Ask HN: Bigger startup is stealing my features, what do i do?

A good question to ask yourself (and this depends on what your startup does) at this time would be whether you should be raising money too.

I personally do not believe that a funded company can compete with you on the features and domain expertise that you have built over the last 5 years. Where they could beat you is in spending money to get to the market first. The fact that there was funding means that someone believes that the idea is large enough to risk millions and there may be a first to market advantage.

(I know you were here first 5 years back, but it is possible that you have not reached out to your entire market yet)

If they are going after your features, you should go after their customers. You're the one leading the group right now and considering they are copy cats, you'll always be ahead of them in the game.

Try to contact their customers through twitter, their Facebook fan page, advertising and whatever you can think of. I'll leave it up to your creativity on how you can persuade them to your product but if you can do that you can bust the other company.

It's time for some strategy.

If you haven't done so already you need to write a vision and mission for your company (or if you haven't revised these in the past ~3 months).

I am not talking about just something to post on a website but what you truly believe and want to achieve.

While I would caution you not to read too deep into quantifying (ie: don't write we will have X customers or do X revenue) this article is a good start to understand a "true mission".

http://www.fastcompany.com/1400930/how-write-mission-stateme...

A quick article on vision: http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch04_Whats_the_Big_Idea.php

Once you write these two statements, assess your current business against them. Are you fulfilling what you have set out to do? Even if you answer yes and especially if you answer no; what needs to change to align the business with the mission, what aspects can you improve?

Is the business in a position to steadily grow towards achieving your vision? What would you like the business to ultimately become? Define milestones that you can use to guide the business forward.

As you are thinking through these statements it is also good to craft a list or statement of your ideal customer(s). Especially when facing competitors you need to know the customers you want.

This article by Jason Fried gives good insight on why knowing the customer you want is very valuable.

http://www.inc.com/magazine/201206/jason-fried/huge-accounts...

Now that you have the backbone of your strategy it is time to define goals. Goals should be two parts: hazy and clear. Why do you want a hazy goal? Because things change and you should not allow yourself to be so set on achieving a clear goal of "500 new customers in 2014" that you compromise the what makes you great. Rather, you should set your goal as "Increase the number of customers in 2014 (by 500 -target, not focus-) while maintaining and exceeding the level of service we provide." I'll admit that sounds like the BS mission statements in the FastCo article, but your well defined mission and vision will guide you in creating these actionable goals.

This may be better articulated by qualitative with a quantitative measure, but I'm sticking with hazy because it gives your mind more freedom to explore possible goals.

The vision, mission and customer statements and your list of goals provide what would be comparable to a requirements specification. It is now your job to use these requirements to identify the steps you need to take to achieve them (similar to system design and writing pseudocode), develop possible solutions for these steps, implement, test and refine.

The key point to all of this, to me, is understanding the idea that "You can't be everything to everybody". So you have competitors, and they're even "stealing" your features... fine. They have (implicitly or explicitly) a value discipline of some sort... figure out what the value discipline of your competitors is, and then figure out what you want your value discipline to be. Once you have that, you know how you're going to compete in the market... by having the lowest price, by having the best product, or by having better "customer intimacy".

This is all explained very well in The Discipline of Market Leaders.[1]

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/The-Discipline-Market-Leaders-Customer...

This is moving move towards a distraction and something you probably shouldn't do. However it's hilarious when you pull it off, so...

Cloak their IP and a 10 mile radius. Show them a new homepage saying you've got fabulous new features in the works. Think up a series of completely useless features that would drive people away, but frame them as plausible. Back it up with facts and figures from "in-depth" user studies you've done.

Then watch them try and beat you to develop the features.

It worked for me in the past.