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Ask HN: How do you compete with an established company like Twitter or Meta?

1 points by blindprogrammer ↗ HN
Let’s say you create a Twitter competitor with the same functionality but some improvements in areas they either don’t currently address or haven't yet recognized as problematic.

How do you compete with them as a small startup when they can simply incorporate any improvements your app or service offers? Since they already possess an established brand, they can render your startup's differentiating aspect irrelevant.

People often mention the MySpace vs. Facebook battle from two decades ago, highlighting how Facebook succeeded as the underdog. However, in today's landscape, most startups are highly sensitive to any threats and tend to appropriate anything that could make a competitor relevant in the marketplace.

MySpace could have easily crushed Facebook by implementing everything the young Facebook was doing at that time, strengthening their brand while making their upcoming competitor irrelevant.

So, how can your startup compete when larger companies can easily adopt your differentiating features?

Sometimes, I contemplate starting a niche-market startup to assist certain people. However, upon further consideration, I realize that as soon as it gains popularity, these corporate giants will swoop in, incorporating my features (without compensation, of course) into their already popular apps.

I recall the individual who created the flashlight app for the early iPhone days. When Apple recognized the value of this functionality, they simply integrated it into the operating system, essentially bankrupting the developer behind the flashlight app.

So, what are your thoughts on this?

6 comments

[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 172 ms ] thread
Group_B
just do whatever tik tok did. Honest answer for 99.99% of people is that you simply cannot compete at the same level that the big guys compete at. Literally no matter what you do.
version_five
Maybe not head to head, but you can definitely compete. Facebook has tried at least twice to materialize communities out of nothing (threads and metaverse), and they fail because it's not organic, they inherit all the bad stuff that comes with scale and none of the good stuff they organically leads to scale. We were talking about someone being imaginary groped in the metaverse and what kind of censorship it should have before anyone actually used it.

Twitter is the same, Musk bought it and drove it over a cliff.

Create a cool community and you can easily compete with those two.

chiefalchemist
But that's the point, you're not actually competing. You're finding space to the left or right of their focus and you're picking up their leftovers.

Is it possible to grow that niche into something larger that eventually competes for the same attention poll? Yeah. That would be TikTok. But TT is also very much an outlier.

That aside, it's possible to be very successful and not necessarily scale to FB, X or TT size. You can be a niche product / platform and do well. Maybe not Musk or Zuck fuck you money well, but well enough to not sweat the small stuff.

tourmalinetaco
Your best bet would be to not compete at all. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t make your product if you truly believe it can be successful, but know that neither Xitter/Facebook make any actual money from their social media services. Xitter has never been profitable and Facebook only makes money from their malvertising. Instead, try to find a dedicated userbase and build your app around their needs in a way that is first-and-foremost sustainable as a business.
tuga
Exactly my thoughts about this.
fragmede
The fact that you didn't mention Threads speaks volumes.

But what you need is desktop accessibility (which Threads doesn't have. Instagram is a mobile-first picture-focused app, and doesn't need it. but I'd much rather type on a keyboard than use my phone), and a giant pile of money, from which you pay people to post content exclusively to your app (which Threads hasn't done). From there, you get influencers to pump out screenshots on the existing apps, making it seem like the conversation is happening there and that they're missing out by not being on your platform. Finally, in order for people to want to use it, there needs to be some sort of a new hook. You can't do E2E encryption because Signal did that so it's table stakes at this point. It can't be auto-deleting and no screenshotting because Snapchat already did that one. And so on.

It's an interesting problem!