Ask HN: Join forces or compete with big player? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Join forces or compete with big player?

1 pointcuro5 comments

We're a year into a project with moderate traction, and just found out that a big company in our industry is building their own similar system. It won't replace ours and they did nothing wrong (like copy us), they're just heading in the same direction.

Any experience with this? Did you reach out to them and join forces or stay quiet and compete? (If we wrote them a proposal, we'd be giving away our secret sauce.)

It looks like a side gig for them, but one they're investing in heavily. Not sure what a win-win arrangement looks like.

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How much money have you invested? How profitable are you?

If you haven't invested a lot, and you are very profitable, then you should compete with them. You have low risk and high reward.

If you've invested a lot, and you aren't very profitable, then I would probably reach out to them to see what arrangement you can set up. The idea here is that you want to protect your original investment. If they start soaking up customers and you guys start losing money, then you go out of business and lose all your money.

And if you're kind of in the middle, it's a bit of a coin toss. You probably should double down, acquire some big customers and more traction, and then decide if you should sell the company if future prospects don't look good.

A profitable buyout is a profitable buyout. If you don't see a path to becoming a massively profitable business, then go get bought (Github) or set up a scammy IPO (Blue Apron)

lol Blue Apron. "Kind of in the middle" is right. Bootstrapping well enough to pay the bills, but not so well to hire and grow, or compliment missing talent. Okay, thanks for the feedback!

Good luck, I'm happy to help! Competition is good for consumers, but bad for business owners.

I think a good rule of thumb is, "if customers aren't banging down the door trying to buy our product, we either need to risk more resources for a chance at growth, or raise our margins and pray we survive"

I wouldn't give up your secret sauce. let them learn with their money.

Maybe look at partnering with one of their competitors.

+1 to partnering with one of their competitors, feels like we could help someone catch up to them at least

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