Google Latitude on iPhone became a competitor of my app, what should I do? | Hacker News Reader

Google Latitude on iPhone became a competitor of my app, what should I do?

12 pointsangkec10 comments

We were terrified when we saw Google's latitude on the iPhone was released today. It went head on with our product that has been in the App Store for 4 month!

My app is called Tracku: http://www.trackuapp.com. Basically we have all the feature the Latitude has now with a few extras like send message within the app as well as share map pins. But I am worried that Google might start to catch up, adding more features and will drive my app out of business.

What should I do? Would appreciate any suggestions.

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+Make the landing page nicer. Add a better one-liner which tells people exactly what your app does.

+Make it more personal. Be super nice to your users. Do awesome things that don't scale.

+ Start a competition, make a game out of your existing user actions. A Christmas treasure hunt?

+Add user-created map layers building virtual worlds on top of the real world.

STOP thinking about Google. Just do your thing and be so good they can't ignore you.

You were already competing with a handful of other startups in this space, including the YC-funded Whereoscope.

Genuine question: how much business were you doing before that you're worried about losing it? You wouldn't be the first company to get steamrollered by some random Google/Apple/... side project.

Having seen your landing page and the video, this about the app:

- I liked the simplicity and the concept of the app a lot.

- Does the msging in any way interact with sending SMSs/IMs?

- It's a great idea to be able to message your sharing friends, but what's the quickest way to reach your friend after you receive a pin from them? Think through the usage scenarios - and flaunt them! "It [the whole scenario] just works" is your best friend.

- Ask your non-techie users/friends about the scenarios and make sure you listen a lot.

The landing page:

- show don't tell. More pictures less txt... (take a leaf from the big A).

- I wouldn't use the word "setup" at all, when you've basically intelligently managed to rid your users of that chore. That's something to flaunt, whereas the very word setup IMO is a turn-off. Just go with "no sign-up"/etc.

- The first paragraph to me looked like filler even if it may be good and true. It would be more appealing to me to directly explain concrete cases where the app can achieve the good things you speak of. (I hope you've watched the FaceTime commercial a lot lately)

- The video is a great beginning, but turn up the voice/eq it (I had some trouble hearing it), and turn down the music a bit?

- Make sure you ask non-techies how it resonates with them. Listen carefully.

- The same operation on your iTunes page, and make sure the screenshots are of very self-explanatory usage cases.

The best thing to do is to keep innovating. I assume you are not as large as Google, and therefore have the ability to move faster.

Think about what your assumptions are about what your software can and should do. List them out, and really critically re-evaluate them. I am certain you can come up with something everyone in this game is taking for granted, flip a bit, and outdo the competition.

For example rethink the concept of sharing your location NOW. What happens if your app instead tracks you over time, creating a heat map of your territories/areas, and can predict where you will be going based on past trends. Now you are doing something even more interesting with a much larger market. Involve the user in predicting/changing the location behavior and you may find a much larger audience than you were ever expecting.

There's a million ways to go, make your own way up if you want to!

Maybe push the "shared pins" aspect? Let friends post up local restaurants they like, and then show which of your friends have been there recently, etc. The social aspects is something Latitude is missing. Something like Latitude-meets-Foursquare would give enough extra for people to use it over Latitude.

Also push that you're not google, and therefore the location data on your app isn't tied with other aspects of a persons life. "Your location is ONLY used to share with specified friends". That's a major thing that puts me off Latitude (even though I do use it, it's always on my mind).

Speaking off-the-hook as a normal nerd, I like this angle. There's actually plenty of Google stuff I might be interested in, but their size and my privacy concerns, partly about Google, keeps me off.

Cultivate your trustworthiness as Andrenid says and you will probably have at least my business and quite some more. Explore (even more?) just what keeps people from sharing their location - their privacy concerns and how they, and you, can get around it in a way that is useful to them. That said, I'll check out your app.

I also really liked someone's suggestion up-thread to animate your app and make it a good place to hang out. That sounds like an app I could and would use. Best.

Second this idea - privacy may be the big new selling point of future services. Trust a bigco or trust us? Public is free, but private is extra (private groups, private social circles, private sharing of specific data).

See: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2002667

Carve out your niche. Google in your marketplace is not a seal of death - look at Zoho.

Compete.

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