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Ask HN: Competitor is playing dirty with us. how would you response?
Woke up in the morning to discover that one of our competitors had chosen to release a blog post with more than 10 lies and misconceptions about our product. Given that our market is still relatively small and our product is well-known, with all its features advertised, it's quite clear that this is a direct attack against our product strategy, aimed at undermining some of our potential leads. How would you respond to this?
- h2odragon 3y agoDirectly, openly, and quickly. "Our competitor has accused us of using the heads of Venezuelan children in our product. These are the receipts from our suppliers in France proving all our meat is sourced from Morocco" and so on. Stick purely to response in the first post. Then, in a later post, explain how the competition is guilty of all the accusations they've thrown at you, and worse: "Their product is actually made of sawdust with plastic skulls and inferior spices"
- gemanor 3y agoTheir post isn't such dirty. They just compared all the competitors in the market and consistently ranked all in 6-9 and us in 1-2. All that, by saying we have lower quality UI (not correct, objectively by our customers) and many missing features (not missing and listed explicitly on our website). We also (as all the players) do a x vs y posts, but we never thought to lie regarding others. Do you think we should actively distribute those response posts?
- hirundo 3y agoGiven that you feel you have the superior product, this isn't tragedy but a great marketing opportunity. Your calm, direct response can explicitly and convincingly list the features and advantages of your product without appearing to be a sales brochure, but simple self defense. To a reader it looks like a morality play instead of an advertisement, but the sales message still gets delivered. You might start wishing for more such blog posts.
- thenaturalist 3y agoFully agree with hirundo. Don't sweat it if you are confident in your product. They played themselves with these claims. If they consistently rank themselves and others in the same bucket, but no clear winner, just you as clear outliers, you stand out. Any potential lead/ user worth their need in money will want to check you out either out of curiosity or to benchmark their product eval better. Better to stand out if you have no downside to be afraid of on your end.
- gemanor 3y agoThanks, these are good points. I think we even could "fetch" the positive facts of their writing and combine it with the real features/facts of our product for this response blog post.