Build Your SaaS

What do you do when a competitor steals your idea? (plus: Justin and Jon have the giggles).
  • People in tech get bent out of shape about who owns certain ideas, UI patterns, and business models.
    • “They ripped off my idea”
    • "They copied us!"
  • This blog post by Justin Mitchell:
  • Good Stackexchange thread:
    • “In the history of science, this is known as "Railroad time". I.e, when the economy has reached a certain state of infrastructure (coal, steel, and land available, plus steam engines and demand for transportation), it's "Railroad time", and the idea of building railroads occurs to many people naturally at the same time.”
  • Documentary: https://www.generalmagicthemovie.com/
  • Multiple discovery (simultaneous invention): “the hypothesis that most scientific discoveries and inventions are made independently and more or less simultaneously by multiple scientists and inventors”
  • Synchronicity: “the simultaneous occurrence of events which appear significantly related but have no discernible causal connection.”
  • Collective consciousness.
  • How to respond if a competitor rips of your idea: 
    • Paul Jarvis tweet: "fathom copycats pop up so often that i've lost count. we honestly don't mind them... they STOKE THE FIRE 🔥 to make our product even better."
  • Hedge against the competition:
    • Build your brand: the way people perceive your company; how “top of mind” are you?
    • Build your audience: competitors can't easily replicate who you know, and who knows you.
    • Customer service: how well you take care of people; how responsive you are
    • Continued product improvement: you don’t have to be the most novel; you just have to show continuous improvement in vectors that customers care about.
    • Last longer than your competition: don’t hire too many people, keep your costs low; if you can outlast your competition, you don’t have to worry about them stealing your stuff.

You can reply to this podcast here:

★ Need a podcast?

  • Transistor allows you to host all of your podcasts in one place.
  • We also offer private podcasts: use them with your team, or on your membership site.
  • Get a 14-day trial here.

Thanks to our monthly supporters:

Thanks to our monthly supporters
  • Pascal from sharpen.page
  • Rewardful.com
  • Greg Park
  • Mitchell Davis from RecruitKit.com.au
  • Marcel Fahle, wearebold.af
  • Bill Condo (@mavrck)
  • Ward from MemberSpace.com
  • Evandro Sasse
  • Austin Loveless
  • Michael Sitver
  • Dan Buda
  • Colin Gray
  • Dave Giunta

Want to start a podcast on Transistor? Justin has a special coupon for you: get 15% off your first year of hosting: transistor.fm/justin
★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

Creators & Guests

Host
Jon Buda
Co-founder of Transistor.fm
Host
Justin Jackson
Co-founder of Transistor.fm
Editor
Chris Enns
Owner of Lemon Productions

What is Build Your SaaS?

Interested in building your own SaaS company? Follow the journey of Transistor.fm as they bootstrap a podcast hosting startup.

They stole our idea! - build your saas
===

Justin: Now there's probably also some people who've got like a, a fetish about those things, right? Like that's the SMR thing, right? Isn't that more whispering? Yeah. But there must be somebody out there that just loves hearing a good swallow, probably.

Jon: Okay, let's do .

Justin: See if I can get . See if you can get your composition. Get through, get through this. All right.

Jon: All right. Hey, everyone. Welcome to Build Your sas. This is the Behind

Oh, man, I've done that in a while. Yeah. All right. Okay. Uh, I gotta take a breather. Okay. I'm like starting, I'm like starting to swing . It's very humid today. Uh, I think we're all losing it. Yep. We're all

Justin: losing it. This is it. This is what people tune in for. The isolation is

Jon: setting in. That's right. . All right.

Hey everyone. Welcome to Build Your Sass. This is the behind the scenes story of

Justin: How come that part triggers you? You just, I know

That's when you, that's just when you start thinking about it. Yeah. . Yeah. Yeah. You like, you, you're like able to stay focused and then your focus only lasts until then. I know.

All right. Wrap it up. Put your, put your, your audio in the folder We're done. .

Jon: That's it. That's 10 minutes of trying to get started. Yeah. Okay. I'm good now. Okay.

Hey everyone. Welcome to Build Your Sass. This is the behind the scene story of building a web app in 2020. I'm John Buddha,

Justin: a software engineer. Oh, we did it. All right. And I'm Justin Jackson. I do product and marketing follow along as we build Transistor f

We, we just had a serious case of the giggles. Right, right before this

Jon: man. Did that ever happen to you when you were

Justin: like in school? Oh, for sure. . Yeah, when, oh, it's because when you know you can't. Laugh. It just makes laughing. I, I mean, my two youngest boys, they share a room and they get this all the time.

We're like, okay, be quiet. No more laughing. And you can just tell, oh, yeah, they, they can't control it.

Jon: Certain classmates would just, just set each other off.

But

Justin: there's also something so great about that feeling of just getting into one of those, those cycles. You can't get out of the laughter. Right. It's, I think there's also part of us subconsciously that doesn't want to, you know, that's why they have, uh, laugh therapy.

That's, is that the thing? Oh yeah. Uhhuh . So the people just get in groups and start, just start laughing. Really? Oh. Like nothing is funny, but they just get into it. And it's just the, the fact that everybody in the circle is laughing. Yeah. It's like,

Jon: wow. It's like, yeah. It's like, uh, I think it's therapy for like depression and

Justin: stuff like that.

that would be, that would be a good podcast. Laugh with us. Yeah. Or it's just you, you, you're just laughing and then the, you see if you can get the listeners to laugh and if it's contagious. Oh, yeah. . I mean, I've definitely, there might, I've definitely, like, I don't know if I full out like, uh, go Gaud, is that a word?

I, I don't know if I've full out, like laughed out loud, but I've definitely chuckled. at podcasts. Mm-hmm. . And it's even worse if you're on an airplane or something where you're, you know, you can't, but then you have to contain it. It, it almost gets worse

Jon: then. Right. You just look around and see if anyone's looking at you.

Justin: Yeah. Funny. Well, the plan was for us to have a quick episode. This, uh, this? Yeah. We just wasted 10 minutes. Yeah. Trying to start it. Yeah. We were, we were just laughing like a couple school kids. But feel good. I'm glad. Yeah, I'm glad we, we were able to get some of that out. It it, we need those, yeah, those cathartic moments.

What I wanted to talk to you about quickly is this idea of competition. And especially, uh, I know we've talked about this before, but this idea of in software and in tech, often in tech you'll hear from somebody that says, oh, this person just stole my idea. Now, actually, before we get too much further, have you e ever had that feeling of, that someone had stolen your idea?

I don't think so.

Jon: No. Okay. But, but I, I mean, I, there's, there certainly have been times in the past, you know, 10, 15 years. Similar things will come out almost at the same time. Yeah.

Justin: Yes. And I think in some, I mean, there's this one competitor that launched after us. Copied our pricing model almost Exactly. Uh, including the idea of having multiple podcasts for one price, which was mm-hmm.

something. I think we were, I mean, maybe we weren't the first, that's the thing. This is the, that what you tell yourself. Right. But we didn't,

Jon: that's the thing. Maybe we weren't the first, but we didn't model that after anyone.

Justin: Mm-hmm. . . We didn't model that after anyone. Also, uh, so sorry, this competitor launched after us.

They chose the exact pricing model, including like the, the per account download limits that we'd talked about publicly on this podcast and figured out, you know, even we have kind of used some of this language. Uh, also , we had somebody, uh, message me directly in the back channel saying they had talked to another competitor, uh, who had.

Oh, those guys at Transistor just copy everything we do.

Jon: Oh yeah, I remember that. And we had never actually used their system. I've

Justin: literally never logged into it. Yeah. Never logged into it. Never seen it. And I, I don't know if this person knows, but like, uh, most of the, the patterns, uh, not most, but a lot of the patterns that we implemented in our system were patterns you'd built before in the podcast system you built right?

The first time. Yeah. So not the podcast system, the podcast web app that you'd built the first time. Right. And so it was, it was kind of funny, like, okay. There's no way we stole those patterns from that person because we've never logged in. We've, you know, most of these patterns are just extensions of what John has already built before.

Jon: Yeah. It was just, I was, that was my familiarity with the, the domain itself of podcasting and I just kind of did what I knew. Mm-hmm. ,

Justin: um, Yeah, so I think this gets talked about a lot and one reason this came up for me again is Justin Mitchell, who's in, uh, MegaMaker, had this crazy thing happen to him where he posted in the our Slack.

He said, I think somebody's ripping me off because he had just released this Chrome extension. And then Al, uh, o w on Twitter, who's quite popular, a lot of people follow him had launched almost. Identical thing. And it, and as Justin is going through, like he could see Al's, um, source code and he's going through the source code, he's like, man, the naming conventions are almost identical.

The, huh Uh, what else let's the, yeah, so the code is very similar. The s v G file we are used for, our setting icon is the exact same. S v G, there's all of these like crazy comparisons that some of the copy writing was the same. But as he investigated this more and more, he realized, uh, because, uh, Owen a w had good documentation on his side, and it turns out they just had the same idea at the same time and just implemented it very similarly.

Uh, yeah,

Jon: I mean it's, they, they probably, they probably learned. Some things maybe from similar tutorials that sort of had similar naming conventions or I, I, it's like,

Justin: it's such a coincidence though. That's, well, this is the thing, and Justin's is called Next Up and Owens is called up next. .

Jon: And they, yeah, they probably copied the S V G icon code from the same website of SVG icons.

Justin: Yeah man. So, and I've posted this link in the show notes cuz it's, it's interesting to go through the whole thing, but what I love is that here is an example. Of somebody initially posting on Twitter and saying, Hey Owen, are you copying me? And kind of calling 'em out publicly, but as they dug into it going, oh, wait a second.

It doesn't look like there's any foul play here, but how many times has there been a Twitter witch hunt where someone announces publicly, Hey, this person is ripping me off. This person copied my idea. , everybody immediately assumed, well, that, you know, this comedian stole, stole my joke. That's, that's another common one, and I think some of this discussion, it assumes.

What do they call this? There's actually a name for this. Oh, the Heroic Theory of Invention and Discovery. So this is the hypothesis that authors of inventions and scientific discoveries are unique, heroic individuals. I'm reading from the Wikipedia page. Great. Scientists are geniuses.

So the idea being, and this is a very North American idea, that, you know, we, we are all each brilliant, unique snowflakes and that we come up with ideas in our brilliant brains that no one has ever thought of. And then we, you know, release those into the world. And then we have then ownership over those concepts, ideas, or whatever,

Jon: as if you're just this, this magician, you're sitting down willing this.

Into

Justin: being, yes. Maybe not. Maybe magician like a God really is right. You're willing this this thing into existence that has never existed before.

Jon: Right. But Right. But it's, yeah. That seems a bit unlikely. .

Justin: Well, a bit unlikely, but it's odd in tech how much this comes up. Like how much. I see folks saying, somebody ripped off my idea.

And even seeing it in myself how sometimes, you know, when that competitor came out, I was like, those dirty rats, you know, they stole our idea. And I, I thought it would be interesting for us to dig into that a little bit. Like even that like. Using that kind of language. Like those dirty son of a gun. Yeah, like and thinking, you know what, like our, there's a flip side to this, which is kind of stoic, I guess, which is.

It's not that impressive of an idea. , you know what I mean? Like Yeah. We came up with this business model and it took us a while. I mean, people can listen to, we did multiple podcast episodes where we were Right. Talking to experts and we were, you know, really thinking hard about it.

Jon: Yeah. We, we initially launched our early access stuff with something entirely different.

Justin: Mm-hmm. and then, you know, went through a process to discover. The, the model we have, but there

Jon: was, there was probably, I mean, we didn't base it on a competitor, but we probably based it on another service we've used in the past. Something different. Mm-hmm. , where it's like,

Justin: yeah, MailChimp uses this philosophy.

Yeah. We could have multiple mailing lists.

Jon: Yeah. Yeah. So we didn't, we didn't come up with it. I mean, it's just we, I guess we, you know, quote unquote stole it from someone else too, if you wanna call it that. Yeah. , but nobody has ownership over that idea. Yeah, I don't, yeah, I think that's one of the things that, that has made the internet so great is that, well, I mean, not just the internet, but uh, the fact that you can't really have ownership over an idea necessarily.

You can have ownership over the result of that idea, which is probably. intellectual property, which is the code, and any assets and logos and artwork and stuff like that. But the actual idea, I don't think you can really copyright that.

Justin: Yes. Yeah. The, there's so much to unpack here. There's many parts of our society that are built around this concept of idea ownership, patents, copyright.

et cetera, right? So there's this, this, this ideal has been implemented. You know, somebody comes up with a concept, a plan, and they can draw it on a piece of paper and take it to a patent office and then say, I own this. And then we've extended it to things like, I own this UI pattern, this UI pattern of a one click check.

I own that. My name is Jeff Bezos. Mm-hmm. and I own that. Right. And on the other hand, as you've just noted, this is antithetical to the idea of the internet, which is No, no, no, no. We, we build on what's come before we remix what's already happened. We take this UI pattern and we all apply it, and then the web gets better.

Mm-hmm. . If we hadn't done this, if there hadn't been this sharing of ideas and patterns and source code, you keep going here, then , we wouldn't be where we're at now. If Xerox had said the idea for, you know, the gooey with the mouse and icons was only theirs. And they weren't going to share that with anybody.

Well, we would've like nothing, like the Mac wouldn't exist. Windows wouldn't mi exist, iOS wouldn't exist. Those principles just became part of the, the common language. What's

Jon: what? What's your takeaway from this that we shouldn't. Just shouldn't worry about competition. Shouldn't

Justin: really, I, it's interesting that you and I are in alignment about this, and I'm sure actually folks will be able to find some, some more examples of where you and I have not, , have not been in favor of this.

I mean, part of this comes from, comes from the, the fact that discovery is difficult and if you're out, you know, you, you're out surfing and you find the perfect surf spot. and the waves are just mint and you on, obviously you want that whole area to yourself, and if somebody discovers it and ruins it, you know, they, they post it on Instagram and then everybody comes.

Yeah. There's this feeling of, oh, well I discovered that spot and now it's been ruined. Mm-hmm. and I, I can, I can identify with that.

The internet and technology is a little bit different also because there's not just one surf spot where it's, it's, there's no, uh, ideas and the sharing of ideas and putting ideas into the common language. Like Lean Startup, you know, Eric Reese wrote that book, but eventually the ideas in that book will become so a part of the common language.

Uh, to the point where it just becomes common ownership. It's not you. You can only hold on to new ideas for so long and say, this is mine and mine alone eventually. Right. You have to share. Um, and if for no other reason, then you, there's no way that you came to that idea without building on tons of other things in the common.

Language and experience that you're not referencing every single time. , you talk about that idea. I think it's good to expose, yes, we all feel this way, like when someone takes something and deliberately rips it off, there is this feeling of, well, shit that was, you know, that took me a long time to develop that or to figure that out.

But on the other hand, I think we ha we, we almost have to like take ourselves down a few notches and go, ideas are ideas and it is always possible and there's a good stack exchange thread on this. For, uh, kind of numerous ways of describing this phenomenon. One is railroad time. So this is from the Stack Exchange thread in the history of science.

This is known as railroad, railroad time, i e when the economy has reached a certain state of infrastructure, coal, steel, land, available plus steam engines and demand for transportation. Well, now it's rail time and the idea of building railroads occurs to many people natural. At the same time. Yeah,

Jon: it's like that for a lot of things I think.

Um, oh, there was a documentary I watched about a company that kind of was a spinoff from Apple in some degree back in the nineties. General Dynamics or something like, know, what was it called? Uh, general Magic, I think. Okay. There's a documentary about this that came out recently and they were pretty much coming up.

with the iPhone way before the iPhone, but it just wasn't technically possible yet. Mm-hmm. , right? Like, it, it worked, but it was just so big and the battery was terrible and it was just, yeah. It's, the time wasn't right for it. Right. So it's not like they, apple necessarily came up with the idea first. They were the first ones to implement it well, mm-hmm.

Justin: Yeah. Yep. I, I mean, , it's funny cuz I, I just Google. The phrase, when Steve Jobs came up with the idea , and if you look at the results, you know, how did Steve Jobs come up with the idea for the iPhone? It, there's this, there's very much this. This bias in our society towards the heroic theory of invention.

Like we love our heroes, like Steve Jobs that just came up with the Macintosh that just came up with the iPhone, and it doesn't take much digging to go, oh, no, no, no. The the iPhone had was clearly built on tons of, you know, ideas that had come before. shared ideas, ideas that were part of the common language.

And so to also, a lot of these ideas were open source. A lot of these ideas were funded by the government. A lot of these ideas were enabled by universities and professors and research, right? Yeah. Yeah. And so there, there's no possible way that Steve. Could have ever done that without all of the history of humanity.

That that came

Jon: before. Yeah. Right. It's not like he just had a light bulb moment and came up with this fully formed idea. Yes. In his head. I mean, it was, there were so many other, I mean, it was built on other technology. It was, and there were, there were some breakthroughs that I think happened to Apple that made it happen, but it.

The right time to do it. And it was finally technically possible. And

Justin: there's, again, there's more in this thread, like multiple discovery or simultaneous invention, uh, which is the hypothesis that most scientific discoveries and inventions are made independently and more or less simultaneously by multiple scientists and inventors.

And we've seen this, you know, we saw this with the light bulb. We saw this with, uh, lot like the power, like, uh, Tesla versus, uh, you know, AC versus DC There. , there's similar ideas that kind of erupt at the same time. You know, for me, cuz I love ideas, I ideas to me are what get me out of bed. I just love discovering something new.

But it it, when I'm discovering something new, it's not like I'm like, oh, I'm the first person to ever discover this. No, I'm, I'm just fascinated by the observation and I think. , you know, when we talk about ideas, ideas are really, they're, they're much less discoveries like novel discoveries and more just observations that we are now discovering for the first time.

It's not that they may have never been discovered before, but you know, you and I are looking at pricing models and we tried that one and, you know, we're talking to different people and, and eventually we're like, oh, wait a minute. MailChimp does it this way. Here's an idea. Why don't we apply that to podcasting?

And the, the idea is not , it's not that, you know, this is this perfect novel, unique, never before uttered idea. No. It's just a interesting observation that we can then kind of, uh, Synchronicity is another way of describing this collective consciousness is another way of describing this. Mm-hmm. , uh, and I, I just see this trope so much in tech and in design and in art.

This idea that only one person could have ever reasonably had that idea for that joke or that piece of art, or that piece of tech, or that business or whatever. And it's, it's just not. , uh, rational if we think about it right now. Clearly there's things that you are direct ripoffs.

Jon: Oh, yeah. I mean there's, yeah, there's, there's obvious plagiarism.

There are obvious direct ripoffs. There are just straight up copies. There's the, the nonsense that Amazon has been doing, which is like using competitor data mm-hmm. to figure out which products to knock off. and make their themselves, which is just sketchy. Like, I don't know if that's illegal, but it's like kind of a dick note.

Justin: Yes. . Yeah. And, and maybe part of this has to do with power, right? Right. Folks with power can observe good ideas and um, They've got the leverage to execute them on them at a very high level, and that strikes folks as unfair, and it probably is. Although in that case, I would say let's deal with the underlying issue there, which is power and too much leverage.

as opposed to let's try to control who gets ownership of ideas more. Because if we, if we try to implement this system, the big companies are going to win every time because it, it, you know, invariably it's just about lawyers, right? And so,

Jon: and economies of scale and Yeah. It's

Justin: just, yeah, brand. They don't need to branding necessarily need marketing budgets, all this stuff.

like folks, if, if we're all using the same mapping library, and this is true in podcasting, lots of folks use the same, uh, like map, uh, plugin or what, what do we, what is that mapping thing we use to show geographic area? That's just a Google chart. Yes. So the lots of folks use that and we, we don't have the right of complaining.

And it's very possible that other competitors saw that we were using that library and said, oh, we're gonna use that too. .

Jon: Yeah. I mean that's, I, I have a hundred percent for sure, seen some sort of JavaScript library or something somewhere that I liked and just looked to the source code and said, oh, I'd like to use this too.

It's open source. There's nothing stopping me from using it. Exactly. So, um, that's one of the great parts. The web and the internet. I mean, that's how I learned how to build websites.

Justin: Yeah. And I, I think the, the other issue that folks have, which is, so I think one reason we do this is for ego. Like we want to be known as the person who invented something or did something first, or has ownership over this thing.

But along with that, I think, you know, folks that are really fighting for , you know, like holding onto this, like for years, podcasting had this troll who was always who, who said they owned the idea of distributed audio. Mm-hmm. , and it's, it's insecurity, right? This person just could not let go of the idea that no, they invented this.

Eventually, like the, the electronic found found Foundation, freedom Foundation. What is it? E F F, they, mm-hmm. , you know, they fought this person in court for years and finally won a judgment against them to say, no, no, no. You do not own this. This is just a, this is just a common. . And, uh, there's a lot, often, I think there's some insecurity there where you feel threatened or your ego feels threatened or you feel threatened financially and you're like, okay, I've gotta push back.

I've gotta hold onto this as hard as I can. This is mine. And that kind of fear being driven by that kind of fear and insecurity is it's, it's just, there's no good end to it because you're not going to win. Like if, if, if you, yeah, even if you, there's no winner in that. There's no winner in that situation.

Well, even if you had truly figured out an amazing idea all on your own, uh, independent of all the years of human history and learning before you, like you, you, you got struck by a lightning bolt and just came up with something that had never. ever been, you know, conceptualized before or the building blocks up to that point had never been built.

Even if that was true, if it's a good idea, people are going to want to share in it. . Yeah. There's, there's just nothing you can do to stop it. It, that would be like saying no, like EU cool mc Square. That's. like nobody else gets to. Yeah. Gets . Anyone

Jon: who uses that to discover anything else owes me royalty.

That's right. .

Justin: Or at the very least, you have to always invoke my name every time you say it. You know? E equals mc squared. TM Einstein Incorporated.

Jon: Yeah. Yeah. Einstein's E equals mc squared.

Justin: Yeah. You're gonna lose, even if we, if we as a society decided to say this is something that we. Um, should be a new law.

Like, okay, you're right. You know what? Every novel idea you have is yours completely on your own. It would be so difficult in our world unless we dis we became an authoritarian state to, to i to impose that, right? Like as long as right. We, we live in a relatively free society and. Again, I think historians would tell us we just, humans would've never evolved to our current state unless we could build on the knowledge and learnings and ideas and concepts and technologies of.

the people who came before us. I, I just don't see how people can win by holding on to these things, um, and saying, no, no, no. That was my idea. I was the first one. It's like, okay. Even if you were, which is highly unlikely, yeah. Pat yourself

Jon: in the back and then move on and work with whoever is. Using that idea I don't like

Justin: exactly the, the openness to, I mean, and this is happening in the, the Jobs to Be Done community. That community has been torn apart because there's this idea of, you know, people don't just buy products. They hire. Products to do jobs in their lives like that. That's just an interesting concept and it's, it's something that a lot of people wanna explore.

But now they're, that community has been fractured into three camps who all hate each other. And all they do all day on Twitter is, is troll each other and, and say that their idea is the best and they were the first ones to come up with it and the other person's wrong. And you know, when people, I have a.

Posts about jobs to be done on my, on my blog and mm-hmm. , you know, some people come to me and go, oh man, I was really interested in that concept, but when I started doing more digging, that community is so toxic, I just, I don't even want to be a part of it. And so we have this great idea that should just be part of the discourse.

That should just be something that we're all thinking about and talking about, and, uh, evolving. , but instead everybody's arguing about who got it first and who got it. Right. And it's, it's just dumb Less,

Jon: less arguing, more hugging more

Justin: More hugging. Yeah, more hugging. Exactly. Exactly. Well, maybe

Jon: not now. You gotta stay six feet.

That's right. But

Justin: eventually more hugging. That's right. Well, and and I, I do understand that. The idea of operating out of fear and operating out of, um, uh, I hate this term, but what do you call that? That, um, there's a growth mindset and a scarcity mindset. I, there's part of that, those ideas that, that kind of rubs me the wrong way.

Hmm. But ideas is one place where we should not have a scarcity mindset. Again. Yeah. I think sometimes when folks feel threatened, like if you're a brand new bootstrapper and you're building something and then you feel like Amazon copied it, yeah, you're gonna be disappointed. It, it'll, that would hurt, obviously.

Yeah. Um, and that's part of competition and that's what makes it difficult. It's maybe one reason why folks should consider not being an open startup , is that if you're sharing everything. It, it just makes it more likely that people are gonna copy it or build on what you just discovered. And, you know, maybe that was a mistake of ours.

Maybe to, to close this off, John, let's talk a little bit about how people should respond. I, I wrote down three things and it'd be interesting to hear what you think about them. Yeah. Uh, the, the, let's actually start with that. That first one, continued product improvement. So, you know, take us, somebody takes our business model, or we think they did.

Who knows? Yeah. Uh, we're threatened. Uh, they are a good competitor. Like they, they mm-hmm. , they have all sorts of ties to the podcasting industry. They are , they're, they're a good competitor. They get mentioned all the time when people say, we're comparing you and this other com company, so how do we respond?

Right.

Jon: We should focus on our own product and make it as good as we can. I mean, I, it, it seems like, you know, if they did, if they were to copy us, they probably would've copied us at a certain point in time. Mm-hmm. , and then went on their own way. Mm-hmm. , right. As they start developing new features that are maybe different than ours.

Something new and revolutionary entirely. Mm-hmm. . Uh, but we're also gonna do the same thing. So at the time they quote unquote copy us. Uh, we would've also been working on new things and we would release those. And then, you know, they might say, oh, that's actually a really good idea. Now we gotta play catch up and build something similar.

And, um, I think that's how competition works.

Justin: Mm. Exactly. And all we can do that's within our control is to go, okay, well we don't have to be the most novel. We just have to show our customers continuous improvement in vectors that our customers care about. Like that's within our control. Yeah. Right. And um,

And so for us it's just, and, and we've also made decisions about what kind of business we wanna run. We don't want to have 10, 20 people on staff right now. Mm-hmm. , all of the development pretty much happens with you, . And so we have decisions every day. You know, it could be Justin does more in the app and creates more poll requests, or we hire somebody to work on this project, or we hire five developers.

You know, there's all sorts of. Decisions we get to make every day. And, um, but I think the, the, the thing that's still driving us forward, regardless of which path we choose, is let's just continue to improve the product in vectors that our customers care about to the best of our ability and really, , that's all you can do.

And I think there's some additional things here. One one point I didn't write, which I'll write for the show notes, is just focus on lasting the longest. So you have a competitor that copies you, uh, as Jason Fried has pointed out. They often don't know the reason behind. the decision you made. And so they can't capture all of the intrinsic kind of magic in that decision.

They're , they're, they're just kind of, they're making a photocopy of it, but the, the, the fine grain details and all of the reasons you got to that point are lost on them. And so, yeah, just. Let them do it, and you just focus on improving the product and lasting as long as you can.

Jon: Yeah. I mean, unless, unless that competitor somehow steals away 90% of your audience, like it seems like it shouldn't matter.

Mm-hmm. , right? Like if you're still doing well and you're doing fine, like kind of like who cares? Mm-hmm. to some extent.

Justin: Yes. Yes. Now, I'm not saying Compe competition doesn't matter. Uh, I think it does matter. There, there is a limited pie in podcasting, you know? Right. Like even if a hundred thousand new shows got added last month, there's only a hundred thousand shows that got.

Re that, that got started last month, right? Yeah. So who got those shows and if 90,000 went to anchor, well, I guess I gotta decide, you know, do we want those customers, et cetera. But there is a, and then there's 10,000 left that we're all fighting over with our like this is a battle, it is competition and there's not an unlimited supply of customers.

Right? So what else can you do? Well, you can last longer. I think. Another thing you can. is your brand matters. So many people come to us and they just say, I just like you and j I like John and Justin. I like the way you run your company. I mm-hmm. heard an interview that you were on, John, and I like the, your philosophy for developing products.

I, Justin, I read something you wrote and it really resonated with me. Um, I just, I like the way that trans. Portrays itself.

Jon: Yeah. If they have, yeah, if they have some, some sort of connection to that, to us or to someone else they know that used it or the brand itself, um, yeah, they're gonna,

Justin: that's a huge benefit.

And, and you know, if you think about this, like our brand, our audience is something that's really hard for people to copy. If someone mm-hmm. one. , a lot of our brand and our connection to our audience is, you know, you and I forming direct connections with people and. That's a lifetime of work that's gone into that, that's a lifetime of history.

That's, you know, John growing up in a suburb of Detroit and then moving to Chicago and then meeting all these people and like there's, there's so much in our experience and our connections and.

Jon: That and you missed, you missed about 10 years in this year. So there's a lot more

Justin: than that. . This is, uh, this is, we get to write each other's biographies.

John . Yeah. Right. John Buddha. By Justin Jackson. Yeah. He grew up in a suburb of Detroit, moved to Chicago and met a bunch of people and then, uh oh. Then he met me, and that's where things really

John's like, wait a Yeah, it's about, that's about, wait a second, huh. Um, so yeah, your, your, your brand, your audience, those are things you can develop and they matter. And people get angry at, uh, 37 Signals Basecamp all the time. You know, uh, people get upset. . Oh, for example, here's a good example. Jason Fried was showing me something in this thing he's working on, and I was like, I was like,

He had a label. And I'm like, Jason, people are going to mention that. Like there's gonna be a lot of cynical response to that decision. Uhhuh . And he is like, oh yeah, I love that.

It's not like he loves it because he just wants the attention. He loves it because that's part of their brand, that's part of the, their audience expects them to make those decisions.

Jon: It'll get people talking about it too. So it's

Justin: exactly marketing on their part. And, and there's a, there's a whole other rationale aside, aside from.

Attention seeking that went into that decision. I don't think it's just attention seeking. I think there is thought behind it and it's very difficult for other people to copy that . Like there's especially this one thing I'm thinking of like if anybody copies it, it folks will know. It is just a direct ripoff of them.

so. Yeah, your branding, your audience. And then the other thing I thought of your, the fourth kind of way to compete your best hedge against the competition is customer service. How well do you take care of people? How responsive are you? Mm-hmm. so they can copy your, your UI patterns forever, but, If you're just more responsive, if you answer people's questions better, if you are friendly, if you are empathetic, if you are, go the extra mile.

That can engender a lot of support and you know, we have customers that really want some features that some of our competitors have, but they're sticking with us because we are, we, we've just gone above and beyond trying to give them the best service possible again. People can copy your ui. They can copy your marketing copy.

They can, they can do all these other things, but they can't be you at 9:00 PM on a Friday night. Still answering some customer support requests. Right, that you get to decide every single time somebody asks that same question that you've had to answer so many times before, but you can still put a smile on your face and say, you know what, no, I'm gonna, I'm gonna answer this the right way.

Or like in our case, we've, we've hired Helen to help us with that and mm-hmm. , and those are decisions you get to make. Is there any other responses you can think of or Not

Jon: really. I mean, the only one that actually comes to mind, and it's not necessarily something we've done, but. Maybe like actually reach out to competition and mm.

Start a friendly dialogue with them. Like there's no reason that we have to be like enemies with our competitors, right? Mm-hmm. and not, not the, not the saying we are, but we haven't necessarily reached out to like these other podcast hosting platform to introduce

Justin: ourselves. Yeah. You know? Uh, yeah, that's an interesting one because I think.

Especially me, like the folks at, I think we can mention it, like the folks at Buzz Sprout have been really nice to us. . Yeah. But I haven't really reciprocated it and I think part of it is cause I just, I don't know that there is something weird about that one to me. I, I don't know. I, I'm gonna have to think about that.

On one hand. Yeah. Like we can be, we don't have to be enemy. Um, maybe we do. I don't know. I, uh, I think we, let's leave it there, but let's keep, keep it open for our readers, our listeners, to. respond to this. To me, yeah. It kind of feels like a boss saying, oh yeah, we're all a big part of, we're a big family, and there's always part of that line that made me feel like, well, no, we're not.

Right. We're not a family. Yeah. And with competitors, it just feels a little bit disingenuous for me to go, well, like, okay, here's a good example this. This guy interviewed me and he was doing it on behalf. An application that was starting in the podcasting space but wasn't podcast hosting. And so I did this big interview.

I was really open and vulnerable and shared a lot of the decisions we made and why we made those decisions. And then three months, six months later, he said, oh, hey, that that episode that. Recorded is out now. Uh, but by the way, I should tell you. And he asked me to share it. And then he is like, by the way, I should tell you that we've pivoted and now we're in podcast host analytics

Oh. I was like,

Jon: I hope you don't mind. They just pictured, they just PI stole all of your,

Justin: everything from your brain. All of my insights. Yeah. And so. Uh, you know, in that situation I was like, well, yeah, I very much do mind. Uh, it's, it's not like I wasn't mad at him for starting a competitor cuz that's just freedom.

Like, yes, you can start, if, if there's a Taco Bell and you wanna compete and they're doing great business, you can start another taco restaurant next to them and try to grab a piece of that pie. I understand that, but I. Friendly to this person before, and I basically said, yeah, I'm not gonna be friendly anymore.

we're, we're, we're no longer friendly. Yeah. And you're on, you're on the blacklist. Sorry. And it's, it's fine. It's not like I, I despise this person. I don't wanna see this person like anything bad happen to them. I was just like, okay, well that, now it's changed, right? Like now. Right. . We, we really can't be friends.

That's just the way it is. And yeah. Uh, yeah. So it'll be interesting what to hear, what the listeners Yeah. Think.

Jon: Totally. So I'm, I'm looking at our, if we're wrapping things up here, I'm looking at our notes about a deadline for the dashboard redesign I've been working on Yeah. Tomorrow, which, which is tomorrow.

We might actually make that really. Yeah, there's a couple small things I need to finish up. Wow. Uh, functionally, it's totally done. That might actually, I don't know if we'll deploy it tomorrow, but it might be done. Awesome. Because we still need to, we're going to still sort of like let people know it's coming again.

We already sent an

Justin: email, I think. Yeah. Wow. That is, that is really exciting. Yeah. You must feel good.

Jon: I do. I'll feel better when it's out and

Justin: Wow. I see. I, I put that in the show notes because see how people respond. I put that in the show notes because I'm like, okay, we, we need to talk about it, but I don't wanna , I don't wanna put it in there and then have John go, ah, like, so to hear that you're, you feel like pretty confident that we could release it.

That is, that is,

Jon: yeah. There's a, the only thing, I have this checklist of things, the only thing I have left really is how to present. HTML tables of data on a mobile view. Mm. Which is a huge pain in the ass. Yeah. Uh, and Tailwind UI has done some of that work. Mm-hmm. , but it's like, you basically just scroll horizontally through a table, which mm-hmm.

also not great. Mm-hmm. , that's just really not a good way to do it, unfortunately. So, so

Justin: you're, you're, you're gonna, you're trying to figure out how to, how to take that to the next level? Yeah. Some combination

Jon: of those. I don't know. We. Let's see if I can figure something out.

Justin: Oh, wow. So that, that is a nice update.

Um, should we, should we say about the other thing or no? Uh, no, not yet. Okay. So we'll keep something in the pocket for next, next week. John, why don't you , uh, take us out with some Patreon. Shout shoutouts.

Jon: Yeah, thanks as always to everyone, um, for supporting us on Patreon. We have, uh, Sophia Canero. Diego.

Chris Willow. Mason Hensley. Borja. Soer. Ward Sandler. Eric Lima. James Sos. Travis Fisher, Matt Buckley, Russell Brown, Avedro, sassy. Pre Becker, Noah, pre Robert Cicio, Colin Gray, Josh Smith, Ivan Kovic. Brian Ray, Shane Smith, Shane. Austin Loveless, Simon Bennett, Michael Siver, Paul Jarvis and Jack Ellis, my brother Dan Buddha.

Darby Frey, Samor Gusto, Dave Young Brad from Canada. Sammy Scher, Mike Walker, Adam De Vander, Dave Juta, Juta. And Kyle Fox from

Justin: Get Reward for.com. I just wanna say, uh, Simon Bennett wrote me a really nice note. He had to remove his Patreon support because okay, he is about to go. Full-time. I think this is public

Oh, I'll, I'll double check. But yeah, he's, he's about to go full-time on Snap Shooter, so congrats to, to, uh, Simon. And we're, we're cheering for you. Yeah. That's awesome. All right folks. We'll see you next week.

Podcast hosting is provided by Transistor fm. They host our MP3 files, generate our RSS feed, provide us with analytics, and help us distribute the show to Spotify, apple Podcasts and more. If you want to start your own podcast or you want to switch to transistor, go to transistor dot f slash justin and get 15% off your first year.