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Yes, if the other company raised funding, there is no way you can compete with that. The same thing happened to me many years ago; I was working on an open sou

Yes, if the other company raised funding, there is no way you can compete with that. The same thing happened to me many years ago; I was working on an open source drag-and-drop content management system and I had built the whole thing - Thinking back; it was actually quite good but then, just as I was about to start monetizing; Weebly, Yola, Wix and a bunch of others just came out of nowhere will tons of funding and I had no choice but to give up. You just can't compete with VC money. You have 2 options; raise VC money or give up and go work for IBM instead; they have a nice cubicle waiting for you.

bdcravens 10y ago
> Yes, if the other company raised funding, there is no way you can compete with that. > go work for IBM instead; they have a nice cubicle waiting for you I know you're projecting your own frustration, but I think you built a product, not a company. Depending on your mixture of customers, service (not necessarily the same thing as the product), and narrative, it's quite possible to remain very competitive. (The company I work for, which was bootstrapped, is very competitive despite funded competitors)
alain94040 10y ago
Even if the competitor offers your product for free, you can still beat them on quality, support, ease of use, etc. A lot of potential customers are willing to pay for convenience. And of course, the likelihood that your average customer even knows there are two competing solutions is low. It all boils down to: be better than your competition. Price is not the only factor.
- stevekemp 10y ago
  Yeah one way to go is to simplify complexity, something I guess the wix/weebly folks did for the average non-technical person who wanted a website. I wrap/resell Route53 DNS hosting from Amazon, and while I don't have millions of customers I think I gain from flat-pricing, and a less complicated webconsole/interface. I still require technical clients (who can use git), but I don't require dealing with credentials and AWS tools.

bdcravens 10y ago

> Yes, if the other company raised funding, there is no way you can compete with that. > go work for IBM instead; they have a nice cubicle waiting for you I know you're projecting your own frustration, but I think you built a product, not a company. Depending on your mixture of customers, service (not necessarily the same thing as the product), and narrative, it's quite possible to remain very competitive. (The company I work for, which was bootstrapped, is very competitive despite funded competitors)

alain94040 10y ago

Even if the competitor offers your product for free, you can still beat them on quality, support, ease of use, etc. A lot of potential customers are willing to pay for convenience. And of course, the likelihood that your average customer even knows there are two competing solutions is low. It all boils down to: be better than your competition. Price is not the only factor.

stevekemp 10y ago
Yeah one way to go is to simplify complexity, something I guess the wix/weebly folks did for the average non-technical person who wanted a website. I wrap/resell Route53 DNS hosting from Amazon, and while I don't have millions of customers I think I gain from flat-pricing, and a less complicated webconsole/interface. I still require technical clients (who can use git), but I don't require dealing with credentials and AWS tools.