Hacker News Reader

> if they hadn't paid attention to Snapchat, would they have come up with it?

There's a big difference between large established players and new startups. Established players can't just grow, they need to protect what they have so that their base doesn't drop out from underneath them. New startups are default-dead and don't have anything to protect yet.

Furthermore: oftentimes, big players offer customers a boatload of features, and most customers don't use nearly all of those features. If you mindlessly copy features, then you aren't paying attention to whether those are the features your small but developing customer base actually wants. The only way to know what features your customers actually care about is to talk to your customers.

Agreed.

The advice to ignore competitors and focus on customer feedback is great when you're small and a solo Dev. As the company grows and you can dedicate other resources, you can start monitoring and selectively copying competitors. I'd still say that internal iteration is a better path though.

Ignore the competitions, does not mean you do not know the competitions.

Follow them and know what they are doing. But do not adjust your plan easily for just what your competitors are doing.

I think this is the spirit of the advice.

Taking this further, ignore what the competitors say they do, but take into account what your market and potential customers do with those competing services.

e.g. A competitor may have launched a bunch of new features that nobody needs or uses. You follow what they do to compete. You then focus on things that don't work when actually, all competitor's customers buy the service for a few core features that they don't shout about, or aren't actually improving (mistakenly).

You can be better at listening to competitors' own customers then they do.

Regarding customer feedback: As soon as you reach a certain scale, it gets really hard.

For my app, I have hundreds of feature requests, and for 95% of them all I can say is, that's a nice idea, but I don't have time to do it.

For the remaining 5% it'll take me a year or longer to implement them.

For customers this looks like I'm unresponsive.

When I started out, I often added features in a few days, and customers were thrilled, but that low-hanging fruit is mostly gone now.

I don't think customers need to see every feature they request actioned, or even actioned quickly. As long as you're shipping new features and communicate both your roadmap and with individual feature requests, I think people understand.

I do, however, think you need to balance big featured with quick wins that make a subset of your clients significantly more happy.

I'm really sceptical about sharing roadmaps. In the beginning, I often talked about planned features, and it often turned out that they took way more time than expected (one of my favorite features is in progress since December 2015).

If I share a public roadmap, and then I don't deliver, people will be disappointed.

So I've started to only tell people about new features once they are stable enough for testing.

I don't want to build up expectations when I'm not sure when/if I can deliver.

> If I share a public roadmap, and then I don't deliver, people will be disappointed.

I agree. Your public roadmap should be conservative, or more oriented towards the type of impact you will be making. The intent of a roadmap is to communicate your focus so that folks outside know the general theme. You then have something to reference in conversations later when someone asks for something that doesn't fit with the theme.

Personally I have found any type of feature and expectation discussion easier in person or on a call. I expect feedback over the internet to be poorly phrased or hostile. Expectations break down if you have any type of sales team who are prepared to offer features to close deals.

It looks like you make a database management app for the Mac. If I was creating a theme-based roadmap I might choose a theme like "SQL Console Improvements". You can explain that your focus is on that area of the product, but that your focus may change in the future. When you get close to being certain a feature within the theme will be developed then publish that information. You can operate multiple themes depending on resources.

This approach can also work for feedback. You can let users know that the next theme on deck is "Optimization Tools" ask for feedback on how users want to improve their SQL queries. Then when you start executing on the theme you have collected feedback that can be incorporated. The flow makes users feel involved in the process. Actually summarizing the feedback in public can be a useful community exercise for expectation setting when everyone thinks they have the most important idea.

I fully agree with this. I'm still trying to figure out how to approach this problem. My next attempt would be to establish a formal system for voting for feature requests (such as UserVoice or a Discourse plugin), and focus on a single top-voted feature.

Side note about your apps: I've used Postico for a year or two now and I really love it! Great job :)

Thanks!

Look at it as a factor of size.

Google MUST be worried for Apple. Because them are figthing for big amount of users.

But when you are solo, or a small team, and your goal/real chance is have a small number of customers, what other do is close to irrelevant.

You will find a lot of competition and your idea will be already in the open for long time. But that is not important. As long you care for your small(ish) customer base you will be ok.

Is like sell hamburgers in the street. The street seller not need to worry at all with Mc-Donald. IF have a tasty product and can provide a better service, it will be ok

Competition is a huge distraction because the market is usually big enough for both companies. Ie customer isn’t looking for feature comparison at this point, but for the best service.

And you can provide that only if you’re focused on present customers.

Took me a very long time to understand this ... PG mentions this as a big failure mode :-/

The way I have always thought of things was along the line of - I can spend all my time worrying about my competition, my competition spends all their time worrying about me, and neither gets anything done.

So my philosophy is to be aware of the competition but listen to my customers and the industry.

Instagram stories - examples like this are where I struggle. At least they copied it fairly well if that's the case :)

If you have 500 customers and your competitor has 500 customers. You are in a market of over 10,000 potential users.

What do you do? go after your competitor's 500 customers, many of which are only going to consider switching if their product lets them down or go after the other 10,000 potential customers that don't use either product?

The point is people spend huge amounts of time and energy trying to second guess their competitors and copy them when they should be listening to customers.

Instagram can experiment in a way that a single-founder with $3k MRR cannot.

The stories features was also stolen based on data that regular competitors would not have. Facebook used Onavo VPN data from users to see how features affect usage of Snapchat. They can also see which apps are very viral or sticky, which is why they bought Whatsapp for $19B.

Is that true? Or just conjecture?

Surely the users of onavo would be self selecting into low economic groups, not indicative of the full population?

I think this part is about focus. Sure, it may pay off to watch your competition but what’s the price for it? Ignoring other things? I interpret it as: most of the times just do what you wanted to do and ignore your competition

Some truths are directional, rather than universal.

Maybe "ignore competitors" is the former.

Example: "carbs are bad" is directionaly true but not universally so (at least I would posit it is directionaly true for the modern American diet)

I took it to mean: don't blindly copy the competition's features, or be intimidated by seemingly complex features they have. Focus on your own users and make them happy.

As I understand it, "not caring" about competitors is used in the sense of "not worrying about them".

I think the key is to "avoid competition", not "ignore competition".

I don't think they're saying "You don't have to care about your competitors." I think they're saying, "You don't have to care about your competitors [to attract the first 500 paid users for your SaaS]."

Yeah, I enjoyed the article, but this isn't for anyone looking to build a serious business. The advice works for someone looking for a similar result (a sustainable income), but I wouldn't want to apply this knowledge if you want a business that makes you even well-off, if not rich.

Spending time on user forums is a poor use of a developer-founder's time. You're better off adding features and focusing on promotion and offloading the rest to a cheap support guy

> Spending time on user forums is a poor use of a developer-founder's time. You're better off adding features and focusing on promotion and offloading the rest to a cheap support guy

I completely disagree. You get to know your core userbase and what their pain points are. When you're in charge of development and sales and marketing and everything related to your product, you really need to know what you're doing and why. Being in touch with your users helps with that.