Ask HN: How to gracefully handle competitor mudslinging | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to gracefully handle competitor mudslinging

My side project [1] has recently started to grow so I took out a few Google Ads on companies in the same space. One of them recently left a review in the App Store calling my app a cheap ripoff of his product (the iOS handle matched the company's CEO's instagram handle). I'm still only at 20 reviews including from one family member who uses my app, so the mark looks kinda bad.

I've been thinking long and hard what recourse would look the best and generally be the best for my app. Should I respond to his review? Should I try to be nice? Should I ignore it?

Sincere thanks for any insight! I've learned so much from HN.

[1] https://getcho.app

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My attitude has always been that I don't have competitors, my customers simply have other choices. Even if the businesses are in competition, my relationship with the people who provide those other choices is not adversarial - if anything, we are potential future partners. If my customers aren't sticking with my product, then I don't blame competitors... I acknowledge that I have missed a need, and someone else is doing it better.

In this case, when someone is being aggressive, I'd just ignore it. Let the market have their say on which product is the better solution without getting into public conflict over it.

>In this case, when someone is being aggressive, I'd just ignore it. Let the market have their say on which product is the better solution without getting into public conflict over it.

While that is nice and all, if someone is actively messing with your rating, that can negatively affect your product from growing regardless of the quality.

There are many example of past products where the "lesser" product won out due to simple weird things like the above. You can't just ignore this stuff all the time. Bigger examples of this happen a lot in tech. Where a large company tries to buy out an idea and if they refuse, they simply make a similar product and then "trash rate" the other product with larger marketing budget and kill it off.

What do you do when you can't ignore it?

If taking out Google ads on other companies in the space means what I assume it means, the bad review sorta lives in the same business ethics space of what can be gotten away with. And now you know. Good luck.

Take the high road. Thank them for the review and that you consider constructive criticism from all users to help improve the app. Focus on the product, not the noise of cheap shots.

    so I took out a few Google Ads on companies in the same space

This is considered an aggressive move. My guess is their CEO thinks he is responding in kind

Respond to review politely and move on. Just make your app the best it can be and focus on the customers you have.

I looked at your app, nice idea. How are you better / different than the others in the same space?

Are you faster or cheaper or better coverage?

The worst thing I see about the competitor is he left their name in the comments so I could look them up.

Thank you! I was actually wondering if him leaving his company in the comments was good for us?

We use 3rd party fleets as our providers so we automatically get massive coverage and scale. Competitors have traditionally built their own by hiring drivers which is an expensive process and requires a "chicken and the egg" solution.

Of course, there are many downsides to relying on 3rd parties- what we can send, the difficulty in enforcing rigid standards etc. So these are the problems we tend to try to solve.

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