Ask HN: Beta users flocking over to competitor

I am not your audience, so what I think is not that important, but I looked at your homepage.

Your opening pitch has too much jargon. I'll avoid using specific words (geez, you are trying to hide from Google? Good luck, Winston Smith!) but you sound like you're talking to a Techcrunch editor in an elevator. Pretend you are selling your product to people who don't know what it is and think it is made by elves.

Meanwhile a lot of the text on that page is white on beige, for the love of god. (In Safari/Mac, Flash blocked). Please hire a designer who can see. Or, rather, one who can't see so superhumanly well that they can read completely invisible text and not notice a problem.

Your homepage is dominated by a giant out-of-focus video preview image in what appears to be 120 by 120 pixel resolution. In other words, my first impression of your site is that you literally lack focus and polish.

Don't rely so much on the video and the clickable previews. I never click them. They tend to play sounds, which disturbs my fellow inmates. They tend to waste valuable seconds of my life. They take my mouse too far away from the back button. Sometimes they just don't work. Try to hook me in the first six seconds without any additional clicks.

I found what I bet is your competitor's homepage. (Google took me right to a bunch of great SEO, surprise surprise.) The page I found is full of reassuring pep talk about how their product is going to improve my business. Words like audience and revenue and affinity. They have helpful links to really basic FAQs about what is, after all, a brand-new fashion trend in business which a lot of people haven't heard of yet. Their design is clean and sharp. It's like an infomercial. I tend to roll my eyes when I read such stuff, but that's my problem: I read too much Techcrunch, I'm too cynical and I know too much about the web-services sausage factory, I am not your audience. Your audience probably appreciates being sold a product in terms that they understand, that they have heard before. It's no mystery to me why your competitor is cleaning up.

Finally, you've heard of A/B testing, right? Because I wouldn't assume that I'm not completely full of it, here. I'm just throwing out hypotheses [1], I'm just one guy, and I'm never going to buy your product anyway.

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[1] Except for the white-on-beige thing. That is a bug, my friend. A high priority bug.

Apparently he has, I guess he's not a huge fan: http://blog.zuupy.com/the-disadvantages-of-ab-testing

It's impossible to answer this properly without seeing your site. With that in mind, here are a few thoughts:

1. Features don't matter in the abstract. You can succeed with fewer features by being, for example, simpler. That's the 37signals "do less" line. You say features are crucial for your white-label solution. Are you so sure? Why do you think this is? How do you know this is why you are losing customers? ("Clearly" is a dangerous word). Who do you think your customers are? What if your customers were somebody else? (See point 3).

2. "...even though their price point is higher..." - this suggests you don't know that high price is often precisely why customers choose things. High prices suggest high quality, and in the absence of other ways of distinguishing between products, it's a very easy one for people to follow. Perhaps you charge so little that you give the impression of not being serious? And, relatedly, perhaps if you charged more you would be able to spend more to acquire users?

3. Pick a niche and own it. If your site works for user types X, Y and Z, just pick some subset of X to go after. Your product will be more targeted to them, which makes it easier for them to see it as something they could use, and it also should make it easier for you to market. See, for example, the many sites that offer build-your-own-websites for photographers, as opposed to simply just build-your-own-websites for everybody.

4. Win on design, on copywriting, on user experience, on humour, on speed, on sociality, on security, on reliability, on locality, on trust, on friendliness. Win on anything that's not what you can't win on. On the internet, there's room for more than one winner.

But, like I said, if we could see your site you'll get better answers.

I'm going to take a guess because I'm obviously not part of your core team so I have no inside knowledge to how or what your doing.

As other have posted in classic purple cow speak [1], you build a better product and remember "your product is not THE product"[2]. Part of Ash's lean canvas[3] even has a spot for alternatives which may even include competitors. The focal point is you need to start testing everything so you can: create a customer feedback loop of _learning_[4][4b].

Ash's model is a variant of the original "Business Model Canvas" which is also very good. I would urge you and everyone to LOOK at the examples and iterations of these models on the main site[5].

Some of the questions you start asking in this exercise are: - What is the problem your solving, and what are the possible solutions? - How will you reach customers, who are the early adopters?

Its never too late, and like I said actually the beginning of the exercise.

Even if you 'know this already', I would urge you to re-test and re-focus on your previous lean canvases/models. Success is in the finer details. Remember, you never stop learning about the customer. You want a 'specific' customer? You develop a strategy - focused on the problem.

So there you go, a 'teaser' on building a better product. Now go read Eric Ries's[6] book[7], Steve Blank's book[8] for overall strategy. See the business model generation book and site[9] (there is an ipad app!) for more finer details. There is also a cheat sheet for Steve's book[10].

I myself am learning this as I recover from a failed startup attempt[11]. Yes, I'm for hire atm and would LOVE to join another team. Hit me up!

[1] http://www.sethgodin.com/purple/ [2] http://www.ashmaurya.com/2011/06/your-product-is-not-the-pro... [3] http://www.leancanvas.com/ [4] http://www.slideshare.net/ashmaurya/running-lean-canvas [4b] http://www.ashmaurya.com/2010/08/businessmodelcanvas/ [5] http://thestartuptoolkit.com/ [6] http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/ [7] http://lean.st/ [8] http://www.stevenblank.com/books.html [9] http://www.businessmodelgeneration.com/ [10] http://www.custdev.com/ [11] http://jasongiedymin.com/post/6040811222/even-more-start-up-...

re: "I'm for hire atm and would LOVE to join another team." ... add a few links to your HN profile.

Although I'm not hiring at the moment, I'm always curious about who's around, and the first thing I did when I saw that was click over to your HN profile page. With nothing there, I can't find out more about you.

Sorry about that. I updated the about.

(Right now on mass transit, at least I put some urls in).

Clearly our users are choosing our competitors because they have better features and more customization options

How do you know? Did you ask? It doesn't sound to me like you asked: Go ask.

Agree with this point, and here's a suggestion about one way of doing this.

You have a set of users who you believe are now using a competitor. Put a survey together specifically for these users. You need to ask them a mixture of questions about your product, and how you compare to your competition. Ask them a mixture of fact-based questions (yes/no, select from this drop down etc) and opinion based questions (both free text, and of the form: very satisfied, satisfied, dissatisfied, very dissatisfied)

Once you've got your survey together, email it to a proportion of these users - maybe 30% of them. In your email, take the approach of... we are beta and are requesting feedback from users on our product and service etc. Keep the email short. Tell them the survey is 10 questions long and should only take 2 minutes to complete (both of these points need to be true!)

Take the view that a 5% response rate is a good response rate (anything over that is a real bonus). Monitor for a few days, maybe a week. See whether the answers to your questions are of any use at all - your questions could come across as lame or open to mis-interpretation. If you are getting problems like that, make some adjustments to your questions. Then email it out to the other 70% of users.

Hopefully you now have some useful information on where you can improve.

What have you got to lose?

That's one way. There's another, even better way: Ask. Ideally, talky-talky over the phone, if you can get it. Direct, personal, simple emails if not.

This is more along the lines of what I was thinking.

I'd normally call, get as close to the decision maker as is possible (not always easy in big companies), tell them you're sorry that you weren't up to snuff, then LISTEN.

It's amazing what comes out of these conversations: Your product might be slow, missing a feature, their general counsel might have had reservations your startup, your account management might suck, the decision maker might play golf with the CEO of the other company etc. etc.

Your guess that your users are choosing our competitors because they have better features and more customization options is correct in only one of these cases. You're doing a startup: You don't have time to fix problems your customers don't have. So ask.

I'm currently getting the following error when I try to view your site:

  Over Quota

  This Google App Engine application is temporarily over its serving quota. Please try again later.

That can't be good for business.

& it redirects to "http://www.zuupy.com/ if that helps.

edit: *Never mind, it was intentional per the message below to prevent indexing

Same "Over Quota" error.

Yeah, the redirect works, but when I get to zuppy.com I see that error.

That has been pretty common. We will start purchasing bandwidth. Even that takes some time.

And you wonder why people are going to your competitor?

Your level of comfort with this problem is the problem. You couldn't have looked less deserving for business. If I were your CEO somebody (or more) would be getting fired right now.

You're in B2B and you think marginal price point differences are stronger selling points than reliability/availability? You think another business would be willing to put their reputation on the line by white labeling through you while you can’t even keep a site up and it’s 2011?

I really miss the up-vote count here. As I wish mine would show. This is like having your hotel on fire, and wondering why guest are reluctant to book a room.

http://www.fezzl.com results in a page saying:

Over Quota

This Google App Engine application is temporarily over its serving quota. Please try again later.

Not a good impression, if you ask me.

The first thing to do is to shake of the "feeling" about your product. Don't forget about the fact that you have been able to get customers pay for some value you created.

Secondly, follow "nudge's" advice of picking a niche. No product can be all things to all people.

All the best, and soldier on ..

Sounds like a tough position to be in. I'm not sure that outright ignoring your major competitor is such a great idea. You could perhaps use them to differentiate yourself in the eyes of your customers?

For example I'm currently working on a language learning app that will be a direct competitor to (what once was) smart.fm. When I discovered their app (a long way into my project) I was at a loss because they have millions in funding and an army of developers.

I realized that their approach to language learning is prescriptive, i.e. they decide what you should learn. To differentiate myself from them, I'd have to go for the opposite approach, in other words, provide a much more exploratory experience for my users. There are a number of other fights I could have picked, but this is something that my users wanted and an easy way to set myself apart from my big hulking competitor.

Is there some fight along these lines that you can pick with them? Could you perhaps play the less/simpler features card instead of trying to compete on features? Is it that their marketing is just better?

Engage with lost customers and ask them what made them leave and what would make them come back.

Genuine (almost entirely off-topic) question: why the indirect link?

We don't really want to be indexed by Google for this thread.

You need to stop trying to be so clever and get back to business basics. Make a product that people want. Tell them about it in clear language. Delight them when they sign up. Have a conversation with them. Make the product better.

And for goodness sake, feed the hamsters in your servers.

Build a better product. Pretend they don't exist.

There is no such thing as "better". There is only "better than". In this case, the OP is asking how he or she can build a product that is better than his or her competitor. In that context, pretending the competition doesn't exist is only burying your head in the sand.

I emphatically disagree. As pg says all the time, don't worry about your competition. Worry about your customers and yourself. Make a product that people want. Continue making it better.

And get a server that can handle a small influx of HN traffic. Jeepers.

There's no alternative, you must build a better product.

Very true. Though, the crux of the matter lies in what exactly does better mean. Another commenter made the great point that you should try speaking to find out why they left. Also, it is worth keeping in mind that if you are competing against an army of developers, you need to be super careful about what you put your efforts into. This will make you focus on the most crucial features and usability issues, which in longer term (if you make it) could be a blessing in disguise.

Figure out how you can differentiate from them. If you can't beat them feature to feature because you don't have the dev team then don't. Either fix a problem that they currently don't or just focus on something like usability and customer experience.

Go out on the streets and talk directly to SMBs to acquire new customers.

Does your competitor offer data export? Offer free data import and huge discounts to their customers if they move to you.

Target businesses already featured on Groupon or other big daily deal sites. If they had successful runs with those, they will now have an email list they can advertise to directly.

Focus on one type of business?

Keep building a kickass product.

Stop blogging for a nerd audience. Blog about your customers' interests. Interview them. Get them featured on popular daily deal blogs like yipit's or Rocky Agrawal's (the guy who recently ripped groupon to pieces).

Would it be possible to ask some of them why they are switching. Could be some stupid issue.

just do our thing, engage with our users, and reiterate until product/market fit

^^ This.

It seems like you haven't considered the possibility that your users who haven't "jumped ship" so to speak actually use something that your competitor can't provide. You just have to figure out what that something is. Build a bunch of tests and try to gather data on what that something is.

Don't try to copy the competition. That difference could be your distinguishing characteristic.

"Don't try to copy the competition. That difference could be your distinguishing characteristic."

I thought this was interesting because it reminded me of Facebook's changes to their newsfeed a while ago. At that time, a number of people (incl. myself) cried that this seemed to be copying Twitter, and that Facebook shouldn't change. I don't know if Facebook was merely doing their own thing rather than responding to Twitter. Regardless, it seems what they did worked out.

Well, there's also something to be said about convergence and overall direction the market is heading. Touchscreen features? Everyone has them, but they got to that after coming from different directions, and they're all being adapted to different interfaces. Perhaps Facebook came across the newsfeed from a different direction than Twitter's stream, but it ends up looking the same because it's the round peg to fit in the hole.

I get a "This webpage is not availableThe server at www.youtube.com...". That looks unprofessional.

Get some free website monitoring at alertfox or pingdom.

This will not solve your main problem, but having a reliable website is a prerequisite for any success. For many users, especially website owners - your customers - such a "bug" makes the website look abandoned.

Knowing about competitors who beat you to market, have traction, and have an 'army of developers' is probably something to do before you build a product.

At this point all you can do is work on your product. Maybe you can find a pain point of people using your competitor and cater to the users who are chafing under that pain point.

Add free survey widget by kiss metrics and ask visitors what do they want from your web app. This way you'll be able get insights from visitors

Get it here : http://www.kissinsights.com/

The logo looks an awful lot like twitter's.

I would find a new business model - your competitor already has a ton of traction and after seeing Groupon's numbers it isn't even that attractive. Correct me if I'm wrong.