Ask HN: What do you do when competition signs up for your service?

I would say it is unavoidable; you can kick them off but then they will sign back on with something you cannot identify. I myself always try to communicate with them and see if there is room for cooperation. You would be surprised how much we got from that. Notably companies we thought were far more advanced (size, sale or feature wise) than we are and finding out they are not. And in one occasion we ended up buying them because they were incompletely over their heads and were trying our system to see if we had the same issue (we did not).

At least they're being honest. Product people at a company I used to work for about 8 years ago would make calls to competitors pretending to be an interested client, and gather details about their offerings from their sales people.

Pretend you never saw it, and take it as a compliment. If you ack that you know thh hh is, you may be tempted to peek into customer information that you have no right to mine for competitive intel. Worse, they might be somehow leading you on about which features they use, etc, as part of a deception campaign.

C'est la vie. Focus on building your product.

Be glad you were able to identify them. I would’ve used a personal email with fake info.

    (a-10) For purposes of subsection (a), accessing a computer network is deemed to be with the authorization of a computer's owner if:
        (1) the owner authorizes patrons, customers, or guests to access the computer network and the person accessing the computer network is an authorized patron, customer, or guest and complies with all terms or conditions for use of the computer network that are imposed by the owner;

    (b) Sentence.
        (1) A person who commits computer tampering as set forth in subdivision (a)(1) or (a)(5) or subsection (a-5) of this Section is guilty of a Class B misdemeanor.
        (2) A person who commits computer tampering as set forth in subdivision (a)(2) of this Section is guilty of a Class A misdemeanor and a Class 4 felony for the second or subsequent offense.

Every competitor that has signed up for any service I've been involved with has tried to hack us. Whether it's something relatively benign like some querystring manipulation, or something interesting like an elasticsearch zero-day, they all try.

This is a good time to think about security. Can they find competitive information in your urls (you use sequential customer ids?)? Are there areas not locked down?

Remember their IP addresses and cookies, and do a scan of your logs in a month.

Still, it's not worth the trouble of kicking them out. Fake emails are a dime-a-dozen.

I don't quite understand. You have a public product that anyone can sign up for, and it turns out some people signed up for it. You don't get to pick and choose your customers.

You make it sound like you aren't checking out what your competitors are doing. Why not? They probably have some good ideas that you can try to implement better than they have.

This should be considered perfectly normal :)

Usually a competitor would disguise themselves but in any case, you're a publicly accessible service, if you're doing something right you should assume competitors are going to take a peek.

Maybe you too should take a look at what they are doing, but otherwise keep "keeping on".

Be happy! You have gotten big enough for someone to care enough about you to include your company in their competitor analysis. I reckon most founders don't get that far.

Post about it on HN, free publicity to a relevant audience that won't feel like advertising.

Kidding. Just look at it as a sign that you've made it. You're now on the radar. Get back to work and stay ahead.

Yes, this is normal.

I have even seen non-Saas competitors sign up under false pretense, names, new emails- and get private demos, special trials, and so on.

Here, their honesty is a positive point.

If I were you, I would even reach out to them for direct feedback. They are paying customers, and you are the provider, and you are within your rights to reach out to them.

It will be a show of good sportsmanship.

Five minutes spent thinking about this question is five minutes you could have been talking to customers instead.

If you have not done this to them, then consider this your first opportunity to learn from a competitor.

Others have commented here that this is normal, but since you're surprised about this, here's some actionable advice (as someone that's worked in very competitive spaces):

1) You should be doing the same thing. If you're not on top of the competition, they will chew you up, especially if they're better funded.

2) When you're doing your own competitive research, watch out for EULAs and ToS -- they're typically not enforceable (or very expensive to enforce), but many of them explicitly disallow this kind of thing. Use fake addresses.

3) Make sure your EULAs and ToS have similar provisions. Again, these are very difficult to enforce, but consider them as very cheap defence-in-depth.

4) Restrict your most innovative features (while they're in beta) to whitelisted user accounts. Again, not a perfect solution, but defence-in-depth.

Being a founder in a competitive space requires wartime thinking. As shitty as it is, your competitors are breaking rules and violating laws all over the place.

At least you can snoop on what they are trying out. If they had used some disguised email, you wouldn't have this information.

Years ago I found a niche on creative editing, checked all editors and found these lacked a good visual tool. After several months of work released the first no-code tool in this niche. About a year later competitors arrived, one from Asia and another from Brazil. They made simpler copies of my tool, but got something right that I didn't understand previously: users wanted pre-designed assets and scenes. They also had communities already created to support with installs and ratings. Didn't get annoyed at this, I could still build a better tool and copy their ideas. I would be annoyed if a large company was the one smashing my app. In some way they contributed to my way of thought teaching me something valuable on user needs and promotion.

I'm signed up for all of my competitor products. It's pretty normal I assume.

One word: Recruit!

They’re being transparent, I think that’s really respectful.

It's a game of chess, not poker.

What do you do now? What do you show them? There's many win conditions.

Sign up for their service in return, tell them, may the best man win. Think also that winning is for the benefit of your customers, and for each competitor to be the best possible.

As long as you're not competing directly against yourself ie. stolen IP, it'll be fine. On that note, you ought to conceal some amount of your source in some way.

Don't be completely open source, have some small thing that can't be copied. The intent of being open source counts. One good way to do this is to have a more efficient algorithm than what's available publicly (talk to me) and then your open source offering has the regular algorithm, but your closed source advantage is a much more efficient algorithm that represents a competitive advantage. Like say multiplication, simple example, suppose you're working with crypto and want fast multiplication, if you can do it faster with some hot algo, you aren't forced to share that, users copying your source can use the run-of-the-mill algorithm. It's the same thing, exact same thing, same input same output, just that you happen to have a faster algo you keep to yourself. You don't even have to tell people! Still open source! Anybody can run all the code!

Because it's strictly necessary to have IP, or tech if you want to call it tech, that can't be copied directly and trivially. Mark Lemley at Stanford says so in his IP law class: "Suppose there's two competitors, one does all the work of creating or inventing something new. The other just copies it. Costs nothing, it's a sure thing. I'd love to be that guy!" It's not as unreasonable as the internet makes it seem.

So you just have to know the system because there are gotchas, like with any law that tries to be fair. So for one, for USPTO, deadlines are deadlines. Death. You missed the deadline? You cannot ask forgiveness for your mistake, they're completely unsympathetic (and it's because people try to hack them so hard). So actually becoming familiar with IP law, and then routing your business in the direction of what you can protect.

Analog is another form of protection, that's very common in high-precision manufacturing in Germany, basically you have an industrial Excalibur in your factory that your competitors don't have.

And what I would do is, sign up to your competitor's service in return, and try it out. Also: try to differentiate somehow. I created a theorematic pricing algorithm and the idea was you just can't charge the same price as a bunch of other people, you have to be different, undercut or mark up, whatever it takes to be alone in the price curve. And when you do go up or down, adjust your product accordingly and according to the specific needs of customers who want to pay that price for it.

That algo is also for sale.

I’ve seen this before with a startup I started years ago. in a few years we were acquired by that competitor :)

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