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.
An Obscure Competitor is Giving Away My Product
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Re: An Obscure Competitor is Giving Away My Product
#12He 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.
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?
Re: An Obscure Competitor is Giving Away My Product
#13How 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 par…
First, thanks for the excellent reply. I'll try to address your points objectively, but this company is my heart and soul (not to mention my financial future) so I get emotionally invested quite easily. "How do you know he's progressing faster?" > I watch his site develop as I develop mine, and he's got better versions of everything in place. My charts are static, his are dynamic. My page load times suck, his are flu…
If you have no money, and you have a valid business then you have equity in a real company that you can trade to a developer for time. Consider coming off of some equity to get a developer on the field. Think of it this way, in any other competition in life, would you play a rookie or bring out the ringer for a dead heat? The talks with your competition did not go well because he knows what you know, he is outpacing you. If you don't think you can outpace the competition and the competition calls, you work a deal, if you think you are outgunning the competition you ignore their advances. Eventually a superior product will win out if there is no way for you to monopolize the market.
Re: An Obscure Competitor is Giving Away My Product
#14If 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 ne…
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 hamstringin…
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.
Re: An Obscure Competitor is Giving Away My Product
#15If 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?
Re: An Obscure Competitor is Giving Away My Product
#16I 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.
Re: An Obscure Competitor is Giving Away My Product
#17He 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.
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?
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.
Re: An Obscure Competitor is Giving Away My Product
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 hamstringin…
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.
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?
Re: An Obscure Competitor is Giving Away My Product
#19If 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 ar…
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.
Re: An Obscure Competitor is Giving Away My Product
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
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.
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.