaking in that language would be frustrated in trying to get an answer as they would then rely on the sources from the forums and chats with various opinions.
What else is going on in the global market?
Part of the marketing and business plans we have been assessing global market trends and can definitely see that the market tendency is driven by the same observations and conclusions that we are having, which is the information tends to be collated by an aggregator and then presented in an easier and most useful way for the users. We have gone through the cycle where information was originally available at one source, then with the easier access to building sites and apps it has blown out of proportion and now is moving back into a consolidation.
What is the user tendency?
Market tendencies only respond to what the users actually want. First of all, we are the users of the information and this app idea has started from the above mentioned frustrations. Before getting ourselves into a rabbit hole and spending a lot of time on building this app we have asked these simplistic questions across the forums, chats and other global migrants, nomads on what their thoughts are when they move around. Overwhelmingly, we were not the only ones that have seen the tendency of users wanting to get an answer now rather than spending days on researching something that is not useful, often outdated or simplistically non-existent.
What is the actual problem between the market, the apps, the forums and user tendencies?
Let’s start with the user tendencies. Users want to get information right now, they want this to be as updated as possible and as accurate as possible. The users got so used to having a “smartphone” and an internet that they are relying on all of the answers and questions through it.
The market is moving towards compiling all of the data into one single source and we are seeing this tendency across the globe, some of the initiatives are done on a smaller scale, based on a google sheets compiled information by the users and others have a subscription based access to the data but in either of the cases it is the definite current information sharing fashion.
The apps have usually played a significant role in information sharing, you can easily access what you need with less than three clicks rather than physically opening a browser and searching for an answer. However, the downside of the apps is that everyone that has a bit of coding skills has created a version of an app that suits their needs or promoting a particular business, this in turn has clogged up the phones and markets.
Following the clogged up situation with apps we can add to it a flubergusting option of adding forums and chats. The number of chats that are created for a particular group or niche or interest or place of living or or or. There are so many of them that you would need to have a full time job just to sit there the whole day long and read all of the various random conversations, questions and answers.
How are we resolving the issue?
We have analyzed the situation from four different perspectives, we have reviewed the competition and who would actually be the competition and came to the conclusion that one super app would help the users get the answers to their most burning questions, services or products, the businesses will have an opportunity to get more eyes on their smaller businesses and provide an opportunity for other events to be available across multiple of nations rather than keeping an eye on the 100s of forums, chats etc.
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