The Backyard – This Town Ain’t Big Enough

Greetings all and Happy Friday! Welcome to The Backyard!

A few things I’ve seen around the RC world lately got me thinking about competition in this hobby. I’m intentionally not going to name companies or specific products here because I’m less interested in litigating individual social media posts than I am in the larger topic they bring up. And the larger topic is this: nobody owns a category of RC.

Small RC companies are hugely important to this hobby. They’re often the ones willing to take chances on weird ideas, underserved niches, and products that simply aren’t going to move enough units for one of the big manufacturers to initially care about. Sometimes those small companies wind up proving that a market exists where nobody thought one did. That’s awesome. It’s one of the things that keeps this hobby interesting.

But proving there’s a market doesn’t mean you own that market. Eventually, if enough people become interested in a particular type of vehicle, there’s a good chance other manufacturers are going to notice. Sometimes those competitors will be other small companies. Sometimes one of the 800-pound gorillas of the RC industry is going to come walking through the door.

And yeah, I can understand how that might sting. If you’re a small company that spent years developing products and building a customer base in a niche that the larger manufacturers mostly ignored, I’m sure it’s frustrating to suddenly see a major company enter that same space. They’ve got bigger marketing budgets, larger dealer networks, greater manufacturing capacity, and brand names that practically everyone in the hobby recognizes. I’d probably have some choice words about it behind closed doors too!

But publicly getting angry at the competition—or especially at customers who are excited about a competing product—is rarely a good look. That’s true whether you’re a two-person operation working out of a garage or one of the biggest companies in the industry. Customers don’t owe any company their loyalty simply because they got there first. Give them a reason to choose your product.

That actually ties nicely into what I wrote about here last week. A local hobby shop I frequent just celebrated 50 years in business. Think about how much the hobby business has changed during that time, especially when it comes to how and where people buy things. You don’t survive all of that for five decades by complaining that customers have other options. You survive by giving them reasons to keep walking through your door.

The same applies here.

And here’s the good news: small RC companies can have PLENTY of reasons for people to choose their products. Being small can allow a company to move quickly. They can cater directly to hardcore enthusiasts. They can make strange variants and specialized parts that would never make financial sense for a huge manufacturer. They can interact directly with their customers and respond to what those customers want. And perhaps most importantly, they can take chances.

That’s frequently how these niches develop in the first place. The big manufacturers have their advantages, obviously, but scale can work both ways. A giant company probably isn’t going to build something that only appeals to 500 extremely enthusiastic weirdos. A small company might look at those same 500 weirdos and say, “Those are our people.” I love that about this hobby.

And there’s another side to a major manufacturer entering a niche that I think can sometimes get overlooked: they might actually make the niche bigger. Someone walking through a hobby shop might see a mainstream release from a company they recognize and discover an entire category of RC they didn’t previously know existed. They buy the vehicle, start researching it, join a Facebook group, watch some videos, and suddenly discover all of the smaller companies that have been supporting that scene for years. Six months later, maybe they’re buying parts or even another vehicle from one of those companies.

That’s not guaranteed to happen, of course. Competition is competition, and sometimes a new product absolutely takes sales away from an existing one. I’m not trying to pretend otherwise. But a bigger company entering your niche doesn’t automatically mean they’re taking your piece of the pie. Sometimes they might be making the entire pie bigger.

And if you’re the small company that helped prove the market existed in the first place, that’s when I’d want to remind everyone why I was there. Keep innovating. Keep making the weird stuff. Keep listening to the enthusiasts. Keep doing the things that a giant manufacturer either can’t or won’t do.

Competition should make everybody sharpen their game. As hobbyists, that’s usually a pretty good thing for us. More companies interested in a category means more vehicles, more parts, more ideas, and more choices. Some products will be better than others. Some companies will execute better than others. Let the customers decide.

There’s room in this hobby for the big guys and the little guys, and I think RC is at its best when we have both. The large manufacturers can bring scale, visibility, and accessibility. The small companies can bring specialization, experimentation, and the kind of wonderfully strange ideas that make you wonder who possibly thought there was a market for this thing.

Then you discover that you’re apparently the market.

I’ve had that happen more times than I’d like to admit.

So if somebody bigger wanders onto what you consider your turf, don’t waste too much time yelling at them to get off your lawn. Give us a reason to keep hanging out on yours.

OK, time to hop off my soapbox.

Alright, that’s it for me this week. Until next time, keep it on all 4’s!