Kareem Mayan SaaS bootstrapper helping customers level up.

You need to be sufficiently differentiated from the incumbents so you're the first-best solution for a group of potential customers (not 6th-best, which you will be if you try and compete head to head with the Hootsuites of the world).

As an example, Buffer came along several years after Hootsuite was founded. It was a simpler, faster way to post content to multiple social media channels. They focused on consumers or small businesses, where Hootsuite couldn't / wouldn't compete. By differentiating well, Buffer was playing a different game than HS, and gained significant traction.

In terms of how to differentiate, you may get lucky, but odds are you'll figure this out by talking to customers to learn what problems they have when managing their social media accounts (start locally and always ask for a referral to new people).

Happy to chat further on a call.

I wrote up a case study on how we used drip email marketing at SocialWOD to convert prospects on our email list into paying customers. This technique is responsible for tens of thousands of dollars in new business, and that's in a tiny market of 4000 potential paying customers.

Here's the case study:

http://blog.reemer.com/how-patrick-mackenzie-made-me-thousands-of-dollars

Happy to chat more if you like.