
Ask HN: Do you talk to your competitors? - lovekale
Early stage startup founder here. Do you generally talk to your competitors? Friends, enemy, or frenemy?<p>I&#x27;ve been building an app to reduce the noise in human conversations and recently I found a similar app that started a year before me. My instinct is to email the other founder and ask him &quot;Hey how&#x27;s it going? Can you share what you&#x27;ve learned with me?&quot; but I wasn&#x27;t sure if putting myself on their radar can be a good or bad idea?<p>Curious what the HN community think? What&#x27;s your experience in your &quot;relationship&quot; with your competitive peers?
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mindcrime
I generally treat the whole thing as fairly neutral. I guess more of a
"frenemy" at times. I don't go out of my way to antagonize competitors, and
I'm happy to wish them well and cheer for them in general. Somebody, I think
it was Steve Blank, once said (paraphrased slightly) "Startups don't die from
competition with other startups, they die because they built a product nobody
wants." I think that's pretty close to true.

All of this, of course, is regarding competitors who are startups. If we're
talking Microsoft or Oracle or somebody... well... no comment.

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lovekale
OP here. You're spot on about the #1 killer of startups isn't competition, but
product-market fit. Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this. Maybe "frenemy"
is how I'll go about it.

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tjalfi
The legal industry has ILTA for this ([http://www.iltanet.org/about/about-
ilta](http://www.iltanet.org/about/about-ilta)). Many law firms use the same
technology stack and it is common to ask our peers for opinions on products or
policies. The results are quite positive.

