Ask HN: My competitors have flawed products but I can't get traction

11 points by saveitincork 8 days ago | 20 comments

Problem: I constantly save Instagram Reels/TikToks about restaurants, events, pop-ups, and things to do, but I always forget about them because they get buried in my saves.

Solution: I built Cork. You can send a Reel or Tiktok directly to Cork without even needing to leave the app, and Cork will automatically extract the info in the reel and save it in a map + calendar.

However, I've been finding it hard to get traction while my competitors have gotten traction/funding. I strongly believe my app outperforms all known competitors (their apps fail on reels of popular creators while mine succeeds).

I'm not here for pity or to advertise, but I'm curious why people ship products that don't work for a pretty significant number of inputs when the teams are big enough (employees + funding) to pretty easily solve the problem in a cheap way (as I've done) or at least have a temporary high-performing solution with GPT.

TL;DR: imo my app outperforms competitors in raw performance. why is a team with manpower and funding failing to do something a 2 person team did in a month?

kcsavvy 7 days ago |

I think you should be open to the idea that your competitors are not competing with you in the way you think they are. They may be fighting (and winning) elsewhere. Fundraising, customer acquisition, specific use cases, communities, niches, etc. Also, they might be losing. From the outside every company wants to look successful - raising money, hiring, growing, etc. The real story is almost never told, so you can’t assume much from the outside.

bruce511 6 days ago | |

This exactly. Or put another way;

"Because you think the quality of the product matters."

If you want to get customers then the right focus is getting customers. Not making the product.

There are 2 of you. Your product is already better. Stop coding. Start marketing.

Like some others here, it's not something I would use, indeed I can't imagine using it, so I can't offer specific advice other than "find the market".

I'll also point out that you did the easy part first, which is your real mistake. Don't build a product then look for the market. Find the market first (that's the hard part) and build a product for them.

cheevly 7 days ago | |

This is a great answer.

Irongirl1 6 days ago |

May I interject?

It has always seemed odd to me that instead of using the "ant trails", as it were, things are set to cause people to do something completely different from what they normally do. It seems harder, somehow...and not as effective.

You want to attract the attention of those who already go out and do things:

bikers, rock climbers, eaters of gourmet meals etc. So wouldn't partnership with these places and apps be the most effective? When you get someone on board...and if your project is properly made, then it should be easier to figure out what isn't correct. You are making assumptions without evidence...any at all, which seems premature. So you need data points to create a direction.....

I hope I'm being clear, as I am a hermit....and go nowhere. But if I were looking to find groups, then I would try a directory like Organized Obsessions ( print only) and pair that with an online effort to advertise in their newsletters etc. Jim Novo's Drilling Down for data collection and Lob.com to know whom to mail. A hybrid approach...which may yield good results. But definitely targeting first.

Hth,

Blackwolf

grugdev42 5 days ago |

Two things jump to mind:

1. The best product rarely wins. As much as it pains me, marketing and sales matter more than product. Your competitors are likely better at marketing and selling themselves and their product.

2. It's a bit cliche, but look into the candy, vitamin, and painkiller theory. Your product is not a painkiller and I suspect it's a candy. Candies are very very hard to make a successful business from.

But, I wish you the best of luck. :)

BuiltByElly 4 days ago | |

Marketing and sales has always been and will always be the problem of running a successful app or business.

I suggest he stops coding, like he said the product is better than his competitors, which is a great start. He should focus all his energy into solving this cosmic problem of marketing and sales and with time he will have users.

This is how business is runned

keiferski 5 days ago |

It seems to me that you're assuming add restaurant to saved is equivalent to cares enough to add it to a map/calendar.

Personally I save a ton of restaurants like this, even in cities I may not visit months or years from now.

I would look into partnering with the restaurants in question. Maybe if someone saves a place to Cork, they get a discount code from the restaurant?

lschueller 7 days ago |

Please do not confuse funding with traction. These things are not related necessarily. In best case, a funded team gets traction and will be able to perform in a profitable relation to that funding. Your angle should be building a small but steady user base and build on that. While others are competing against time and expectations, you compete against visbility and trust. Your competitors aren't your competition you should care about. It should be, how to communicate to the users more effectively.

leros 6 days ago |

What's your marketing look like? A bad product that gets put in front of a lot of people will gain more traction than a great product only a few people see.

A competitor with funding may simply be able to kickstart product awareness with lots of lost spend on advertising. Whereas a bootstrapped company will have a much more difficult time getting off the ground.

cantalopes 7 days ago |

Not the only thing that matters but still important: i don't think your brand name is good. The name is so generic and hard to search, you picked marketing on a nightmare difficulty level. Besides from recognizability i think even if someone recommended your app directly by word of mouth they would not be able to find it

varunKvK 6 days ago |

better product doesn't equal more traction.

distribution is a separate skill from building.

your competitors got traction because they figured out how to get in front of peopl not because their product is better.That's the uncomfortable part.

nosioptar 7 days ago |

I think it'd be a good idea to spend some time on SEO/marketing. I spent a few minutes trying to find your app. I couldn't find it at all via searching ddg, play store, or apple app store. Competitor sites/apps did show up.

snisarenko 7 days ago |

Do you have a link to your product ? I have the same problem, and actually want to try your product

I can't find it on google

snisarenko 7 days ago | |

Ok, i found it. https://www.instagram.com/cork.save/

So immediate feedback. Why do i need to download an app ? This is HUGE friction.

Why can't i just DM your Intagram account all the posts/events that i care about, and it can pull directly from there and sent me a web link with a login code to view my organized events ?

Do you have links to your competitors ?

fragmede 7 days ago |

First off: congratulations on shipping! Most never get there.

Genuinely: Who cares about saving reels? Or less bluntly, who are your potential customers and where are you advertising to reach them? Instagram itself is hugely popular, but the general population of Instagram users won't and don't care about saving reels. So either you teach them to (a la the story about the first shopping carts), or you find users who already want to, but don't have a tool for that yet, or are using a competitor's tool. Having not given it a ton of thought, creators themselves would want (and be willing to pay) for you're service. Play up the issue of if their account gets hacked or suspended by Instagram itself, they'll lose access to their reels and stories and posts, so use your service to get an off-site backup. Do you have AdWords setup so you come up when potential users search for your competition? Don't answer this, but what's your targeted/projected CAC (customer acquisition cost) vs LTV(lifetime value of a customer). You probably want to double or triple your ad-spend, but that'll raise CAC, so you want to have a examination of LTV before you commit to that.

Etc.

Contact a marketing agency for more in-depth specific help.

senordevnyc 6 days ago | |

One of us has completely missed the value prop of this app. I didn't think it was about "saving reels", but rather about easily extracting event details like time / place data from reels that are about a specific event. Saving the reels is just the mechanism.

romania1 5 days ago |

Sales is what you need more than a better product.

Ethee 7 days ago |

The actual 'performance' of the product is usually the last thing that matters to the consumer. People happily put up with all sorts of bullshit while complaining about how bad the product is usually for a number of reasons. A lot of engineers get trapped in the idea that if your product is simply less enshittified than all the competition then they should win the product market battle. But product marketing has little to do with those things and more to do with getting the product in front of actual users and making the user imagine using your product every day. We're in an attention economy, if you can't grab a users attention then your product means nothing.

erelong 7 days ago |

Try different marketing approach

Yahyaaa 5 days ago |

It's possible your competitors aren't actually solving the same problem you are. Founders tend to compare products on technical performance, while users often choose based on distribution, habit, onboarding friction, or simply which app they heard about first.