Ask HN: A competitor just launched and I am at 60%. Quits? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: A competitor just launched and I am at 60%. Quits?

17 pointsarisAlexis26 comments

A competing product that is almost identical to what I was going to launch was launched today. Their product seems nice and they have a team and the launch appears quite successful. I have been working alone on this as a side project for some months but I think I can roll it out in 2-3 months from now as polished as they can and without a team. Should I quit and move on another project? I have tons of innovative ideas and this isn't the first time this happens. Should I start a new one?

Looking for advice from more experienced devs/startuppers

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Let them market the product for you. Reverse engineer their marketing and sales process then go for their customers. Even if you are not able to grab some customers from them you will be able to profile what the average customer is like.

Leverage their resources to your advantage. Quitting because they launched first just talks about your drive and commitment. Not about the potential to make money.

> hen go for their customers

How exactly this can be executed?

Subscribe to their newsletters and see if they mention anyone.

Email the competitor and ask if they have case studies. They usually do and if they don't they will scramble and provide one.

Use a search engine and do some deep searches.

Search on social networks. See who liked their content/page.

Set up a google alert.

These are just a few...

1. If they're VC funded they can afford to lose money on the product for along time. Not great. However, they're charging the same as you, so you're not competing with free at least.

2. Do you need to have every single user in the market? If not, does it matter that there are competitors? Can't you both co-exist?

3. Features often matter a lot less than marketing. If you haven't done any marketing and are relying on features, then yes, you have a problem.

3. is an interesting angle and if someone asked me I would say the opposite, but I am not really knowledgeable in the field.

Have you heard the parable of 2 Johnnys?

Johnny McDumbpants. Who drew on years of knowledge formulating super absorbent materials to develop special diapers for the wild Javan Rhinos.

He was 90 days away from his launching his product, when he opened Rhino Magazine to see a grinning Bill Dumb-but-Fastpants featured on the cover. Beside him was a sexy Rhino wearing an “almost identical” diaper!

Johnny then wore one of his own diapers, and then Johnny shot himself. Very sad.

His gravestone read: “Here lies Johnny who was dumb enough to develop a product for a miniscule market. A simple Google search could have shown him that there were probably only 63 Rhinos left in the wild. He did it because he could. He also shot himself because he could.”

The other, Johnny McSmartpants was inspired by diapers. But he hired Jennifer Aniston for an edgy photoshoot wearing (only) them and eating from a skinny tube of baby formula. He cleverly called it Jenniferelac – The secret of Being Jennifer and marketed it to Soccer Moms and Lady Millenials.

Elated after making a zillion dollars, he went and bought himself a Ferrari but then hit a tree and bled to death because he was too fat to wear a seat belt.

His gravestone read: “Here lies Johnny who knew people believed Jennifer Aniston. He once identified a large untapped demographic, repurposed an existing product and cleverly marketed it to the right audience. He did it because he didn’t know shit about super absorption.”

Moral of the story: Everybody dies in the end, but in a large enough market, competition is not what a startup needs to worry about. Find Product Market fit.

References: - https://goo.gl/2ZKjVL - https://goo.gl/G136qs

Is it really identical? Try to look for differences and emphasise your unique selling points. It's rare there's only one way to spin a product and it's unrealistic to expect no competitors. I usually make a matrix of competitors against various attributes (e.g. price, features) and look for a gap.

For what it's worth, I've been on a project in a similar situation. The other project was packed with features and had tons of marketing. Our product had less features which might seem like a disadvantage but because of this we were able to make the UI much more focused, streamlined and uncluttered plus it was more robust which was important to some customers.

I think it depends a lot on the market you're going after.

If your market is price-sensitive, either because you're selling to consumers or because you're selling to small businesses who are usually stingier, then competing on price can work, and to the extent that you can be the product that these guys get compared to you may be able to ride their coat tails as they spend on marketing the category.

If your market is not cost-sensitive, consider open sourcing your software and then selling consulting services for it; your customers may even contribute patches back. This will probably set a ceiling for how successful you can be since contracts will naturally top out at some value because companies can always take your open source code, but it may let you compete.

There are probably other strategies if you want to compete, but realise that you will have to compete and you will have to tailor your strategy to you customers.

Their prices are pretty much competitive already, was kind of surprised I think they are operating at cost for the launch.

Let them validate the market for you. Assuming there are no other players in the area, then this is something new, without a market. Who knows, maybe you both have been chasing the wrong thing, something that no one wants.

The problem then becomes judging their success from external factors. For exmaple, from my perspective, it seems like there have a been a lot of floundering "database as a service" types of services lately. People have been building different types of scalable datastores and failing to find a market (won't name names here :))

I think that have few competitors shouldn't worry you till the moment that delta between your product and your competitors it's solid. I would be even relieved about such a thing. You are not alone betting on this type of market.

Just to clarify the delta point. How can you be sure that the difference between your product and the competitors one is reasonable?

Try to use the product vision statement from Geoffrey Moore’s book Crossing the Chasm. http://elevatorpitchessentials.com/essays/CrossingTheChasmEl... Try to see if your point [5 (Unlike)] is solid enough compared to your competitors. If not, work on it.

I would think twice before to throw everything.

What if my product is almost identical? you think I should artificially change it so that it has a differentiation?

As I said work on it. You can differentiate by customers type (b2b or b2c), business model (subscription, advertise, once time payment, remarketing), features (mobile, web, offline) just to say some.

You can compete on many different fronts such as quality, support, price, features, market focus etc.

Also, they just launched, that means they are just starting as well which tells nothing of possible future success.

Even if totally unique, the market might be large enough to have multiple competitive offerings. It's rather unusual for one player to grab the entire market.

FWIW, when I had a corporate job, there was an anecdote in some big meeting that a competitor had literally photocopied one of the insurance policies my company was selling. They didn't even change the font. Yet, they couldn't sell the policy as well because they weren't servicing it as well as my company.

You may think the product is almost identical, but it may not be as identical as you think.

May I recommend Peter Thiel's book, "Zero to One"?

In the book, he describes how one of their engineers, exasperated by their competitor, X.com, matching them feature for feature, designed a bomb to blow it up. It probably would have been more shocking were it not for the fact that four out of the six key people at the company had designed bombs in high-school. He didn't go through with it and, instead of an explosion, the companies fused.

This is just an anecdote; Thiel has incredible insights and the eloquence to make them useful.

Also remember, product development is only half the game. Marketing is the rest. You can work that to your advantage if you pay your dues to the Great God of Marketing.

I don't think a couple months is that big of a head start. You may even be more agile than them since you are not beholden to investors and your management overhead is far less. I say work on getting your product out and see where it goes. A bit of perspective which may or may not be useful: Uber launched in 2011. Lyft launched summer of 2012.

This is great validation of your idea/product.

Keep an eye on them, see how well they are doing. There are few niches where you'll be the only game in town. 2-3 months isn't that long to get to launch since you've came this far.

Study them and learn from them.

Launch soon though don't spend too much time polishing.

Good luck.

I agree. Try out their product as well, create an account or whatever, use it, and see what turns out to be frustrating when you actually use it, and when yours launches, you will have a better product.

The problem is, two or three months from now, they won't be where they are now. Realistically, can you catch a moving target?

If not, can you see a piece of the target space that they aren't reaching? Can you beat them to that?

Keep going.

As their burn rate is higher than yours they might run out of steam and fail.

You need to focus on your marketing and think are you able to beat them on custom acquisition.

If you believe in the product and like working on it: fight back, be better, be more competitive

Don't build trivial things next time.

>Don't build trivial things next time.

Do please show us the non-trivial things you've built which justify the arrogance in your comment.

Edit: in case someone wants to ask me the same - I have nothing. But then I didn't leave a comment for no purpose other than to insult the quality of a project whose details weren't even described.

I meant to say "Don't build a solution to a trivial problem".

The probability of someone releasing something that makes your work obsolete is greatly reduced if you work on something nobody else does. That's one of the ideas in Peter Thiel's Zero to One.

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