Is there a market for yet another Project Management tool?

A crowded market means opportunity -- clearly there's a large demand too.

Also over-crowded markets often enter an acquisition phase where larger players consume the smaller ones, and that's a nice opportunity for an exit or to have less, and less nimble competition.

It probably means traditional marketing will be too expensive at first because it's hard to stand out in the noise and bid on AdWords. But it also means people probably talk about this stuff everywhere so a social media strategy might be fruitful no matter how many competitors there are.

The key is to have a story worth retelling. If you have nothing new to say, and you can't do traditional advertising, what's left?

I'm an efficiency consultant, so I'm constantly evaluating project management tools for various clients. Most of them are awful and many of my clients are under-served even by the best solution available for their situation. (I specialize in working with highly-detail-oriented Type-A personalities, and at this point I'm just going to build my own solution for them.)

Breaking into the existing market would definitely be a challenge, but it's not impossible. There's an incredible amount of room for improvement and for niche solutions. If your goal is to dominate the PM market (doesn't seem like it is), then I'd probably choose a less-saturated market. However, if you have a unique solution that applies to certain industries, or work environments, or personality types, then a laser-focus on that niche and a commitment to creating a PM app that serves that niche's needs can definitely result in a profitable and successful company.

Connecting with consultants who serve, peripherally or wholly, your target market can also help break into the market without having to deal with fighting for SEO.

Speaking as an old project manager myself, "projects" are one of those evergreen areas of problems... "Projects" sit in the intersection between technology & organization; and people are always looking for better solutions there. So there will always be a market for a better project management solution.

That said, marketing it will not be easy. Almost every niche I can think of already has incumbent suppliers. One are that is moving right now is "change management", which seems to be a lot about giving HR simple tools to spread a "change management process" to the entire organization. Perhaps you could attach your project to a change management methodology that is in demand?

Question you should ask yourself is if there will ever be a leader in the market, which it appears to me might never be the case. Why would you want to enter a market knowing it's never possible to take the market? My guess is that it's based in this case on how dependent the product is on human relationships. If you where going to enter the market, I'd suggest focusing the relationships, and not the eye candy. But who knows, I've never personally built out a PM tool before.

Personally I think it would be crazy to go into that market. It's one of the most crowded categories I can think of. There are dozens and dozens of such sites (BaseCamp being one of the leaders). Hard to break through all that noise, hard to differentiate yourself, hard to give users a compelling reason to use your site instead of the 99 others, and hard to get people to pay for it. Hard, and expensive because if you don't market, nothing will happen. I have no doubt you can make a great product, but this is not a "build it and they will come" type situation. I would suggest looking for underserved niches rather than overserved niches.

Trello is proof that there is always amarket for a better mousetrap.

Absolutely. I've been using like 10 PM tools so far and i dont remeber there was one that really did the job. I've been working on huge projects, small projects but there was always something missing.

What you should do is this: figure out the segment you want to sell to (huge project with lots of planning, small projects with collaboration and tracking, software development etc). Then figure out whats missing in the current market leaders and than you make your product.

World is big and will become even bigger so there enough room for everyone.

Yes, there definitely is a niche market for a Project Management + Customer Relationship Management system with a modern, sleek UI, an API, tagging, and Gmail contextual gadget.

For the past four+ weeks, I've been searching for such a solution. I've tested 30 CRM+product management products so far, looked at another 25, and NONE does all of the above well. So if you can pull that off, go for it - I'd pay to use your system.