A well-funded company just copied my product. What do I do?

I think we should start a club for IH'ers taking on well-funded companies :) I am in a similar situation and only a few months ahead of you so still figuring this out but here is what I got so far:

Differentiate & do what well-funded companies can't do:

Niche down - Can you focus on a specific industry, job role, spreadsheet use case, etc.,? <- They can't afford to do this but you can.

Be where they aren't - Generally, big companies take the large-scale launch/marketing approach. That always leaves all of the nooks & crannies open. Be in every one of them.

Focus - Own one marketing channel, solve for one specific use case, etc., etc.,

Either way, don't freak out. I think the excel spreadsheet target market is big enough for a few players!

P.S. - I FINALLY uninstalled Excel and now use Google Sheets exclusively. Am I an outlier or a trend?

Very sorry this happened. The whole competition game is an aspect of building a business I loathe. I was surprised that when I launched my app how many product designers of the big players signed up as some of the first people to check it out.

I am in the productivity space which is highly competitive. Personally, I just try not to think about it. My aim isn't to have a huge market share. Just make a nice living doing what I love. And the market is plenty big for that, most ANY market is plenty big for that. Just focus on growing as if they did not exist. There will be people that will find you first.

You can try to differentiate a bit by focusing on a niche or doing marketing in a way they are not doing. The other Indiehackers offered some great suggestions. Best of success!

How much time did you spend on customer development vs. building features in those 2 years? It doesn't make much sense to me that you've been in the market for that long and suddenly a competitor will come in and get all the success just because their product looks better.

Bro first relax, because I think you are going to have fun doing this now. Read my experience and try to implement it.

First sit back and relax and don't worry. They are big and well funded it's their plus point but at the same time it's their weekness too. They report to investors you to none. How better it could be.

• Never bad mouth them. NEVER. Even if they do you should not bad mouth them. Keep it highly professional. Mention your "note" verbally to people but do not give it in writing to anyone.

• Make your product match theirs in terms of feature and quality. UI they can be better but make your functionalities good. I should get what they have from you. Forget the other unwanted features.

• Check what their cost is and reduce yours. Don't take a loss but just trim your profit margin a bit. Make it look attractive to your prospective customer. Avoid price war at any cost. If they are smart they would know they can't reduce their price because they are big.

• Offer great and personalised customer support. Your CS team exp should be like friends talking to each other to solve their problems.

• Try to look for one USP which you can implement to beat them. It could be a feature or something operational.

• Try giving great experience while the project is in the trial plan (if you have).

• Have option to chat with your users. You can use Intercom's startup plan here.

• Have a decent website. Focus on SEO and organic traffic. You can't beat them on adwords so don't try.

• Have a nice blog with good quality content and try to make the website spear in front page for google search.

• Have a comparison page on your website which compares your product with theirs. Keep it unbiased but at the same time accentuate your strengths and USP. Ensure this comparison page appears when people spefically search for your competitors name and not for any other keywords. You can use swords for this one thing. Keep the cost low.

• Try getting into this full time if you can. It will help you in multiple ways.

I hope this helps and all the best.

I work in finance and regularly have to assess people's excel skills when hiring. When I myself interview, companies always assess my skills too. This is a pain in the ass to have to administer. If I were you, I'd focus on people like me.

Edit: I should also note that when I was in business school, they required us to take a semester long course on excel. 90% of students didn't care and would just copy off me. They couldn't do a simple vlookup at graduation. So I would challenge your assumption that people would actually want to pay for help learning excel. This was 10 years ago so maybe the world has changed, but the data I get from interviewing points toward most people still sucking at excel (but everyone thinks they are a rock star, which is why we have to test them).

Your biggest weapon will probably be willingness and ability to focus on a niche. A well funded company will have to justify any deployed capital by diving into big enough market to get returns.

Go super niche and build out a company / brand from there.

I'd assume there is space for more than 1 spreadsheet education company on the internet.

There are tons of ways you can differentiate: target audience, use-cases, pricing model (not necessarily cheaper), customer support, custom courses, etc.

From my experience, competition is rarely the reason a project doesn't succeed. Unless of course Google decides to take over your industry and offer a free product...

If anything, you can use them for inspiration. They're probably better at copywriting, design, seo, or one of many other angles. Analyze, learn, copy.

Any market big enough to warrant the attention of a "big" player has room for competition. There are many reasons why customers pick one product over the other. A personal example:

I needed recordings of how users browse and interact with my website. I went to Segment and clicked on the "Heatmaps and recordings" category. They have eight products listed!!! I created trial accounts on half of them and after a few buttons clicks on Segment, my data was going to all four of them. I patiently watched user recordings on each one, got a feel for the user experience and features, and checked out the pricing. I picked one product. Team size, VC funding, ad budget, and SEO had no bearing on it. When you're listed on Segment, everyone's on equal ground and product quality and pricing are the only things that matter!

You should not worry and just keep outputting great content.

If I want to learn about it, I would not stick to one source only. I try everything I can find that looks interesting, and if the content is good, that's where my money will go. Sometimes to more than one place.

So do not get discouraged! I am not a heavy spreadsheet user, but if I had stumbled upon both pages I would definitely try yours first. The fact that you are an indie hacker is even more compelling!! And I never heard of Datacamp before...

I know these are a bit biased opinions. But I can only try to encourage you! The first attack plan that comes to mind is to make your site appear high on Google searches! Tons of SEO tuts around...

Well, good luck... and keep it up :)

Hey Bryan, you can still make it, there are 100s of industries where there is space for more than one solution to a problem.

Even if it seems like a direct competitor, I'm sure you still have a compelling and different offering, they also help you validate your idea, for free!

Just keep grinding, if you're worried if they "look better" just make sure you highlight how great your offer is and try keep your existing customers even happier so that they keep spreading the word.

So they wanted to work with you to create this product and since you declined they went ahead and made one themselves? Wow man, sorry to hear that. But my advice would be not to give up, you can still make a great product and compete.

Competition is good, it will make you work harder and smarter. I wrote a piece on this: https://competitors.app/startup/start-new-business-many-competitors-market/

Your only move would be to turn your smallness into an advantage (unless you plan on getting funding and building a team etc).

I'm a one man show, and my niche has a few already well established competitors with solid products. Here's what I think are my advantages:

1. I'm very low maintenance, and my product is too. As long as I can scrape up an extra $50/month for the servers, I'm game, and that's the fancy tier for now, I could always go back to the $15/m one. My competitors have 100-500 employees each. It may sound crazy, but I bet I could steal some of their customers by offering them for free the ultimate packages that BigCo charges them $200/m, and I could keep doing that for years. I'd love to see a 300 person company try that.

2. I might be faster than them, and you probably might be faster too. In your company, you're the CEO, the board of directors, the investors, all the management and all the employees. When you think of a feature, you start working on it on Wednesday and you have a working prototype Sunday (more or less, at least that's how it is for me). No need to go through all the hoops. Sure, it won't be 100% tested, but you will get it done fast and might lock in some early adopter love. You want to stay creative here though, keep an eye on them but try to push your own stuff more as that will give you an edge.

3. I get to say fuck it. If they fail, they fail big. If I fail, I don't have a hobby until the next obsession that hits me. That's good because I can risk more, and that kind of guerilla attitude is scary to everyone, everyone fears someone who has nothing to lose. Find a way to take advantage of that, there must be an angle in your niche too.

Had this happened to me as well. Wasn’t nice feeling to have and that was close to 5 years ago.

Part of the issue with taking on professional capital is that VCs expect you to scale fast or die.

That happened to the startups came to the same space and died over the past 5 years.

The main cause off death can be attributed to too high a burn rate before finding actual market fit was achieved.

The main lesson I learned from the experience as well as listening to what both Reid Hasting, Guy Kawasaki and Paul Graham said is that when attacked, retreat and double down even more vehemently on your core competence. Learn from what they did successfully, learn more from how they failed, otherwise do you best to ignore them.

Do things everyday to get your customers to love your product even more

I was watching Shark Tank one night and a company came on with an almost identical product to mine. They received funding from Mark Cuban and Chris Sacca (and have later raised a total of $10m I believe). It was a big moment for my two person startup. Do we continue as the "David" in the story? Or do we throw in the towel.

We decided to continue and to be honest, not a single customer we have spoken to has ever mentioned their product. We are in Canada and the competitor is in the States which likely helps. But the important part is to remember there is space for many competitors in every industry. Also, just because you know about competitor X, doesn't know your customer does. Just be the better company... just have the better product and you'll succeed.

Congrats! This is actually one of the best things that can happen to a smaller product. Sure, it means there will be more competition and prospective users will ask "why use this when x exists." But, it provides a bit of market validation.

More and more people are seeing a market in your area, so, find a niche, market to them and own that portion. At the end of the day, if you have something that works and you support it better than the big guys in a category with demand things ussually work out.

Well I say hooray! You just got funded! Listen - if you think your going to make money with unique ideas as an indie your wrong. They have not copied you they just had your idea. There site is nothing great - it's not mailchimp or stripe. It's just a nice template start up theme. You need to step your game UP. They have money and that money is visible - So. Get all over there product, Watch what they do and copy the SHIT out of it - for FREE! It's a big world and a big market. Mc Donnald's don't own the buger market. Nike don't own the trainer market. Evaluate your product and your USP. Be straight with yourself do you have something to offer. Business's are not built by products they are built by people. You are a person what is your strength? Get on the phone and online and sell that. Your doing great - someone else loves your idea so much they are throwing money at it - Stand in the rain and make it rain. Good luck!

Just posted this because freaked out too: https://saaspnr.io/saas-competition/

First things first, this sucks. No matter how big or small your company is, it absolutely sucks when a competitor comes in that appears to be better funded, better connected, and better suited for your market.

Next... and I'm a blunt person so I'll try to tailor my response to be a bit softer.

2 years is an inordinate amount of time and resources to pour into an MVP. The best way to figure out if this is something the market needs is to get it into the hands of potential customers. The rate of change in technology happens way too fast to spend 2 years on something that could be obsolete in 1.

Now the bottom line is, it doesn't matter. Execution is what wins at the end of the day. Myspace got railed by Facebook. Blockbuster/Netflix, Couchsurfing/Airbnb. The list is long and the graveyard is full of startups that were better funded and lost to nimble, more innovative startups.

Lastly, winner take all markets don't exist as much anymore. There's room for Uber and Lyft. Find another differentiator, another moat, and create value for your customers and you will be fine.

Without having any knowledge on the niche, I'd say Excel tutorials are a niche with more than just you and that well-funded company.

There are probably gazillions of sites doing random Excel tutorials or more organized courses, you always had competition in the last 2 years, this new one is just yet another company, and 50 more will join you this year (just guessing).

It's up to you to find your own space in that niche, like you did until now, keep going!

What is your background? How did you become good with spreadsheets?

I am asking because I agree with others that said you have to niche down.

Look, some people learn to use spreadsheets because they know they have to. Those people may not know why excel is better.

But in some areas, finance for instance, google is not a competitor. Find this niche. Instead of just spreadsheets, spreadsheets for (fill the blank).

That being said, you are forgetting about information asymmetry. You know about your competition, prospects may not.

Think how are they marketing the app. Who is the audience. Look for different places.

And as other pointed out, do what they want do. For example, 1 on 1 sessions or whatever.

You are way cheaper so you still have a point of differentiation.

You could look even cheaper by going on a monthly subscription.
You currently have a 59$ one-time fee, so you could go with a 9$/month, at first it seems cheaper, but after 7 months you've earnt more.

Of course, you'll need to add more courses otherwise your customers will finish them all within the first month. But on the other hand, you would probably have more customers, so I would even guess a revenue increase.

Yes, it can be discouraging when someone launches something similar but seeing as they are well funded, take it as someone else validating the domain.

Can you offer better personal customer service? Monitor social media to see what people are disliking/liking about their offering. You could use this to find your edge.

Maybe a little off topic, but the copyright notice on the bottom of your site still says 2017. For me, that is usually an indicator of an abandoned project. Might be a good idea to update that as well.

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