When Competitors Are Nipping At Your Heels

Michele Hansen  0:00  
So we had kind of a wake up call this week.

Colleen Schnettler  0:04  
Oh, what happened?

Michele Hansen  0:07  
So we're looking at some of our competitors websites, and we realize either their employees don't have kids, or they don't care that their employees have kids or what, but they have gotten a lot more done this year than we have.

Colleen Schnettler  0:24  
Oh, okay. 

Michele Hansen  0:26  
I mean, we feel good about what we've gotten done considering everything. But it was definitely kind of a moment of, whoa, okay. Like, you know, should you know, we have this information now, like, should we do something with this knowing that some competitors are nipping at our heels a little closer than they were a year ago?

Colleen Schnettler  0:47  
So what does it mean for them to be nipping at your heels? Are they releasing new features? Are they like, what exactly did you see that made you go, Oh, we need to up our game.

Michele Hansen  0:58  
So it's, it's partly new features, I think it's one of the most visible things, there's also some administrative type features, like, you know, certain compliance, and certifications. And you know, it with this kind of thing, though, you know, you have that first moment, it's like, oh, like, they now support something that they didn't before that we do. And so that makes us tighter competitors. But also remembering that we compete on so many different levels. And like, we have no one true one to one competitor, um, which, which I think is good for us. And it was, the other thing is like, we don't really pay much attention to our competitors, which I think is somewhat unique. Um, you know, I get the sense that that most companies, if you ask them to how they divide their mental headspace, and research time, and all of that between their competitors and their customers, I'm gonna bet that most companies are somewhere around at 20 in favor of looking at what their competitors are doing, what their features are, what their pricing is, you know, what their marketing is, like, all those kinds of things. And then 20% on the customers, and even like, really great companies that are known for focusing on their customers, which most truly great companies are, are probably more like 5050. And I think we're more like 9010 in favor of listening to our customers and letting them guide our roadmap. And then it's really maybe only once or twice a year that we really check in on what our competitors are doing.

Colleen Schnettler  2:46  
Okay, so you were checking out some of your competitor sites? And like, what's your reaction? Are you concerned? Are you worried, you're gonna start? Are you seeing, are you seeing higher customer churn? Because people are going to your competitors for these additional features?

Michele Hansen  3:01  
No, that's the thing. And our growth is, you know, perfectly healthy, it's, you know, beyond a level that that we, you know, sort of, quote, unquote, need. And so all of that is healthy, and we're really busy. So we're not worried about it. And I think that's what I have been thinking a lot about is okay, you know, we have this moment of we have this new information. And whenever we get new information, there is there's the question of, what do we do with this information? And the answer to that question can be nothing, we don't do anything different. Which I think is an under appreciated answer. In business many times, and old boss of mine was sort of famous for, you know, his do nothing approach. Because, you know, we're not going to sort of run around like chickens with our heads cut off to launch a new feature. When, you know, it turns out that oh, well, the competitors pricing model is actually not as customer friendly as ours, and based on some other things are, it's very clear, they're going after a different market segment than we are. And maybe there's a small percentage of customers that view us as a one to one comparison, but it's really very few customers who do, but it's a tricky thing, right?

Colleen Schnettler  4:34  
Yeah, I can definitely see that. So I was talking to a friend the other day about his last SaaS, which did really well, he grew it and he sold it for a good chunk of money. But he was talking about like the emotional upheaval every time a competitor launched. And I thought that was really interesting, because that's got to be like, you don't know what to do. Should you implement these features like there's got to be a lot of tension there in terms of how you approach this kind of new information you have?

Michele Hansen  5:02  
Yeah, and and what I tend to think about is, when I get those feelings, I pull it back to Okay, what what are the dimensions that we are truly competing on? And how many of those have really changed, and how many of those are present in this competitor, and how easy is it for this competitor, to replicate our model, because that's what makes a business unique is it you know, all the different things that go into it that make certain you know, price points possible for some companies that aren't possible for other ones, for example, you know, so we, we not only compete on the price itself, we also compete on the pricing model. So we have free tier daily free tier plus pays, you go plus subscription options. And then you know, all sorts of other more custom options after that. You know, some of our competitors are, for example, one of the major ones, they have a free tier per month, but you have to have a credit card on file. Some of them are much lower free tier per month, some of them have a free tier per day, but it's only for a three month period, like there's all and then like some of them have pays, you go on top of that some as we were talking about with you a couple of weeks ago, some of them maybe have paid you go on top of that, or they have subscriptions within a certain band on top of that, or they jump straight to enterprise after that. Um, and so the price and the pricing model are one way we can eat, then, of course, there's the the data itself, like so in our space, it's the coverage, you know, where US and Canada and some of our competitors are us only some of them are worldwide, but not at rooftop level. Some of them are rooftop, like some places rooftop some places not like all sorts of different things. And then also the different data appends that we have. So adding congressional districts, adding census data, all that kind of stuff, which most of our competitors don't have, only one has a couple of those things. So there's the data and the coverage. There's also things like the features. So we have an API, we also have the ability to upload spreadsheets, like massive spreadsheets, most of our competitors don't have spreadsheet upload support, most of them don't have batch geocoding support. And some of them actually expressly prohibit batch geocoding. Only one of them has some sort of spreadsheet support, but it's actually like copy paste, and it's very limited. And then there's also Terms of Service, which is probably the hardest one for anyone to replicate, which is our extremely permissive Terms of Use. And most of our competitors have very restrictive Terms of Use, and you know, you can't store the data, you can't reuse it, things like that. And so when we have a, you know, a new competitor Come on, or a new a competitor, add, you know, features or things like that, we're always thinking, Okay, like, how does this? Yes, there's that initial feeling of like, oh, oh, like, okay. But then what does that actually mean for us? And how does that change our competitive position? And usually, it's, you know, what, this, there's more competition, that's fine. We're still okay, we're ...