> Many layers of the financial system for small and medium businesses are used to working with QB
This is more US-based, I'm working for a QB competitor in France and let me tell you that they are going to be crushed at very high speed either by us or another similar modern competitor. They are going to lose the whole market within 5 years and TV ads won't help them. They are moving way too slowly for the market.
I’m not familiar with the French market but Intuit is still on track to keep crushing it in the USA. Intuit spent $2.35B USD on R&D last year (across all products) and QBO revenue grew 33%.
Many startups in the space are building features, not products, and are at risk of QBO adding their feature the same way Stripe has been killing off fintechs with every new feature rollout.
There are many “let’s fix accounting” startups but the market itself moves slowly. It’s difficult to nudge users to switch accounting software and QBO has deeply entrenched network effects with accountants and integrations.
Another huge issue for QBO competitors is that there’s only so much you can do with the general ledger (GL) and closely associated functionality. The GL system is an end user of multiple different transaction sources/pipelines while most of the time those pipelines are outside of the GL software’s control. There isn’t enough there to strongly differentiate and pull users off QBO unless (maybe) you build a mega platform that handles all parts of the transaction lifecycles (something like what Brex is doing), and then you need to convince users to be all-in on all of the components to get the benefits.
This is more US-based, I'm working for a QB competitor in France and let me tell you that they are going to be crushed at very high speed either by us or another similar modern competitor. They are going to lose the whole market within 5 years and TV ads won't help them. They are moving way too slowly for the market.