Zoho’s Competitive Advantage in Low-Code Application Development

Problem Statement

Figure out what is Zoho’s competitive advantage in the Low-Code Application Development Platform space (LCAP) and craft a strategy to win.

Brief Summary

Zoho Creator is a Low-Code Application Platform that is industry agnostic. We need to figure out the competitive advantage and craft a strategy to win in the market.

Here’s how we can do it:

  1. Find competitors
  2. Conduct a SWOT Analysis
  3. Identify our Competitive Advantage
  4. Create a Strategic Plan

Known Competitors

  • Power Apps
  • Betty Blocks
  • Quickbase
  • Caspio
  • Outsystems
  • Mendix

SWOT Analysis

Strengths

  • Powerful yet flexible Drag & Drop Builder
  • Large App Integration capability (600+)
  • Highly Skilled Resources and Mature Technology

Weaknesses

  • Need to learn an additional language to build products in Zoho Creator i.e., Deluge
  • Lack of enough Brand Awareness around Zoho Creator

Opportunities

  • LCDP market will grow 10X by 2030.
  • Leveraging B2B Influencer Marketing to further the adoption of Zoho Creator
  • Partnering up with Conglomerates having businesses in multiple verticals to grow exponentially
  • Entering B2C Market with a Freemium Model
  • More potential for enterprise penetration.

Threats

  • LCDP Products that don’t require additional Language i.e., No-Code Tools
  • New AI-driven entrants in the LCDP space
  • Products offering Freemium model

Competitive Advantage

Cost Leadership

  • Zoho Creator plans start from INR 1000/User/month which is quite cheaper as compared to competitor plans.
  • This attractive pricing model gives Zoho Creator an undue edge over competitors.
  • Zoho Creator has cost leadership which is also evident from customer feedback.

Differentiation & Innovation Leadership

  • Zoho Creator, being a mature product, has created innovative leadership.
  • Deluge is an example of that.
  • We also need to create a broad market differentiation strategy.

Strategic Plan

Target Audience

  1. Startups
  2. SMBs
  3. Enterprise

Vision

To be the worldwide market leader in low-code application development by keeping the cost leadership and focusing more on the differentiation leadership.

Plan

Overcome our weaknesses

  • Deluge can stall our growth. Therefore, we should be as independent of the language as possible. This can be done by introducing another user-friendly language such as Python, which is quite popular and would tone down the learning curve of the user and prompt more user adoption.

Leverage our strengths

  • We have cost leadership while having highly skilled resources.
  • We should keep using that to our advantage and keep innovating.
  • This means setting up an R&D team inside the Creator team whose sole focus would be to work on new features that our competitors don’t have.
  • A basic action outline would be to test out a new feature (however small but moving fast) every 2-4 sprints.

Tap into the opportunity in the market

  • The B2C market is packed with competitors like Bubble. But Zoho is a much bigger player and we shouldn’t miss out on the opportunity to tap the B2C market with mature products.
  • Creator Economy is worth billions and that can be an additional market to expand to.
  • We should also sign MoUs with conglomerates to accelerate our growth. Conglomerates can be our high-ticket clients and can help us grow financially as well as with user adoption.

Market the product better

  • Having talked to about 15 people in the no-code/low-code space, I came to the conclusion that a lot of them don’t know enough about Zoho Creator.
  • This showcases that we need to market Creator better. This can be done by creating signature events such as Hackathons and Influencer marketing campaigns.

    Similar Posts