What do you do when a company replicates your product and give it away for free?
I have been working on zohunt.com for a while now and recently learned that a company in India is building an applicant tracking software to help grow their other products.
According to the founder, the product is free and they will only make money if the customers buy their other products.
Example; if a company uses the free applicant tracking system to recruit a new talent, they will upsell them on other products such as background check software, HR software, etc.
What will you do if such a thing happens to you, make your product free as well? Reduce price or act like nothing happened?
I believe there is plenty of ATS in the market. Just focus on your product. You will do just fine.
Just a heads up, the "See an example" button on the landing page took me to a blank page. Using Chrome.
It's irrelevant.
First, not everybody will hear about this Indian company.
Second, if you solution is better, you will find people buying it. There are tens of free photoshop alternatives, but they are still doing pretty well. The same goes for the office suite and many other product. Books are still being sold even if you can find the same content for free on blogs, youtube and so on. Spotify is still there even if it's easy to download music for free. And I coukd go on and on.
If their product is better than you have a problem but this woukd be true even if their solution were paid.
I'll add my voice to those who say "just make your product better, or provide functionality that they don't." Or, you could position your product to target a different group of people that their free offering does.
Years ago I downloaded FlightGear, a free and open-source flight simulator. I quickly decided to buy Microsoft Flight Simulator X (FSX), because FlightGear just didn't deliver. I can't remember the price, other than that it was over $100. Either way, there's a huge difference between $0 and $100, and I willingly paid for FSX.
It's entirely possible to compete with free products.
It seems that plenty of other options already exist in this space, so I would focus on how your product is different from your current competition (that could be price, niche, unique feature, UX, etc). It could take the India company 12 months to launch their free version or they could end up dropping it completely.
Also, just a heads up that under "How It Works", the second two tabs don't pull anything up.
Unrelated but you missed a v in the tab "Ealuate and Hire Better" on your landing page
Talk to 10 people who should use your product. What do they value? If they just want a cheaper product, you might need to find new customers. If they value support, features, or consulting, you can still win.
Google Analytics is free. How do any of the other analytics companies make money? Look at that example.