
Ask HN: What do you do when a competitor offers their service for free? - nicholas73
This competitor is planning to monetize their user base indirectly, probably valuing them as an email list.<p>However, I think this service provides enough value alone that people would pay for it.  I don&#x27;t think they realize it, because they are not their own end users (whereas I am building the service based on my own needs).<p>I&#x27;d really prefer not to build my own freemium version to compete with them.  I think my service can be slightly better, but a free version would take away most people who would have chosen the cheapest plan.<p>Anyone have a story that is related?
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benologist
You're not competing with that other person, you're competing with nobody
knowing you exist and nobody caring you exist.

All the people who know _both_ products exist .... is probably just you.

If your company fails it'll definitely be because of what you did, not what
they do.

If your company succeeds it'll - almost - definitely have nothing to do with
anything the other company did.

~~~
jondubois
Yes, if the other company raised funding, there is no way you can compete with
that.

The same thing happened to me many years ago; I was working on an open source
drag-and-drop content management system and I had built the whole thing -
Thinking back; it was actually quite good but then, just as I was about to
start monetizing; Weebly, Yola, Wix and a bunch of others just came out of
nowhere will tons of funding and I had no choice but to give up. You just
can't compete with VC money.

You have 2 options; raise VC money or give up and go work for IBM instead;
they have a nice cubicle waiting for you.

~~~
alain94040
Even if the competitor offers your product for free, you can still beat them
on quality, support, ease of use, etc. A lot of potential customers are
willing to pay for convenience.

And of course, the likelihood that your average customer even knows there are
two competing solutions is low.

It all boils down to: be better than your competition. Price is not the only
factor.

~~~
stevekemp
Yeah one way to go is to simplify complexity, something I guess the wix/weebly
folks did for the average non-technical person who wanted a website.

I wrap/resell Route53 DNS hosting from Amazon, and while I don't have millions
of customers I think I gain from flat-pricing, and a less complicated
webconsole/interface. I still require technical clients (who can use git), but
I don't require dealing with credentials and AWS tools.

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jv22222
There are a lot of products where free and premium competitors exist.

Perhaps the best advice is from Michelle Obama: "When they go low, we go high"

Consider aiming for high end users in your market, then you need far fewer
customers to generate a decent wage.

For example if you charge 49 vs 9 then you need 5 x less costomers to hit your
paycheck.

Just be sure to validate with real customers that the market can bear the
price point you need.

~~~
p333347
> Perhaps the best advice is from Michelle Obama: "When they go low, we go
> high"

Brilliant appropriation.

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Mz
It is not at all uncommon for the people who want it to be free to be high
maintenance users who bleed your company for product support. Having more
customers does not always translate to more income.

The message you need to worry about is almost certainly not "Why you should
spend money on my product instead of getting theirs for free." The message you
need to focus on is why people should want your product at all. In fact,
before you get to that stage, your message may need to be as simple as "We
exist."

This was the marketing goal of Aflac's initial duck commercials. They were a
little known insurance company with low name recognition. They tested two
commercials. One was a more respectable, conservative commercial. It achieved
around 40% name recognition, which was the industry standard and would have
been a big improvement. The second achieved 90% name recognition, but was a
silly duck making fun of the sound of the name. It was considered hugely
risky, but the CEO latched onto the 90% name recognition metric and went with
that campaign.

After becoming a household word, they changed their marketing campaign goal to
trying to educate people about their product. It was poorly understood as to
how it differed from other insurance products. Yet, they were already a
Fortune 200 company because everybody at least new their name and that they
existed.

Cart and horse and all that.

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qwrusz
You need to figure out if you are in fact offering the same service or do you
have significant differences in product, market and customers.

If it's the same service, then who is right about the better business model.
You _think_ this service provides enough value that people will pay for it,
this competitor thinks free is better, who is right? who is _more_ right?

Sometimes business models change (ask newspapers) or competitors force you to
take a loss/make changes on things you would rather not. This is business.
Hopefully not, but you might have to build that freemium version for the short
term and figure out a way to add better price discrimination to it.

How much market research have you done? Entrepreneurs building for themselves
have a huge advantage but are also often most likely to not do enough market
research, assuming many others out there think just as they do.

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wayn3
When they go low, you go high.

Outcompete them on quality. Pretty simple. And don't forget that you don't
compete with each other. You compete with being considered irrelevant.

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bdcravens
Our competitors aren't free, but often significantly undercut our prices.
(it's a performance based product) Our response are our values adds and our
narrative.

