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In VC parlance, someone else launching doing the same thing "validates the space".
Does it really? I always felt like people who I was working with used this to support bad ideas for startups. Do VCs really prefer "validation", or first to market?
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Also, you can take risks that they may be unwilling to take. You don't have group-think to worry about. You can use tools & languages that it's too hard to hire for. As this is a PG site, consider functional systems. I'm a huge haskell fan myself, and holy crap is it faster to develop in, especially early on. In terms of productivity, it can be 10-15x. It's proven as such in my own work. How many devs do they have? L…
"In terms of productivity, it can be 10-15x." Any sources on this? Or is it primarily based on your own experience?
This is great news. Somebody is spending huge amounts of money to help you figure out how to make money. Now your problem is much reduced: instead of doing all of it, you just need to figure out what they are doing and tweak the good parts and ditch the bad parts. So how is their sales pipeline working? That's the key question. Where are leads coming from, how do they convert them, what are the major selling points.…
For anyone in any kind of competition I would highly recommend checking out the wikipedia article:
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This is great advice for me to hear, as I'm in a similar position right now. I've been considering obliquely slamming our competitor in a blog post, but I've held off because I don't want us to come off like dicks. Wouldn't I be better off focusing the messaging on how we're doing it right, rather than how they're doing it wrong?
You can define yourself and, through the remaining empty space, end up defining them. If you define yourself as "The simple, no-frills, easy way to Foo," for example, then you're defining your opponents as one or more of: complex, extra frilly, less easy.
The exact same thing happened to me a little over a month ago. A few days before the launch of http://limelightapp.com/ , we saw http://app.net/ show up on the front page of HN. Initially, my heart sunk. (You've already felt this, I'm sure.) Thankfully I was sitting next to my wife on the couch, who had the good sense to say: "Go grab a beer." I took her advice. In the end, I can honestly say that having http://app.n…
Nice!
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Also, you can take risks that they may be unwilling to take. You don't have group-think to worry about. You can use tools & languages that it's too hard to hire for. As this is a PG site, consider functional systems. I'm a huge haskell fan myself, and holy crap is it faster to develop in, especially early on. In terms of productivity, it can be 10-15x. It's proven as such in my own work. How many devs do they have? L…
This is great advice for me to hear, as I'm in a similar position right now. I've been considering obliquely slamming our competitor in a blog post, but I've held off because I don't want us to come off like dicks. Wouldn't I be better off focusing the messaging on how we're doing it right, rather than how they're doing it wrong?
However you can talk about all the ways that X is done wrong without actually mentioning by name the competitors who are doing X wrong. Clearly explain the problems you see in 'the industry' and your solutions to them, but not the other people/companies involved.
There's something different happening though, and it primarily has to do with execution. We do crazy shit to get traction, because we're scrappy as hell and aren't going down without a firefight. We're extremely lean and we all code, whereas their organization is far more bloated. The numbers belie the actual fairness of the fight. And moreover, we don't currently need a massive amount of money. Our burn rate is fairly low.
Here are a few things I've learned:
1. More bodies isn't better. More money isn't always better. Traction and happy customers should be your key metrics.
2. You can always raise money later at a great valuation using the argument "Hey, these guys raised money from X VCs and are blowing up."
3. You need to launch. Stop waiting.
4. In the big picture, everything here doesn't matter. Both us and our competitors are going up against a bunch of old-guard corporations who are the current incumbents. It doesn't matter if we have similar products if our overall market share is .001%-- the other 99% is the true competition.