Most founders know that competition can actually be a good thing: - **We often discuss spying on your competitors,** but have you considered teaming up with them? Here's why collaborating with your competitor could be a game changer, and how to go ab
Most founders know that competition can actually be a good thing:
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We often discuss spying on your competitors, but have you considered teaming up with them? Here's why collaborating with your competitor could be a game changer, and how to go about it successfully.
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Energy is finite, and productivity is limited. Dru Riley discusses how ChatGPT can help you save time and conserve energy, highlighting solid opportunities in the space.
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Founder Mac Martine made a $50,000 mistake with his first SaaS. Below, he shares how he ended up working on his product for 2 years and only got 1 sale, and what he learned from the experience.
Want to share something with nearly 120,000 indie hackers? Submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter. —Channing
🤝 Teaming Up With Your Competitor
by Syed Balkhi
Indie hackers know better than anyone that competition can be fierce. You need to stay at the top of your game, and find new ways to gain an advantage over your competitors to remain successful.
But what if I told you that partnering with a competitor could actually help elevate your business? It's true! Creating a successful partnership with another company within the same market can open up opportunities for growth, cost savings, access to resources, and more.
Here's how!
Understand your competitor's goals and objectives
Knowing what motivates your competitor can help you come up with common points of collaboration or strategic alliances that benefit you both. That way, you'll be able to work together more effectively, and build bridges instead of walls. Another thing you can do is to combine your resources to expand market share, and push boundaries in product innovation.
How can you discover your competitor's aims and goals? Well, the answer is simple: Research. Investigate what your competitor has been doing in the market, and try to identify their strategies.
You can also take a content marketing approach, using Ahrefs to check what your competitors rank for. You’ll learn what keywords they're targeting, and what their content strategy looks like. This will tell you if your own goals align, and if there are gaps you can fill.
Identify areas of shared interests and synergy
Here, you're looking to find common ground that can be mutually beneficial for both of your businesses.
This might include a desire to collaborate on a certain project, or implement a special marketing strategy (newsjacking could work here!).
For example, take Semrush and SurferSEO. Both have SEO and AI writing options, and joining forces could make for a wonderful collaboration. They each make up for a main feature that the other one is lacking; Semrush has a better content analysis tool, while SurferSEO helps optimize your pages and posts with linking and keyword recommendations.
So, if we put these features together, that makes a package deal. One feature will complement the other.
Try to recognize synergy early on, and embrace it as an opportunity for growth.
Sign an agreement
Collaboration is all about having a formal agreement and contract that provides a secure foundation for both teams involved.
Usually, a partnership agreement outlines a variety of elements, such as:
- Roles and practices of each person or team.
- Specifications for deadlines and deliverables.
- Ownership rights for any material created together.
- Strategies for resolving potential conflicts.
Basically, it takes care of all the major points to ensure that stakeholders are clear on their goals and objectives. Plus, it provides legal protection should any conflict arise.
Having an agreement allows both teams to build trust early on, in order to focus on building the greatest success together.
Set clear expectations and boundaries
If you ever enter a partnership with your competitor, everyone must be on the same page. Here are a few things that need to be outlined:
- The nature of the collaboration.
- Who is responsible for what tasks.
- How the outcome will be measured.
- Resources to be shared.
- Division of profit.
- Goals to be achieved.
These are some of the points that should be clarified in the contract.
Create communication guidelines and protocols
Remember, communication is the key to success. A successful partnership with your competitor depends upon clear, consistent communication guidelines and protocols. Here are a few to get you started:
- Regular check-ins and progress updates.
- Reporting progress against key performance indicators (KPIs).
- Coordinating joint activities.
Take advantage of cross-marketing opportunities
Cross-marketing opportunities are a great way for you to build successful partnerships with your competitors.
In cross-marketing, two companies come together to mutually benefit each other’s marketing objectives. Not only does this help achieve company goals, but it also brings in potential customers who may want to make use of both services.
For instance, when Burger King and McDonald's came together to make money for charity, Burger King told its customers to buy from McDonald's for a good cause. McDonald's responded by giving their customers discounts when they visited Burger King.
This collaboration not only helped both competitors raise money for a good cause, but also increased their brand reach.
Keep an eye out for cross-marketing opportunities, and take advantage of them whenever possible. Keep these questions in mind:
- Do you and your competitor have the same target audience?
- What kind of products can you jointly promote with your competitor?
- How will the promotions benefit you both?
Once you have answers to these questions, you can dive further into planning cross-marketing strategies.
Wrapping up
A successful partnership with your competitors takes a lot of planning and effort, but if planned properly, it can be beneficial for both.
You might have to face some challenges (trust issues is a big one!), but if you do the groundwork and have an agreement in place, you can overcome such obstacles.
Would you consider partnering with your competitor? Let's chat below!
Discuss this story.
📰 In the News
from the Growth Trends newsletter by Darko
🏛 Most Americans are in support of the US government banning TikTok.
🔎 Here's how top companies measure content quality.
💻 Twitter has open sourced its recommendation engine.
🚫 Italy has banned ChatGPT, and says it will investigate OpenAI.
🛩 Breaking down why some travelers fly across the world without leaving the airport.
Check out Growth Trends for more curated news items focused on user acquisition and new product ideas.
🤖 Trend Alert: ChatGPT
from the Trends.vc newsletter by Dru Riley
Why it matters
ChatGPT boosts the productivity of businesses and individuals.
Problem
Time is nonrenewable. Energy is finite. Productivity is limited.
It's the Theory of Constraints at its finest.
Solution
ChatGPT helps you automate work and save time coding, writing, researching, and more.
Players
ChatGPT tools:
Predictions
Opportunities
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Streamline your marketing. Use ChatGPT to write marketing copy, product descriptions, sales pitches, and more. Jose Bermejo does market research. Erin wrote sales copy for her website. Tejas Rane wrote a blog post on cold email outreach. Avocados from Mexico plans to use ChatGPT for a Super Bowl marketing campaign.
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Use ChatGPT as a coding assistant. It can write, explain, and debug code. Devjeet used it to build a Catan board game. Amjad Masad used it to find, explain, and fix a bug. Pietro Schirano made a website. Flafi made one, too.
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Sell prompts for business and personal use. Find the best prompts for certain use cases, then turn them into a digital product. Valdo sells SEO 101 ChatGPT and Chat GPT Landing Page Optimization. Elias Puurunen sells ChatGPT and Data Science, a list of data exploration prompts.
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Build an online course. Teach others how to save time on personal and business tasks with ChatGPT. ChatGPT Cash Cow is a workshop for professionals and business owners. ChatGPT chatbot for Salesforce shows how to build ChatGPT for Salesforce. ChatGPT Masterclass shows how to start and scale a business with ChatGPT. A Course on ChatGPT for YouTubers teaches how to find ideas, write scripts, and more. The Complete ChatGPT Guide from Zero to Hero teaches how to become a ChatGPT expert.
Risks
- Bias: Human bias is transferring to AI. ChatGPT can produce hateful, racist, or sexist comments.
- Disinformation: ChatGPT can deepen the disinformation crisis. It can fake sources and give plausible, but incorrect or nonsensical, answers. Elephants do not lay eggs.
- Misuse: ChatGPT is not meant to give advice, and you shouldn't rely on it for anything important. Do not ask it for help with mental health.
Key lessons
- ChatGPT learns from us. It didn't know what "updog" was, until now.
- We underestimate the power of AI. Jack Clark says today's AI models are far more capable than we think.
- The output quality depends on the input quality. Direct prompts and follow-up questions lead to better results.
Hot takes
Haters
"ChatGPT's responses are generic. They lack depth and insight."
ChatGPT is not the ultimate source of truth. Some say it can write your papers. Others say it does not understand math. Treat it like a toy, not a tool, at least for now.
"ChatGPT won't replace Google Search."
Google may disrupt itself first.
"ChatGPT promotes laziness."
Our energy is finite. We take the path of least resistance. Tools like ChatGPT make it easier to conserve energy. This is not its fault. It's biology.
"We can detect AI-generated text."
There are ways to make it harder. This is unedited, AI-generated text. Writer says that five out of nine passages are human-written. GPTZero says that it's likely a human-written text.
Links
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What's the Most Interesting Thing You've Done with ChatGPT? The tweet behind this report.
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Illustrating Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback: How human feedback helped train ChatGPT.
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The Coming AI Hackers: How AI can exploit vulnerabilities in social, economic, and political systems.
Related reports
More reports
Go here to get the Trends Pro report. It contains 200% more insights. You also get access to the entire back catalog and the next 52 Pro Reports.
Subscribe to Trends.vc for more.
🧠 Harry's Growth Tip
from the Marketing Examples newsletter by Harry Dry
Show the transformation: Here, "a moment" becomes "something real."
Go here for more short, sweet, practical marketing tips.
Subscribe to Marketing Examples for more.
💸 Mac Martine's $50K SaaS Mistake
by Mac Martine
Hi, founders! I'm Mac Martine, and I made a mistake with my first SaaS product that cost me tens of thousands of dollars.
I had been working remotely for Adobe for 11 years, and I built my app on the side. I kept waiting for the "right" time to go full-time. I wanted the app to be ready to go!
I finally put in my notice, telling myself that I was two weeks out from being ready to launch. I had a plan...I could see it all, and the dream was becoming real.
Here's what happened next.
Leaping and falling
From my first day as a full-time indie hacker, I would get up every day before dawn with tons of energy. I'd fill up my coffee mug, hop on my bike, and head to the office. I was hard at work before most people were even awake!
I was having a great time, and I told myself that I just needed one more week of development before focusing on sales and marketing.
The next week, I told myself the same thing. And the week after that. And the one after that.
Eventually, I did send out some emails. I got a single sale. That was exciting, but I was almost two years in. By this time, my wife and I were about to have our first kid. There was more pressure, and I was about to have people depending on me. With no real signs of progress in my business, it was time to close the doors.
Avoiding the hard stuff
I had been doing what is so common for developers trying to be founders: I was procrastinating, avoiding the hard parts. Sure, the app had room for improvement, but all apps do. I was starting to learn that hard-earned lesson about getting in front of customers early.
I had entered a market that I knew nothing about, and had no connections. But I saw a massive market: Appointment scheduling software for any business that wants to let their customers schedule online. I just needed a minuscule sliver of that market, but it meant nothing if I couldn't penetrate it.
I can at least say that I made $100 from my first SaaS. But, I also spent tens of thousands of dollars of my savings during that time.
I could call this one majorly expensive two year mistake. And, in a way, it was. But that's an unproductive way to look at it. No need for shame or guilt here. It was also a huge learning experience.
Do I wish I could have learned these same things in less time with less cost? Sure. But that’s just the way things go sometimes.
Nowadays everyone’s talking about quick validation, fast iterations, and trying lots of small bets. I agree that this is the best way, but in 2012, this wasn’t a common approach. It didn’t occur to me to do it any other way than I was doing it.
So, do I regret it? Hell no.
The lessons
I learned so many crucial lessons about business, and myself. This mistake taught me that:
- Talking to customers as early as possible is crucial to reduce the risk of wasting time building something that will never see the light of day.
- Sales and marketing are hard.
- Apps are never "finished."
- I enjoyed the building part, but not the marketing and sales (this has since changed).
- I can build a sizable app on my own.
- I have the drive and determination to keep going, even when it’s hard.
- I have internal motivation that is crucial for this type of work.
- There are a ton of hats to wear as a founder (development, sales, marketing, accounting, taxes, design, communication, writing, contractor management, etc). While I didn’t love them all, I wasn’t afraid of diving in and figuring them out!
Here's my advice for other founders:
- Talk to prospects as soon as possible, ideally before even started to build.
- As you make mistakes (and you will), don’t beat yourself up. Pick right back up and keep going. Learn from it, and recognize that it often takes experiences to truly learn things.
You’ll want to quit at times, but if you have it in you, you’ll take a quick break, then get back to it. If it were easy, everyone would do it.
You either have it or you don’t. If you have it, I don’t need to tell you to keep going. You just will!
Discuss this story.
🐦 The Tweetmaster's Pick
by Tweetmaster Flex
I post the tweets indie hackers share the most. Here's today's pick:
🏁 Enjoy This Newsletter?
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Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Gabriella Federico for the illustrations, and to Syed Balkhi, Darko, Dru Riley, Harry Dry, and Mac Martine for contributing posts. —Channing
