4 ms·

An Obscure Competitor is Giving Away My Product

7 points by kellyreid 15y ago

I'm working on a product for the company at which I'm a cofounder. So is some other guy. The products will be functionally identical once both are deployed and out of beta. In comparison: ME: 6 months with PHP and mySQL HIM: Professional developer US: 2500 twitter followers, 20k unique page views per month HIM: 9 twitter followers, page views unknown US: Marketing a basic subscription at $9/mo, up to $99/mo for high-volume biz customers HIM: Free. We currently have paying users from our content-paywall model, and we have been around for over 2 years. He's toiling in obscurity now, but he's one tweet away from becoming a serious competitor. I've reached out to him to see if he's interested in working together, but the response has been unenthusiastic. The only saving grace is that we still have a pretty massive user base to whom we can market this product. He is starting from 0, effectively. This is the first time in our history that anyone has presented competition. As the only programmer on staff, I am worried. My programming skills pale in comparison to his. Although I'm learning at a breakneck pace, it is discouraging to see him progressing much faster. As hard as I am working, I get a pit in my stomach thinking about what will happen if he both beats us to market (likely) and gets media attention (possible). I have to keep track of his progress, but each time I check in I get dejected and lose my motivation to work. I am sure most of this comes from insecurity in my own skill set since I'm still very new to programming. I know this feeling is not new territory. What do you do to push through it?

heelhook 15y ago
If the products are identical as you said, then, even if the other developer is building at faster speed than you are I would say you still have the upper hand because of your greater visibility. That said, if I were you I would launch a beta, even if its only a private beta, just to get the word out there, that way you can preempt his launch by getting the word out there. See every feature that its not completely necessary to the minimal viable product, cut those and launch. Bests of luck!
- otoburb 15y ago
  This is a great comment I totally missed: just launch. The fact you have paying customers is a good sign what you've got is good enough. +1
- kellyreid 15y ago
  I have a few biz owners who are actually waiting for a beta invite already. I just put a nice UI on top of it last night so it looks like a 'product', and I'll be giving them the keys to test drive as soon as I rewrite my queries so it doesn't take 5+sec to render a graph and 20+ sec to pull historical pricing data. Query run times, above all, is where my inexperience shows the most and is by far the most hamstringing part of this process.
  - kls 15y ago
    Are you running a relational database? if so check all of your indexing. Unless you are doing some pretty crazy stuff indexing should reduce those queries to milliseconds.
    - kellyreid 15y ago
      Yes, mySQL. I'm sure I've made loads of mistakes in structuring things. I don't know where to start checking my indexes for mistakes though. Any resources you can point me at that are somewhat newbie friendly?
      - kls 15y ago
        First thing to do is look at you where and order/group by clauses almost all of the items listed after them should have an index on them. Many should have a common index on the columns together, if they are used together a lot to filter information.
        kellyreid 15y ago
        hmm. that makes a lot of sense. can you suggest some reading that can help me understand which types to use? I'm almost entirely self-taught on SQL so the result is "functional" code that's just not well-designed or optimal
        deleted 15y ago
        [deleted]
heelhook 15y ago
37s' rework has a great chapter, "underdo your competition", I think its really applicable to your case.
- kellyreid 15y ago
  It was quite brief but the point was made. Thanks, this book actually looks incredible!
otoburb 15y ago
How do you know he's progressing faster? With your base of paying customers, you should be able to iterate faster than your competition. If you can't, and if you feel it's that much of a serious technical threat, then you may want to consider hiring a technical professional of your own. At the same time, your business co-founder (presumably you're the one responsible for the technical side of the house while your partner is responsible for sales, marketing and biz dev) should seriously investigate if there is any merit to the competition's revenue model, and whether it's in your best interest to adopt a freemium model of your own (it may not be). Given that you claim to have a working paywall model (something that I think many media companies and media brokers would kill for), your content must be a niche of some type. Attack this problem from as many simultaneous angles as possible (technical/feature-parity, pricing and marketing). If you can learn faster than your competition (that doesn't necessarily mean release features faster -- "learn" is the keyword here) from your paying customers, then you should be in a much better position to stay ahead. The fact that you said that the "[...] products will be functionally identical once both are deployed and out of beta" is a red-flag to me that you either haven't done enough analysis of the competition's feature set, or if you have, then you need to increase the tempo of customer feedback to incorporate into your product. Perhaps you will say that as soon as you deploy new features based on your customer learnings, your competition will copy you. If that's the case, then (from a marketing angle) you will always be first to deliver features and should be able to please your customers faster, hopefully resulting in greater adoption (until you saturate your market). I smell a lot of fear from your post. It may help to reframe your situation in a more positive light, since imitation is usually the highest form of flattery, while competition is sometimes used as a signalling mechanism (to yourself and others) that you picked a potentially profitable addressable market. tl;dr 1) Congratulations! You're validating your business model and market with actual paying customers and (now) competition. 2) Figure out how long each of you can last if one of you gave the content away for free. Consider freemium for your own offering (teaser content?). 3) Increase, analyze and act on feedback from your customers faster. 4) Hire better technical talent. Sorry I didn't answer your original question of "What do you do to push through it?" Hopefully the suggestions above will help to combat the dejection and loss of motivation.
- kellyreid 15y ago
teyc 15y ago
$100/mo is nothing for a business user. If it is important to their business, it is not an issue. In fact, emphasize that paid support means you will be around to answer their questions. Work on other forms of stickiness. If historical data can be presented in a useful form, then people will less likely to leave because it means leaving their old data behind. Another form of stickiness is friends or social aspects.
- kellyreid 15y ago
  Paid. Support. Where was I on that one? That's a GREAT selling point for us; we're known to have an insanely fast customer support response time, which we can sell.
mapster 15y ago
He may be positioning himself to be bought out of the market by you. Keep your nose to the grindstone and get market share by making customers very happy they are with you.
- kellyreid 15y ago
  Can you explain that more? You have to imagine that customers who are paying nothing for his product (except to be annoyed by "ONE WEIRD TRICK" ads) will be happy to have an alternative, but if they get the same basic functionality, won't they be glad they don't have to pay?
  - mapster 15y ago
    You very well lose customers if price is their pain point, but my point was to win them over with service and marketing and keep that competitor in obscurity. Or offer to buy him out so you can shut his site down.
    - kellyreid 15y ago
      Got it. That makes sense. We can't beat 'free' on the price point, that's for sure. But we -can- offer support, spend money on marketing, and hope that our existing platform keeps him in the dark.
milaniliev 15y ago
If short-term technical issues, such as performance problems, are preventing your launch, why not just bring in an experienced developer for a few weeks as a consultant? You wouldn't have to pay them that much, I don't think. It might also be possible to defer payment partially if you are truly cash-strapped. I don't know if this helps, but for business users, paid, stable, reliable-support, above-board businesses are worth real money. Red Hat makes essentially all their money offering support on a product they themselves make available for free. Also: your competitor is not copying your content, is he? Is he able to code-up the platform AND pay for content creation on a free product?
- kellyreid 15y ago
  No, he's not offering content at all (except a sporadic blog post). Our -new- product, the one that's going to bring us the growth we direly need, is the one that's being evolved on our two sites, in parallel.
helen842000 15y ago
I try and remind myself there will always be competitors selling the same thing cheap enough to put you both out of business. You have your users AND they are paying. How sustainable is a business where he absorbs all the costs and doesn't bring any revenue in? How much support can he continue provide to free users? Especially if they get into the large numbers. You are treating it like a business, he is treating it like a project that he can drop at any time. In my eyes, he is collecting your future customers for you. When he spends to the bottom of his pockets and folds, his customers will have to choose between your service or no service. Hold on, keep focused on your lovely customers. Give them amazing service. Go above and beyond for them. Stir up a little press of your own (make your stake on first to market a little early) Don't get caught up in looking over your shoulder.
kellyreid 15y ago
Thanks to everyone who took the time to reply to this. It's really valuable to have a community like HN, who have been here and done this all before. I took the advice of "get over it and just keep hacking" and have just emailed the first batch of beta testers. I spent a while on the front-end so it feels more like a 'product'. That actually had a powerful emotional effect on me; now I look at it with pride. I know it's just a few lines of CSS and big pretty fonts, but it just 'feels' like its real now. I got to watch a user see the site for the first time yesterday and watch him interact with it. It was a nice moment. My hope is that, even if this guy launches a product before I do, that we'll steal the spotlight due to our size and existing customer base. We can also offer support and on-demand customization (for the biz customers). Now I just have to hope that people will actually pay for this! They're paying for written content, so I can't imagine that they won't pay for this.

7 points by kellyreid 15y ago

heelhook 15y ago

If the products are identical as you said, then, even if the other developer is building at faster speed than you are I would say you still have the upper hand because of your greater visibility. That said, if I were you I would launch a beta, even if its only a private beta, just to get the word out there, that way you can preempt his launch by getting the word out there. See every feature that its not completely necessary to the minimal viable product, cut those and launch. Bests of luck!

otoburb 15y ago
This is a great comment I totally missed: just launch. The fact you have paying customers is a good sign what you've got is good enough. +1
kellyreid 15y ago
I have a few biz owners who are actually waiting for a beta invite already. I just put a nice UI on top of it last night so it looks like a 'product', and I'll be giving them the keys to test drive as soon as I rewrite my queries so it doesn't take 5+sec to render a graph and 20+ sec to pull historical pricing data. Query run times, above all, is where my inexperience shows the most and is by far the most hamstringing part of this process.
- kls 15y ago
  Are you running a relational database? if so check all of your indexing. Unless you are doing some pretty crazy stuff indexing should reduce those queries to milliseconds.
  - kellyreid 15y ago
    Yes, mySQL. I'm sure I've made loads of mistakes in structuring things. I don't know where to start checking my indexes for mistakes though. Any resources you can point me at that are somewhat newbie friendly?
    - kls 15y ago
      First thing to do is look at you where and order/group by clauses almost all of the items listed after them should have an index on them. Many should have a common index on the columns together, if they are used together a lot to filter information.
      - kellyreid 15y ago
        hmm. that makes a lot of sense. can you suggest some reading that can help me understand which types to use? I'm almost entirely self-taught on SQL so the result is "functional" code that's just not well-designed or optimal
        deleted 15y ago
        [deleted]

heelhook 15y ago

37s' rework has a great chapter, "underdo your competition", I think its really applicable to your case.

kellyreid 15y ago
It was quite brief but the point was made. Thanks, this book actually looks incredible!

otoburb 15y ago

How do you know he's progressing faster? With your base of paying customers, you should be able to iterate faster than your competition. If you can't, and if you feel it's that much of a serious technical threat, then you may want to consider hiring a technical professional of your own. At the same time, your business co-founder (presumably you're the one responsible for the technical side of the house while your partner is responsible for sales, marketing and biz dev) should seriously investigate if there is any merit to the competition's revenue model, and whether it's in your best interest to adopt a freemium model of your own (it may not be). Given that you claim to have a working paywall model (something that I think many media companies and media brokers would kill for), your content must be a niche of some type. Attack this problem from as many simultaneous angles as possible (technical/feature-parity, pricing and marketing). If you can learn faster than your competition (that doesn't necessarily mean release features faster -- "learn" is the keyword here) from your paying customers, then you should be in a much better position to stay ahead. The fact that you said that the "[...] products will be functionally identical once both are deployed and out of beta" is a red-flag to me that you either haven't done enough analysis of the competition's feature set, or if you have, then you need to increase the tempo of customer feedback to incorporate into your product. Perhaps you will say that as soon as you deploy new features based on your customer learnings, your competition will copy you. If that's the case, then (from a marketing angle) you will always be first to deliver features and should be able to please your customers faster, hopefully resulting in greater adoption (until you saturate your market). I smell a lot of fear from your post. It may help to reframe your situation in a more positive light, since imitation is usually the highest form of flattery, while competition is sometimes used as a signalling mechanism (to yourself and others) that you picked a potentially profitable addressable market. tl;dr 1) Congratulations! You're validating your business model and market with actual paying customers and (now) competition. 2) Figure out how long each of you can last if one of you gave the content away for free. Consider freemium for your own offering (teaser content?). 3) Increase, analyze and act on feedback from your customers faster. 4) Hire better technical talent. Sorry I didn't answer your original question of "What do you do to push through it?" Hopefully the suggestions above will help to combat the dejection and loss of motivation.

kellyreid 15y ago

teyc 15y ago

$100/mo is nothing for a business user. If it is important to their business, it is not an issue. In fact, emphasize that paid support means you will be around to answer their questions. Work on other forms of stickiness. If historical data can be presented in a useful form, then people will less likely to leave because it means leaving their old data behind. Another form of stickiness is friends or social aspects.

kellyreid 15y ago
Paid. Support. Where was I on that one? That's a GREAT selling point for us; we're known to have an insanely fast customer support response time, which we can sell.

mapster 15y ago

He may be positioning himself to be bought out of the market by you. Keep your nose to the grindstone and get market share by making customers very happy they are with you.

kellyreid 15y ago
Can you explain that more? You have to imagine that customers who are paying nothing for his product (except to be annoyed by "ONE WEIRD TRICK" ads) will be happy to have an alternative, but if they get the same basic functionality, won't they be glad they don't have to pay?
- mapster 15y ago
  You very well lose customers if price is their pain point, but my point was to win them over with service and marketing and keep that competitor in obscurity. Or offer to buy him out so you can shut his site down.
  - kellyreid 15y ago
    Got it. That makes sense. We can't beat 'free' on the price point, that's for sure. But we -can- offer support, spend money on marketing, and hope that our existing platform keeps him in the dark.

milaniliev 15y ago

If short-term technical issues, such as performance problems, are preventing your launch, why not just bring in an experienced developer for a few weeks as a consultant? You wouldn't have to pay them that much, I don't think. It might also be possible to defer payment partially if you are truly cash-strapped. I don't know if this helps, but for business users, paid, stable, reliable-support, above-board businesses are worth real money. Red Hat makes essentially all their money offering support on a product they themselves make available for free. Also: your competitor is not copying your content, is he? Is he able to code-up the platform AND pay for content creation on a free product?

kellyreid 15y ago
No, he's not offering content at all (except a sporadic blog post). Our -new- product, the one that's going to bring us the growth we direly need, is the one that's being evolved on our two sites, in parallel.

helen842000 15y ago

I try and remind myself there will always be competitors selling the same thing cheap enough to put you both out of business. You have your users AND they are paying. How sustainable is a business where he absorbs all the costs and doesn't bring any revenue in? How much support can he continue provide to free users? Especially if they get into the large numbers. You are treating it like a business, he is treating it like a project that he can drop at any time. In my eyes, he is collecting your future customers for you. When he spends to the bottom of his pockets and folds, his customers will have to choose between your service or no service. Hold on, keep focused on your lovely customers. Give them amazing service. Go above and beyond for them. Stir up a little press of your own (make your stake on first to market a little early) Don't get caught up in looking over your shoulder.

kellyreid 15y ago

Thanks to everyone who took the time to reply to this. It's really valuable to have a community like HN, who have been here and done this all before. I took the advice of "get over it and just keep hacking" and have just emailed the first batch of beta testers. I spent a while on the front-end so it feels more like a 'product'. That actually had a powerful emotional effect on me; now I look at it with pride. I know it's just a few lines of CSS and big pretty fonts, but it just 'feels' like its real now. I got to watch a user see the site for the first time yesterday and watch him interact with it. It was a nice moment. My hope is that, even if this guy launches a product before I do, that we'll steal the spotlight due to our size and existing customer base. We can also offer support and on-demand customization (for the biz customers). Now I just have to hope that people will actually pay for this! They're paying for written content, so I can't imagine that they won't pay for this.