What do you do when competition strikes?

Double down ofcourse. Or look for more ideas here :)

That should be a good news. That probably mean you are in the right direction because the big company also want to be on the same direction.

You need to understand that the big player usually don't focus that much on side new project, because it is not their money machine and also they unable to move as fast as you do because of corporates bs. The person behind the project also don't care about the success of the project as you do and most of the time not even competent to do the job.

You need to find all the places that the big player not promoting and get there and promote them as fast as you could. Be as close to the user as you could. Make new feature and iterate as fast as you could. Go to their posting and if you see people interested with the product, dm them beg them to try yours.

Write more blogs on that topic and product. You can use creativeblogotopic.com to quickly automate seo research and get the best topic and keywords to rank higher on search for the business.

The only problem is if the big player is solopreneur and indiehacker. If he is big player and a solopreneur thats mean he know what to do, he can do fast and he is very competent. That will be very hard to compete with.

Good Luck to you, If I were you I will fight the competition because where ever you go competition will be there. At least you know the market is there.

Double down.

Adapt and stay competitive. It wouldn't be a competition if you just gave up.

Little harder if a big player jumps in the space, but I find that there's usually plenty of users to go around as long as you're on top of things.

I notice that there's a lot of people out there (including myself) who'd prefer to use a more specialized platform that does a few things well vs a big player platform that has 25 other tools and services.

There's plenty of alternate options/competitors to findcool.tools, so I ensure I'm learning from what everyone else is doing and try to do it better or put a different spin on it.

Double up.

Find ways to differentiate your product.

Avoid differentiating in price because that's just a race to the bottom, which you won't win. Instead, focus on a different niche, or add a unique feature, or emphasise your personal customer service.

Also - get some testimonials and case studies from the 1K people who thought your product was a hit. Ask them why it was so much of a hit.

Ask a few of them to compare your product with the competitor's and ask for their honest views on the comparison.

I had a similar problem a couple weeks ago. I've been building a specialised web development course for the last few months (will hopefully officially announce it soon!), and I saw that a well-respected figure in the industry is also creating a course that overlaps with pretty significantly with mine.

With that said, I reached out to him personally and told him what I'm doing, where it seems our courses overlap, and where they diverge. He responded pretty positively, review the course introduction I sent over to him, and he even suggested having a link to my course in his course's "next steps" section. Whether this gambit proves positive for both of us is up in the air.

I also recognise that him and I are both independent creators, and he's not a huge corporate player, so I probably wouldn't reach out if I saw a large company like Google do something similar.

I recently built a tool specifically to track competitors and their updates https://rivalhunt.co. As everyone else said here, it's always good that there is competition for your product and you should focus mostly on your own product. But it's still very important to see the direction that everyone else is taking to make sure that you understand the market and its needs.

The good thing about competition is that you know there is a market. It's probably harder to sell a new idea to a market that doesn't yet exist than it is to choose an existing market with established companies.

I would consider the following points to win:

1. make sure the product is really good and has a good user experience.
2. create lot of free, valuable content related to the product, e.g. whole strategies and step-by-step guides about the issue you solve (if you don't have a huge marketing budget for advertisement).
3. Do cold calls and emails

Competition, schmompetition.

Competition is only determined by the size of the dog. By 'dog', I mean the size of your operation. If the competitor is in the growth phase while you're in the MVP phase, for example, there's a difference in both the offer and the messaging. They've already figured out what you're trying to figure out.

If you both are the scale stage, then it becomes about who can spend the most to acquire a customer.

Honestly, I look at competitors as an opportunity to pull the frustrated customers they have with a better fitting product/service.

Look at what they're doing poorly, and put focus on that. Go to where they are, and build good will by directly addressing those unmet needs.

Build in a way that they can't afford to, or aren't designed to do. Care about the little details that the users /actually care about/. Companies often build products that /look/ like the right thing but feel off. Do it right.

If you products are the same, where you can differentiate is branding. Good branding can bring trust and loyalty, so you go for that.