
Ask HN: An employee at a competitor signs up to your site. What do you do? - evangow
Background: The first competitor in this space started back in 2012. I had a look at their product last year and thought I could do better.<p>For the last year, my product has been a sub-set of their features with a better UI&#x2F;UX (in my opinion anyway!). I recently started to differentiate though and released a feature they don&#x27;t have and am working on releasing other new&#x2F;differentiated features.<p>Other background: They&#x27;re definitely the biggest in this space, but recently, they&#x27;ve been losing a lot of customers to a different competitor that started in 2014, but they don&#x27;t seem to have copied any of the differentiated features that competitor has released (yet).<p>Today, I saw that someone from their company signed up to my site. They only have ~10 employees, so they definitely know I exist now.<p>Is there anything that you would do in this situation, or just keep moving along?
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davismwfl
Just keep moving. Worry about releasing your features and being a better
solution not that they are looking at what you already have done.

I had a mentor that told me to tell everyone about what I am doing and not
hide things. His point was that if you aren't moving fast enough and in the
right direction competition isn't what will kill you, you will just die. The
more time you worry about a competitor the more time they have to catch up, so
the moral is always focus on product. That doesn't mean you don't do a
competitive analysis at some points, just that you don't waste time worrying
about what they are doing, you find the right path and execute on what the
market needs/wants, not what others are doing.

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matt_the_bass
Also if you think keeping public features secret is a method of security, then
you need to find other methods.

This employee could be considering leaving their current job. That company
might also be considering trying to acquire you.

