A bigger rival just started using the words my product is built on. I think it's good news.
For a year the pitch for AI Applyd has been one sentence: an application isn't sent until the company's own system confirms it. You pick the job, we fill in the form on the employer's careers page, send it, and bring back the employer's confirmation.
This week a much bigger app in my category added a line to its feature page promising confirmation every time an application is received, through receipts.
My first reaction was the one you'd expect. My second, a few hours later, is that this is the best thing that has happened to my positioning all year.
Here's why.
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It means buyers are asking. Nobody adds a line to a feature page that customers aren't asking for. I've been arguing that "submitted" and "received" are different things. Now the market leader is saying it too, to an audience many times mine.
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It moves the fight from words to proof. Anyone can write "confirmation". The question a buyer can now ask is short: whose system wrote the receipt? The tool's, or the company's? That question used to need a paragraph of explaining. Now it's already in the buyer's head.
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It tells me what to stop saying. If they can say a line truthfully, it isn't a positioning line any more. So every line on our site now goes through one test: could they say this? If yes, it isn't ours.
What I'm doing next is showing instead of saying. The words are shared now. The employer's own confirmation isn't.
The part I haven't worked out: how do you make "our receipt is the real one" land without naming the other company and without sounding petty? A comparison page is the obvious answer, and also the most defensive-looking one.
Has a bigger player ever started using your words? What did you do?
I build AI Applyd: https://aiapplyd.com?ref=indiehackers
I stopped trying to win the sentence and put the proof in the path instead. A one-screen after-send view that shows the employer's confirmation (redacted is fine) answers "whose receipt?" without a comparison page or naming anyone. Buyers remember the artifact; they forget feature-page lines. When I've been in that spot, "here's what you get back" beat "we're different" every time.
That is the better answer, and it beats mine because it does not ask the reader to hold two companies in their head at once.
We half have it already. After a send there is a record with the employer's own confirmation attached to it. It lives inside the account, so the only people who ever see it are the ones who already signed up. The proof is sitting behind the door it is supposed to open.
The thing I am stuck on is consent. Every confirmation belongs to a real person's real application, so publishing even a redacted one means asking them first. I would rather ask ten people than build a comparison page, so that is probably the next move.
Did you get permission for yours, or use one from your own account?
The picture didn't make it into the post, so here it is. Two rails leaving the same point, one lit at the far end: same words at the start, different evidence at the end.