An Obscure Competitor is Giving Away My Product

If 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 necessary to the minimal viable product, cut those and launch.

Bests of luck!

How 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 partner is responsible for sales, marketing and biz dev) should seriously investigate if there is any merit to the competition's revenue model, and whether it's in your best interest to adopt a freemium model of your own (it may not be).

Given that you claim to have a working paywall model (something that I think many media companies and media brokers would kill for), your content must be a niche of some type.

Attack this problem from as many simultaneous angles as possible (technical/feature-parity, pricing and marketing). If you can learn faster than your competition (that doesn't necessarily mean release features faster -- "learn" is the keyword here) from your paying customers, then you should be in a much better position to stay ahead.

The fact that you said that the "[...] products will be functionally identical once both are deployed and out of beta" is a red-flag to me that you either haven't done enough analysis of the competition's feature set, or if you have, then you need to increase the tempo of customer feedback to incorporate into your product.

Perhaps you will say that as soon as you deploy new features based on your customer learnings, your competition will copy you. If that's the case, then (from a marketing angle) you will always be first to deliver features and should be able to please your customers faster, hopefully resulting in greater adoption (until you saturate your market).

I smell a lot of fear from your post. It may help to reframe your situation in a more positive light, since imitation is usually the highest form of flattery, while competition is sometimes used as a signalling mechanism (to yourself and others) that you picked a potentially profitable addressable market.

tl;dr

1) Congratulations! You're validating your business model and market with actual paying customers and (now) competition.

2) Figure out how long each of you can last if one of you gave the content away for free. Consider freemium for your own offering (teaser content?).

3) Increase, analyze and act on feedback from your customers faster.

4) Hire better technical talent.

Sorry I didn't answer your original question of "What do you do to push through it?" Hopefully the suggestions above will help to combat the dejection and loss of motivation.

$100/mo is nothing for a business user. If it is important to their business, it is not an issue. In fact, emphasize that paid support means you will be around to answer their questions.

Work on other forms of stickiness. If historical data can be presented in a useful form, then people will less likely to leave because it means leaving their old data behind.

Another form of stickiness is friends or social aspects.

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 fluid. And so on. We COULD iterate faster but we do not have the money to hire. We're making enough money to pay our editors and writers, and the founders are taking a paltry salary (I still do a bit of freelance writing to keep my bills paid), but not enough to pay for developers. This is why I have taken the helm and learned to hack!

My partner is also a lawyer, and handles everything related to tax, marketing, legal and bookkeeping. The competitor's revenue model is basically "run ads". I dont think he's even considering it as a real business. He's only a problem as long as his service is free, mind you. Once he starts charging, we have the advantage.

We don't "claim" to have a working paywall model; it's there. We are pulling down 5 figures of yearly revenue from subscriber fees (most of which goes towards overhead right now). We are indeed a very niche site, and our new product is targeted directly at both business and end-user customers within this niche. It's a product they're BEGGING for!

I'm about to give my business beta testers their first shot at the software, as soon as I can figure out why the whole thing is running so damned slow. From there I will have a tremendous advantage over the Other Guy. I'm learning as fast as I can, but I still -fear- that its not fast enough.

"The fact that you said that the "[...] products will be functionally identical once both are deployed and out of beta" is a red-flag" >> Hmm. I guess that's a bit short sighted of me. The concepts are the same, so I'm hoping my execution beats his.

I don't care if he copies my existing work; I care if he beats me to market and gets the publicity he needs to give away what I intend to charge for.

There is a lot of fear in my post because that's exactly what I'm feeling; its a new feeling for me. My site blazed a new trail in my industry; no one had dedicated an entire platform to our area before, and we haven't really experienced competition.

The competition only underscores just how good this idea is, and how important it is to get it to market ASAP.

I think I have to ensure our execution is better, our CORE feature set is comparable (not talking bells and whistles, i mean The One Thing that makes the product what it is), and we have the platform he lacks. Thanks again for taking the time to address this. Entrepreneurship is sometimes emotionally draining and it's great to have a community that understands the feelings that can sometimes crop up.

I guess its back to coding, then!

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 hamstringing part of this process.