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Ask HN: My competitors have flawed products but I can't get traction

5•saveitincork•21h ago
Problem: I constantly save Instagram Reels/TikToks about restaurants, events, pop-ups, and things to do, but I always forget about them because they get buried in my saves.

Solution: I built Cork. You can send a Reel or Tiktok directly to Cork without even needing to leave the app, and Cork will automatically extract the info in the reel and save it in a map + calendar.

However, I've been finding it hard to get traction while my competitors have gotten traction/funding. I strongly believe my app outperforms all known competitors (their apps fail on reels of popular creators while mine succeeds).

I'm not here for pity or to advertise, but I'm curious why people ship products that don't work for a pretty significant number of inputs when the teams are big enough (employees + funding) to pretty easily solve the problem in a cheap way (as I've done) or at least have a temporary high-performing solution with GPT.

TL;DR: imo my app outperforms competitors in raw performance. why is a team with manpower and funding failing to do something a 2 person team did in a month?

Comments

kcsavvy•3h ago
I think you should be open to the idea that your competitors are not competing with you in the way you think they are. They may be fighting (and winning) elsewhere. Fundraising, customer acquisition, specific use cases, communities, niches, etc. Also, they might be losing. From the outside every company wants to look successful - raising money, hiring, growing, etc. The real story is almost never told, so you can’t assume much from the outside.
cheevly•2h ago
This is a great answer.
Ethee•3h ago
The actual 'performance' of the product is usually the last thing that matters to the consumer. People happily put up with all sorts of bullshit while complaining about how bad the product is usually for a number of reasons. A lot of engineers get trapped in the idea that if your product is simply less enshittified than all the competition then they should win the product market battle. But product marketing has little to do with those things and more to do with getting the product in front of actual users and making the user imagine using your product every day. We're in an attention economy, if you can't grab a users attention then your product means nothing.
erelong•2h ago
Try different marketing approach
fragmede•1h ago
First off: congratulations on shipping! Most never get there.

Genuinely: Who cares about saving reels? Or less bluntly, who are your potential customers and where are you advertising to reach them? Instagram itself is hugely popular, but the general population of Instagram users won't and don't care about saving reels. So either you teach them to (a la the story about the first shopping carts), or you find users who already want to, but don't have a tool for that yet, or are using a competitor's tool. Having not given it a ton of thought, creators themselves would want (and be willing to pay) for you're service. Play up the issue of if their account gets hacked or suspended by Instagram itself, they'll lose access to their reels and stories and posts, so use your service to get an off-site backup. Do you have AdWords setup so you come up when potential users search for your competition? Don't answer this, but what's your targeted/projected CAC (customer acquisition cost) vs LTV(lifetime value of a customer). You probably want to double or triple your ad-spend, but that'll raise CAC, so you want to have a examination of LTV before you commit to that.

Etc.

Contact a marketing agency for more in-depth specific help.

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