Ask HN: I am having a competation from bigger player. Please advice? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: I am having a competation from bigger player. Please advice?

7 pointsssing7 comments

Recently I launched http://doosracricket.com and currently working on getting users. It is a prediction site where you can compete with friends or world on cricket. I was counting on World cup 2011 series starting February 19th.

Now I see Yahoo cricket is also coming with Predictopus (more sophisticated with huge prizes)

Not sure if this is good or bad for my app. Looking forward to HN community for advice.

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The classic advice is pg's essay "How to Make Wealth" (http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html):

"At Viaweb one of our rules of thumb was run upstairs. Suppose you are a little, nimble guy being chased by a big, fat, bully. You open a door and find yourself in a staircase. Do you go up or down? I say up. The bully can probably run downstairs as fast as you can. Going upstairs his bulk will be more of a disadvantage. Running upstairs is hard for you but even harder for him.

What this meant in practice was that we deliberately sought hard problems. If there were two features we could add to our software, both equally valuable in proportion to their difficulty, we'd always take the harder one."

In addition, I would say: (1) provide extremely good customer relations (any post submitted to your site blog or email sent is answered in half an hour max) and (2) use your personal network, Yahoo is not a person, so it doesn't have any friends, you do. Use them and their friends.

If you have the cash, you could experiment with advertising Doosra cricket on Yahoo.

Your new homepage design is a lot better than your first. Get someone to edit your copy. "Compete with friends or world" should be "Compete with friends or the world". A professional copywriter will probably write something like "Challenge your friends!".

Yahoo Predictopus gives users 1000 points to start with. I see most people on your leaderboard have 0. Give them 10,000 each.

Your target market is Indians. Use Hindi slang words where it's appropriate (without offending the south Indians!). I doubt Yahoo will do that. Your name is a good example.

It will probably do you more good than harm. First of all, a competitor should spur you on to work hard on your product, lest everyone picks your competition instead.

Secondly, you can use it as a real marketing opportunity. What I mean is, with a product from Yahoo, there's going to be all sorts of press and many cricket fans talking about their product. That's your cue to show up (without being spammy), and get the word out about yourself. You could get some media attention at the very least, as well as word of mouth (people talking about Predictopus will be told by their friends about doosracricket).

Your competitive advantage over a bigger player like Yahoo will be your ability to iterate much more quickly. As long as you have some sort of quantitative way of measuring your success, you'll have a pipeline you can use to optimize your users' experience and your goal conversions..

An advantage you have is people who are already invested in your site. If they have a good ranking going or some friends on the site they won't be very interested in packing up and going elsewhere. You could try and make the site as viral as possible (wall integration, send to a friend, etc) to try and snowball your users into more users.

I am also counting on it but the rewards Yahoo is providing to the winners is huge and will draw lots of attention.

You can try to direct some of that attention to yourself, since you're in the same space. You can't compete on prizes, but you'll have a different offering - you have to distinguish your product from Yahoo's product in other ways.

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