Ask HN: A Well Funded Competitor Has Launched Before Me What Should I do?

Not only are things moving along faster now I have someone to benchmark myself against, it has really brought into sharp focus the areas I need to concentrate on. I've been able to learn from mistakes that they're making, rather than suffer the cost of making those mistakes myself. Overall the project is absolutely stronger as a consequence.

In fact, I'm probably more excited when they release a new feature than their average customer is.

There's an aphorism that says "the second mouse gets the cheese" which I think means that coming second you can let the forerunner make the mistakes and learn from what they get wrong. This has a lot of mileage IMO.

Anecdote: When my partner and I started in business in a very fine niche, a largely new thing in our country, a competitor opened in our town within a km of us between us securing premises and opening them. Thankfully they determined for personal reasons they couldn't continue and left us with some extra customers ... don't pin your hopes on your competitions CEO getting pregnant though!

Look at who's funding them, perhaps try to infer some of their movements by the likely advisors they have. Ask around. Check out the founders' resumes. It's easier to get intel about a larger group than the plans of a single man. Check out what technology toolchain they're using, and find someone who's used it before, and/or other public systems that use it now. It may provide a useful source of likely avenues they'll take later (some APIs make some approaches easier), you may be able to predict them before they've even decided. With that in mind, choose your own toolchain and market focus accordingly. Are they going to have any nasty chokepoints later, in terms of necessary features that aren't supported by their toolchain, or performance bottlenecks that'll squash their scalability/skyrocket their costs for a while?

Also, if all else fails, you've got your brain just churning away at the problem domain all day. If you want to play dirty, take out some patents on some inevitabilities in that space. Hobble them early, force them into more expensive routes (some stupid bastards will even think it's an advantage that they can afford to!). In software, it's easy & tempting to go the safer O(N) route when a riskier O(1) will do (in effort -- say writing all your entity types by hand versus an automatic derivation mechanism). A patent threat can certainly push people in different directions early. In terms of productivity, that can be a 30+ scale factor. How many devs do they have?

Put out a blog & control the narrative. The more people they have, the more mistakes they can make at a time, the more datapoints you can pick from to form the narrative your way. The right narrative can help compensate for a lack of a marketing team. Consider reading up on Guerrilla warfare.

Also, you don't have to win the market. You can just stay alive & appear useful long enough to get bought by someone else who wants to compete against your opponent.

Yeah, a good part of this is way over the top, but maybe something will be useful to you :-)