

Ask HN: Beta users flocking over to competitor - fezzl

Hi all,<p>We recently discovered a competitor that launched much earlier than us and have more traction. We then even noticed that some of our earlier Beta users have also moved on to said competitor. We know, because we require a domain name to sign up for an account, and, since they use a stealth iframe pointer/redirect on their domain name, it's easy to find out what platform they are currently using. Think JanesCustomJewelry.com switching from Volusion to Shopify.<p>My question to all is: what next? Clearly our users are choosing our competitors because they have better features and more customization options, which are crucial for a white-label solution, even though their price point is higher. It will be hard to differentiate via a features battle; they have an army of developers.<p>Any advice? Or do we just do our thing, engage with our users, and reiterate until product/market fit? It's hard to ignore a competitor and very tempting to copy what they do. We have a feeling that whatever paying customers we have are only paying customers because they have not discovered our competitor. That is pathetic.<p>Update: <i>indirect</i> link to our site - http://www.fezzl.com
======
mechanical_fish
I am not your audience, so what I think is not that important, but I looked at
your homepage.

Your opening pitch has too much jargon. I'll avoid using specific words (geez,
you are trying to hide from _Google_? Good luck, Winston Smith!) but you sound
like you're talking to a Techcrunch editor in an elevator. Pretend you are
selling your product to people who don't know what it is and think it is made
by elves.

Meanwhile a lot of the text on that page is _white on beige_ , for the love of
god. (In Safari/Mac, Flash blocked). Please hire a designer who can see. Or,
rather, one who can't see so superhumanly well that they can _read completely
invisible text_ and not notice a problem.

Your homepage is dominated by a giant out-of-focus video preview image in what
appears to be 120 by 120 pixel resolution. In other words, my first impression
of your site is that you _literally_ lack focus and polish.

Don't rely so much on the video and the clickable previews. I never click
them. They tend to play sounds, which disturbs my fellow inmates. They tend to
waste valuable seconds of my life. They take my mouse too far away from the
back button. Sometimes they just don't work. Try to hook me in the first six
seconds without any additional clicks.

I found what I bet is your competitor's homepage. (Google took me right to a
bunch of great SEO, surprise surprise.) The page I found is full of reassuring
pep talk about how their product is going to improve my business. Words like
_audience_ and _revenue_ and _affinity_. They have helpful links to really
basic FAQs about what is, after all, a brand-new fashion trend in business
which a lot of people haven't heard of yet. Their design is clean and sharp.
It's like an infomercial. I tend to roll my eyes when I read such stuff, but
that's my _problem_ : I read too much Techcrunch, I'm too cynical and I know
too much about the web-services sausage factory, I am not your audience. Your
audience probably appreciates being sold a product in terms that they
understand, that they have heard before. It's no mystery to me why your
competitor is cleaning up.

Finally, you've heard of A/B testing, right? Because I wouldn't assume that
I'm not completely full of it, here. I'm just throwing out hypotheses [1], I'm
just one guy, and I'm never going to buy your product anyway.

\---

[1] Except for the white-on-beige thing. That is a _bug_ , my friend. A _high
priority_ bug.

~~~
godarderik
Apparently he has, I guess he's not a huge fan: <http://blog.zuupy.com/the-
disadvantages-of-ab-testing>

------
nudge
It's impossible to answer this properly without seeing your site. With that in
mind, here are a few thoughts:

1\. Features don't matter in the abstract. You can succeed with fewer features
by being, for example, simpler. That's the 37signals "do less" line. You say
features are crucial for your white-label solution. Are you so sure? Why do
you think this is? How do you know this is why you are losing customers?
("Clearly" is a dangerous word). Who do you think your customers are? What if
your customers were somebody else? (See point 3).

2\. "...even though their price point is higher..." - this suggests you don't
know that high price is often _precisely_ why customers choose things. High
prices suggest high quality, and in the absence of other ways of
distinguishing between products, it's a very easy one for people to follow.
Perhaps you charge so little that you give the impression of not being
serious? And, relatedly, perhaps if you charged more you would be able to
spend more to acquire users?

3\. Pick a niche and own it. If your site works for user types X, Y and Z,
just pick some subset of X to go after. Your product will be more targeted to
them, which makes it easier for them to see it as something they could use,
and it also should make it easier for you to market. See, for example, the
many sites that offer build-your-own-websites for photographers, as opposed to
simply just build-your-own-websites for everybody.

4\. Win on design, on copywriting, on user experience, on humour, on speed, on
sociality, on security, on reliability, on locality, on trust, on
friendliness. Win on anything that's not what you can't win on. On the
internet, there's room for more than one winner.

But, like I said, if we could see your site you'll get better answers.

------
jjm
I'm going to take a guess because I'm obviously not part of your core team so
I have no inside knowledge to how or what your doing.

As other have posted in classic purple cow speak [1], you build a better
product and remember "your product is not THE product"[2]. Part of Ash's lean
canvas[3] even has a spot for alternatives which may even include competitors.
The focal point is you need to start testing everything so you can: create a
customer feedback loop of _learning_[4][4b].

Ash's model is a variant of the original "Business Model Canvas" which is also
very good. I would urge you and everyone to LOOK at the examples and
iterations of these models on the main site[5].

Some of the questions you start asking in this exercise are: \- What is the
problem your solving, and what are the possible solutions? \- How will you
reach customers, who are the early adopters?

Its never too late, and like I said actually the beginning of the exercise.

Even if you 'know this already', I would urge you to re-test and re-focus on
your previous lean canvases/models. Success is in the finer details. Remember,
you never stop learning about the customer. You want a 'specific' customer?
You develop a strategy - focused on the problem.

So there you go, a 'teaser' on building a better product. Now go read Eric
Ries's[6] book[7], Steve Blank's book[8] for overall strategy. See the
business model generation book and site[9] (there is an ipad app!) for more
finer details. There is also a cheat sheet for Steve's book[10].

I myself am learning this as I recover from a failed startup attempt[11]. Yes,
I'm for hire atm and would LOVE to join another team. Hit me up!

[1] <http://www.sethgodin.com/purple/> [2]
[http://www.ashmaurya.com/2011/06/your-product-is-not-the-
pro...](http://www.ashmaurya.com/2011/06/your-product-is-not-the-product/) [3]
<http://www.leancanvas.com/> [4] <http://www.slideshare.net/ashmaurya/running-
lean-canvas> [4b] <http://www.ashmaurya.com/2010/08/businessmodelcanvas/> [5]
<http://thestartuptoolkit.com/> [6] <http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/>
[7] <http://lean.st/> [8] <http://www.stevenblank.com/books.html> [9]
<http://www.businessmodelgeneration.com/> [10] <http://www.custdev.com/> [11]
[http://jasongiedymin.com/post/6040811222/even-more-start-
up-...](http://jasongiedymin.com/post/6040811222/even-more-start-up-failure-
lessons-learned)

~~~
charliepark
re: "I'm for hire atm and would LOVE to join another team." ... add a few
links to your HN profile.

Although I'm not hiring at the moment, I'm always curious about who's around,
and the first thing I did when I saw that was click over to your HN profile
page. With nothing there, I can't find out more about you.

~~~
jjm
Sorry about that. I updated the about.

(Right now on mass transit, at least I put some urls in).

------
astrec
_Clearly our users are choosing our competitors because they have better
features and more customization options_

How do you know? Did you ask? It doesn't sound to me like you asked: Go ask.

~~~
eddmc
Agree with this point, and here's a suggestion about one way of doing this.

You have a set of users who you believe are now using a competitor. Put a
survey together specifically for these users. You need to ask them a mixture
of questions about your product, and how you compare to your competition. Ask
them a mixture of fact-based questions (yes/no, select from this drop down
etc) and opinion based questions (both free text, and of the form: very
satisfied, satisfied, dissatisfied, very dissatisfied)

Once you've got your survey together, email it to a proportion of these users
- maybe 30% of them. In your email, take the approach of... we are beta and
are requesting feedback from users on our product and service etc. Keep the
email short. Tell them the survey is 10 questions long and should only take 2
minutes to complete (both of these points need to be true!)

Take the view that a 5% response rate is a good response rate (anything over
that is a real bonus). Monitor for a few days, maybe a week. See whether the
answers to your questions are of any use at all - your questions could come
across as lame or open to mis-interpretation. If you are getting problems like
that, make some adjustments to your questions. Then email it out to the other
70% of users.

Hopefully you now have some useful information on where you can improve.

What have you got to lose?

~~~
jerf
That's one way. There's another, even better way: _Ask_. Ideally, talky-talky
over the phone, if you can get it. Direct, personal, simple emails if not.

~~~
astrec
This is more along the lines of what I was thinking.

I'd normally call, get as close to the decision maker as is possible (not
always easy in big companies), tell them you're sorry that you weren't up to
snuff, then LISTEN.

It's amazing what comes out of these conversations: Your product might be
slow, missing a feature, their general counsel might have had reservations
your startup, your account management might suck, the decision maker might
play golf with the CEO of the other company etc. etc.

Your guess that your _users are choosing our competitors because they have
better features and more customization options_ is correct in only one of
these cases. You're doing a startup: You don't have time to fix problems your
customers don't have. So ask.

------
dolinsky
I'm currently getting the following error when I try to view your site:

    
    
      Over Quota
    
      This Google App Engine application is temporarily over its serving quota. Please try again later.
    

That can't be good for business.

~~~
masonhensley
& it redirects to "<http://www.zuupy.com/> if that helps.

edit: *Never mind, it was intentional per the message below to prevent
indexing

~~~
dolinsky
Yeah, the redirect works, but when I get to zuppy.com I see that error.

------
Luyt
<http://www.fezzl.com> results in a page saying:

 _Over Quota

This Google App Engine application is temporarily over its serving quota.
Please try again later._

Not a good impression, if you ask me.

------
lazylland
The first thing to do is to shake of the "feeling" about your product. Don't
forget about the fact that you have been able to get customers pay for some
value you created.

Secondly, follow "nudge's" advice of picking a niche. No product can be all
things to all people.

All the best, and soldier on ..

------
alinajaf
Sounds like a tough position to be in. I'm not sure that outright ignoring
your major competitor is such a great idea. You could perhaps use them to
differentiate yourself in the eyes of your customers?

For example I'm currently working on a language learning app that will be a
direct competitor to (what once was) smart.fm. When I discovered their app (a
long way into my project) I was at a loss because they have millions in
funding and an army of developers.

I realized that their approach to language learning is prescriptive, i.e. they
decide what you should learn. To differentiate myself from them, I'd have to
go for the opposite approach, in other words, provide a much more exploratory
experience for my users. There are a number of other fights I could have
picked, but this is something that my users wanted and an easy way to set
myself apart from my big hulking competitor.

Is there some fight along these lines that you can pick with them? Could you
perhaps play the less/simpler features card instead of trying to compete on
features? Is it that their marketing is just better?

------
troels
Engage with lost customers and ask them what made them leave and what would
make them come back.

------
skrebbel
Genuine (almost entirely off-topic) question: why the _indirect_ link?

~~~
fezzl
We don't really want to be indexed by Google for _this_ thread.

~~~
pbreit
You need to stop trying to be so clever and get back to business basics. Make
a product that people want. Tell them about it in clear language. Delight them
when they sign up. Have a conversation with them. Make the product better.

And for goodness sake, feed the hamsters in your servers.

------
foobarbazetc
Build a better product. Pretend they don't exist.

~~~
quanticle
There is no such thing as "better". There is only "better than". In this case,
the OP is asking how he or she can build a product that is better than his or
her competitor. In that context, pretending the competition doesn't exist is
only burying your head in the sand.

~~~
pbreit
I emphatically disagree. As pg says all the time, don't worry about your
competition. Worry about your customers and yourself. Make a product that
people want. Continue making it better.

And get a server that can handle a small influx of HN traffic. Jeepers.

------
alexanderedge
There's no alternative, you must build a better product.

~~~
dmitri1981
Very true. Though, the crux of the matter lies in what exactly does better
mean. Another commenter made the great point that you should try speaking to
find out why they left. Also, it is worth keeping in mind that if you are
competing against an army of developers, you need to be super careful about
what you put your efforts into. This will make you focus on the most crucial
features and usability issues, which in longer term (if you make it) could be
a blessing in disguise.

------
RandallBrown
Figure out how you can differentiate from them. If you can't beat them feature
to feature because you don't have the dev team then don't. Either fix a
problem that they currently don't or just focus on something like usability
and customer experience.

------
revorad
Go out on the streets and talk directly to SMBs to acquire new customers.

Does your competitor offer data export? Offer free data import and huge
discounts to their customers if they move to you.

Target businesses already featured on Groupon or other big daily deal sites.
If they had successful runs with those, they will now have an email list they
can advertise to directly.

Focus on one type of business?

Keep building a kickass product.

Stop blogging for a nerd audience. Blog about your customers' interests.
Interview them. Get them featured on popular daily deal blogs like yipit's or
Rocky Agrawal's (the guy who recently ripped groupon to pieces).

------
Tichy
Would it be possible to ask some of them why they are switching. Could be some
stupid issue.

------
TuaAmin13
just do our thing, engage with our users, and reiterate until product/market
fit

^^ This.

It seems like you haven't considered the possibility that your users who
haven't "jumped ship" so to speak actually use something that your competitor
can't provide. You just have to figure out what that something is. Build a
bunch of tests and try to gather data on what that something is.

Don't try to copy the competition. That difference could be your
distinguishing characteristic.

~~~
iqster
"Don't try to copy the competition. That difference could be your
distinguishing characteristic."

I thought this was interesting because it reminded me of Facebook's changes to
their newsfeed a while ago. At that time, a number of people (incl. myself)
cried that this seemed to be copying Twitter, and that Facebook shouldn't
change. I don't know if Facebook was merely doing their own thing rather than
responding to Twitter. Regardless, it seems what they did worked out.

~~~
TuaAmin13
Well, there's also something to be said about convergence and overall
direction the market is heading. Touchscreen features? Everyone has them, but
they got to that after coming from different directions, and they're all being
adapted to different interfaces. Perhaps Facebook came across the newsfeed
from a different direction than Twitter's stream, but it ends up looking the
same because it's the round peg to fit in the hole.

------
sapper2
I get a "This webpage is not availableThe server at www.youtube.com...". That
looks unprofessional.

Get some free website monitoring at alertfox or pingdom.

This will not solve your main problem, but having a reliable website is a
prerequisite for any success. For many users, especially website owners - your
customers - such a "bug" makes the website look abandoned.

------
endtime
Knowing about competitors who beat you to market, have traction, and have an
'army of developers' is probably something to do before you build a product.

At this point all you can do is work on your product. Maybe you can find a
pain point of people using your competitor and cater to the users who are
chafing under that pain point.

------
mpunaskar
Add free survey widget by kiss metrics and ask visitors what do they want from
your web app. This way you'll be able get insights from visitors

Get it here : <http://www.kissinsights.com/>

------
antihero
The logo looks an awful lot like twitter's.

------
suking
I would find a new business model - your competitor already has a ton of
traction and after seeing Groupon's numbers it isn't even that attractive.
Correct me if I'm wrong.

