Ask HN: I Found My Competition. Now What?

6 points by saucerful 14 years ago | 7 comments

"The idea" hit me about 9 months ago. In that time, I've been very busy with grad school so I haven't built much, though I did have a chance to experiment with a number of technologies and so I now have a pretty clear vision of how to build the site.

About a week ago, I discovered that 75% of my idea has been implemented by a site that's been around for almost 3 years. Last month they had 100k unique visitors and about 4x as many pageviews. The missing 25% is, however, non-trivial. I think the existing site is not as clean and clear as I would have liked. There's less of a focus on media and more on text (my site would ideally have both). The ads are somewhat annoying and not helpful (I have some good ideas for making money that is actually useful to my users).

On the other hand, my idea is very much dependent on a strong community so my competitor's existing userbase is a huge advantage. Now, my question is: How do I proceed?

As I see it, I have two options: 1. Carry on. Slowly build the site, initially invite-only, and just bank on it being all around better.

2. Contact my competitor (a very small team of two or three devs) and offer to join the team.

Of course, if I contact them, they might choose to reject my offer so I have to be careful about what I say to them. And if they accept-- what is a reasonable way for me to be compensated? I obviously want a piece of the pie here.

Another thing that will have an impact on my decision is that I wasn't really looking to dominate the market with my site. I would be happy to make a modest income while helping my users. On the other hand, I don't know how happy I would be being in the backseat on the existing dev team vs. the driver on my own project.

I'm obviously not the first person in this situation. Does anyone have any advice or experience they are willing to share? Thanks in advance.

hoodoof 14 years ago |

Kinda sounds like you have a sense that you are owed part of their business? I'm not sure they will see why.

Imagine you spent 3 years developing your code, building your business to 100K uniques, pulled togething a team of 3 developers. Then a guy turns up and says "I had that same idea 12 months ago, I'd like a job and a I think I deserve a slice of the company too.".

What would you say to him?

rick888 14 years ago |

This just validates your idea. There are always better ways to market a product and make it unique enough to win over your competition. It sounds like they still have a small team, so if you want your own company, just keep working on your own project.

It just means there is more work ahead of you.

What do you expect to get if you join their team? They already have a product in place with a pretty big community, the only thing you can really expect at this point is to be an employee. Your "piece of the pie" will be your monthly salary. This will also destroy your chances of starting your own company (mostly because they will have an NDA/Non-compete)

thewordpainter 14 years ago | |

i'm with rick...this is public validation that you were on to something. depending on the resources they have behind them, it's probably too early to throw in the towel...then again, if you take your passion for the concept and apply it to their team, i imagine you'd make a great addition.

huhtenberg 14 years ago |

It.All.Depends.

It all really depends on what these missing 25% are, on how hard it is to build a minimally viable community, on how big the pool of potential users is, on how exactly you talk to the devs, on where they are located, etc.

Too many factors that could vary wildly and so I doubt that anyone's past experience would be indicative of what you should be doing. In fact if you hear here an anecdote you like it may encourage you to take more risk than you can afford.

trevelyan 14 years ago | |

I think it depends less on the features and more on the competitive landscape. If this guy needs to build a community he needs to rank in Google and get organic traffic. It doesn't matter if he isn't #1 as long as he can get in the top three or four results.

So a single competitor isn't a problem, but if he can't get good positioning because there are other sites he can't dislodge he's facing at best a long crawl to visibility, and is at a huge disadvantage competing against a larger team who already have community, content, ranking, revenues and domain age/trust.

winsbe01 14 years ago |

build your product. competition is a good thing; dominating a market gives people a lot to gripe about.

plus, having a fairly direct competitor with 100k uniques gives you 100k people who already are attracted by the 75%, and may be overjoyed at the last 25. Just keep going and stick to your vision.

Mz 14 years ago |

Last month they had 100k unique visitors and about 4x as many pageviews.

I don't think this is enough information to go on. What kind of money are they making off that traffic? How qualitative is the community? What are the working conditions? Are they in debt up to their eyeballs and there isn't any more pie to go around even if they felt you had something of real value to bring to the table?

You haven't posted anything which really indicates they have a solid business. I have known of sites in the past with traffic but little to no income and lots of frustrating other issues. I think you need more info to have any hope of making a reasonable assessment of the situation.

Best of luck.