⚙️ Finding White Space in a Crowded Market

On Sunday, I wrote about the humbling realization that we'd positioned the product incorrectly.

We should’ve emphasized the full workflow we plan to assist with instead of focusing on one feature: the video conferencing tool with real time Q&A.

The response by you all was... intense.

Dozens of you reached out with similar stories of pivots, failed assumptions, and the brutal reality of customer feedback.

But here's what I didn't tell you: After that email, I spent two days in a competitive research rabbit hole, trying to figure out how the hell to communicate what we are building.

A friend set me straight on our positioning.

An agency owner was walking me through his vision during an hour long design call. He builds meeting bots for clients—charges them $3-5K each to create these exact workflows manually.

And I'm just staring at his screen thinking: He described what we've been trying to build.

Then he said something that made me sit up:

Wait.

What?

"Think about it," he continued.

"Slack didn't win by being better IRC. They made chat the foundation for all team workflows. You're doing the same thing, just starting with meetings instead of messages."

That hit different.

I'd been thinking we were competing with Zoon, Otter and Fireflies.

But this guy—who literally builds this stuff for a living—was saying we're actually trying to build team intelligence infrastructure that happens to start with meetings.

The problem wasn't that we were in a crowded market.

The problem was that I'd been thinking about the wrong market entirely.

The Meeting Assistant Market is Absolutely Saturated

Let me show you what I mean.

The "AI meeting assistant" space has dozens of established players, each fighting over the same positioning: "automated meeting notes."

Here's what the landscape looks like:

The Transcription Giants:

• Otter.ai: "Your AI meeting assistant"

• Fireflies: "Automate your meeting notes"

• Fathom: "Never take notes again"

The Enterprise Solutions:

• Zoom AI Companion: Built-in assistant across the platform

• Microsoft Copilot: Teams integration with the full Office suite

• Notion AI: Meeting notes integrated with docs

Every single one promises some variation of: "We'll transcribe your meetings and give you summaries and action items."

And they're all technically correct. But they're also all fighting over the same slice of pie.

What Our Design Partners Actually Told Us

While researching competitors, I kept thinking about the conversations we'd had with design partners after that failed MVP.

Their feedback wasn't about transcription quality or summary accuracy.

The operations director managing 20+ people:

She wasn't complaining about meeting transcription. She was describing knowledge fragmentation.

The engineering manager running daily standups:

He wasn't asking for better notes. He was asking for workflow management.

The Pattern None of the Competitors Address

Here's what I realized: every established player treats meetings as isolated events to be documented.

But our design partners described something different entirely—meetings as recurring workflow checkpoints that need to maintain context, track decisions, and drive actions across time.

The competitive research confirmed this gap. From my analysis I realized that few explicitly market around recurring meetings and continuity of discussions over time… most treat meetings as discrete events to be optimized.

This is the white space.

Not better meeting notes. Recurring meeting workflow management.

How Linear Cracked a Similar Problem

This reminded me of how Linear approached project management.

When Linear launched, Jira dominated the market. Atlassian was massive, established, with deep enterprise integration.

Any logical analysis would say "don't compete with Jira."

But Linear didn't position as "better Jira." They positioned as "project management for modern software teams."

Linear's insight: Teams didn't want more powerful project management. They wanted project management that matched how they actually worked.

Our insight: Teams don't want better meeting notes. They want meetings that connect to how they actually work.

The Positioning Shift

Instead of "AI meeting assistant" (crowded category), we're positioning as a "Meeting Agent"

Here's why this works:

1. It's Additive, Not Replacement: Remember the organizational inertia problem I wrote about last time? People won't switch from Zoom because of bureaucracy and risk.

But they will add intelligence to their existing workflows. An "agent" suggests enhancement, not replacement.

2. It Targets Underserved Workflows: The competitive research shows most tools optimize for one-off meetings or generic "productivity."

We're explicitly built for teams that have the same meetings week after week—ops reviews, standups, planning sessions, client check-ins.

3. It Solves Integration, Not Documentation: While competitors fight over transcription accuracy, we're solving the harder problem: making meeting outcomes flow seamlessly into work systems.

What This Means for Category Creation

The lesson for any founder in a crowded market: Don't compete on features. Compete on workflow positioning.

Ask yourself:

• What job are existing solutions really hired to do?

• What adjacent job do customers actually need done?

• Where do current solutions stop that creates friction?

For us, the answers were:

• Existing solutions document meetings

• Customers need to operationalize meeting outcomes

• Current solutions stop at notes; work continues in fragmented tools

The strategy:

• Identify the workflow gap competitors don't address

• Position in the adjacent space where you can own a category

• Make the switch about progress, not risk

The Risks of This Approach

This positioning isn't without challenges:

Execution Dependency: "Agent" implies autonomous action. If we can't deliver on that promise, the positioning backfires.

Education Required: "Meeting Agent" is a new category. We'll need to educate the market on why this matters.

Scope Expansion: Once you own a workflow, customers expect you to solve more of it. The product surface area grows quickly.

But these are better problems than fighting Otter and Fireflies on transcription quality.

What's Next

We're rebuilding our messaging around meeting workflow management, not meeting documentation.

Most importantly, we're targeting teams with early stage managers with recurring meeting pain—operations teams, engineering managers, client service groups—instead of trying to be everything to everyone.

I’m hoping this a clear path through a crowded market.

The bigger question for your own positioning:

When everyone in your space is fighting over the same value proposition, where's the adjacent workflow that nobody owns?

Sometimes the best way to win a crowded market is to find the uncrowded one right next to it.

Building in the gaps,

—Rameel

P.S. If you're curious about the full competitive research that informed this positioning shift, I'm putting together a detailed market analysis for our design partners. Just reply with a “YO” and I’ll hook you up