This morning as I was finishing the Stage’s launch newsletter I’ve discover thanks to this tweet that we’ve 2 new competitors (based in Spain). I can’t imagine better news.

Competitors are really great. As I’ve said before competitors are great news. Competitors means there is a market for real. Competitors means money and customers. Competitors means you’ve an enemy. And we love to have enemies.

When we decided to build Stage we knew that we’re going to fight companies like Amiando, Eventbrite or RegOnLine. With passion instead of fear, we took the resolution to build the event online management system we would like to use and not enter the cold war strategy of “we too”.

We thought that anybody should be able to organize an event and sell tickets online regardless of the amount of the resources and infraestructure. We decided that in this media democratization era we’re living we were going to build a tool to allow anybody manage his events.

Keeping this principle in mind we designed a business model based on the generated costs and available margins. We took our competitors’ ticket price based variable fee, changed, renamed and returned it to our customers transformed on savings and a fixed fee. Now others are looking more and more like us.

We wrote in our whiteboard “Innovation != Money”. Is not the same, there is not even correlation. We’ve forced ourselves to do a better product than the one companies 4, 10, 100 times bigger than ours have done. We’ve showed ourselves that 3 people can make a product that thousands of people will use happily.

The lifetime monopolies have finished. Nowadays just good is not enough to create or manage them. You’ve to create something useful, ethical and beautiful. And we did it. Dear competitors sorry but… we’re ready.

We were wanting you.