Direct competitor followed me on X - ignore, follow back, remove as follower, and/or block?
My general thought is just to ignore, and start to be a little more careful about posting revenue numbers, growth, new features before they're launched, etc.
That's a discussion as old as, well, social media :)
It's very tricky, and I don't believe there is one truth.
Blocking might make the feel empowered and if they read your posts through other means, you will not know.
A follow back would depend on your general social media strategy. I don't know who you normally like to follow, but following back could look like a "I see you".
Remove as follower could be a smart move, as it shouldn't send a notification, but your posts might still show up less in the timeline.
Generally, i don't like changing my behaviour because of other people. So I would go with "ignore". At least mostly. You can take it as a reminder, that you never know who is reading your posts.
The things I liked best when people talked about dealing with competition were, "have amazing customer support" and "have a better product".
Yeah it's a fair point to just keep on doing what I'm doing. Thanks for the reminder there, I usually tend to think like that anyway. For some reason this bothered me a bit more than usual!
I get it. There was a mix of frustration, anger but also validation, when other devs cloned #vendordetailsomo. It felt like an accomplishment for the project and work to be worthy enough of imitation. Isn't that called the highest form of flattery?
If somebody deems you relevant enough to follow your progress, you might have made an impression on them.
Maybe it will come to you in the next days, why it bothered you.
It might not be the follow at all, but a reminder of something else. Especially, if they feel like a real threat to your business.
The last time someone cloned my app I wasn't worried because the clone was terrible and I could tell they were the type of person to give up after 5 minutes.
This time, I think it's just that this competitor actually seems to have a good product. But ultimately, I think I just need to listen to customers and not pay too much attention to what this person is doing with their business.
Are they just following you? If so, follow back and offer support. Even direct competitors can support each other in a way that becomes mutually beneficial. I support my fellow direct competitors all the time because customers/clients might need different things or prefer different brands, but I tend to be a "tide raises all ships" kinda person (and it's paid off).
Are they acting shady? Remove as a follower or block, whichever you feel like doing.
Considering it's Twitter, people can just make another account and look at your stuff from there, so I'd tend to just remove them as a follower UNLESS they're shitposting about you and trying to drag you or your brand down (then outright block, then write a post about why that behavior will sink a brand fast and destroy trust from future clients and fellow competitors -- basically use it to your advantage and control the narrative to make it good PR for you).
I just read the conversation between you and Joda. There's a difference between a direct competitor and someone who legit cloned your app.
If it's someone who cloned your app, I'd:
- remove as a follower then ignore them because ultimately they shouldn't affect what you're doing -- stay in your lane and worry about yourself and what you're doing
- write a post about it (in vague terms, not calling out the person) -- something about creativity and innovation aren't outright cloning and how we can all bring something different to the table to make similar-but-different products, etc.
Right, in the original case (not this person) where someone cloned my app after abusing a free trial to gain intel, I called them out directly on X, blocked them, and had my payment processor blacklist their email globally. Apparently they had been a problem for other businesses as well as I was told it wasn't the first time someone had complained about that customer email haha
Big fucking yikes. You did the right thing with that. What's funny is they're so stupid. You'd think if they wanted to be a sneaky-sneak, they'd at least create different emails lol
Yeah they were big stupid. They reached out in a "solo founders" telegram group I'm in to tell me that they liked my product and they were going to give it a try for their own group
Then I saw them start a trial. After a few days, when I noticed they hadn't done much with the trial except log into the dashboard and look at all the settings, I reached out -> radio silence
The trial expired and a charge was attempted and they used a stolen or limited credit card, so it failed. Then they quickly canceled their subscription, maybe hoping I didn't notice the failed charge. At that point I looked at their Twitter and saw they had just launched a competing product with a very similar logo and landing page haha
I called them out in that group for pulling that kind of move (and abusing a trial) as well as the tweet I mentioned.
So reckless and stupid. The community of people actually creating and shipping products is pretty small, so it's mind blowing people think they can get away with this...then continue to fuck over other people.
Anyway, I'm glad you were able to ban the email address, and hopefully he's too stupid to create a new one as a workaround. These people don't last in the game anyway.
Yeah, just a follow for now. They didn't clone anything as far as I know and I didn't even know they existed until recently; they started a few years before me.
I may follow back at some point, but I think it would be too tempting for me to keep looking at their posts and subconsciously adjust my own roadmap.
Instead I just want to focus on listening to what people ask me for and ship accordingly.
If following them back is going to derail you, it's not worth it at all. Stick with your game plan and strategy.
Ultimately, we don't know someone else's strategy (or if they have one (lots of people don't) or if it's even working), so if you start to switch up what you're doing/how you're doing it because you got distracted by someone else, it could lead you to a dead end.
Keep holding the line with your approach. You're already doing things right by listening to people and giving them what they ask for.
Blocking doesn't really do much. They can use a different account anyway. Also it might bring unwanted drama, at least for my level of following. The only time I did it was to send a message.
Most of the time I'd ignore, or remove them (as a follower), so they less likely to see my content without following me again.
I think regardless of the competitors following us, we should not oversharing. I stopped sharing revenue and growth tactics a while ago. And only share some of them at a very high level (eg: not going to share keywords / channels / campaign details)
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That's a discussion as old as, well, social media :)
It's very tricky, and I don't believe there is one truth.
Blocking might make the feel empowered and if they read your posts through other means, you will not know.
A follow back would depend on your general social media strategy. I don't know who you normally like to follow, but following back could look like a "I see you".
Remove as follower could be a smart move, as it shouldn't send a notification, but your posts might still show up less in the timeline.
Generally, i don't like changing my behaviour because of other people. So I would go with "ignore". At least mostly. You can take it as a reminder, that you never know who is reading your posts.
The things I liked best when people talked about dealing with competition were, "have amazing customer support" and "have a better product".
Yeah it's a fair point to just keep on doing what I'm doing. Thanks for the reminder there, I usually tend to think like that anyway. For some reason this bothered me a bit more than usual!
I get it. There was a mix of frustration, anger but also validation, when other devs cloned
#vendordetailsomo. It felt like an accomplishment for the project and work to be worthy enough of imitation. Isn't that called the highest form of flattery?
If somebody deems you relevant enough to follow your progress, you might have made an impression on them.
Maybe it will come to you in the next days, why it bothered you.
It might not be the follow at all, but a reminder of something else. Especially, if they feel like a real threat to your business.
The last time someone cloned my app I wasn't worried because the clone was terrible and I could tell they were the type of person to give up after 5 minutes.
This time, I think it's just that this competitor actually seems to have a good product. But ultimately, I think I just need to listen to customers and not pay too much attention to what this person is doing with their business.
Are they just following you? If so, follow back and offer support. Even direct competitors can support each other in a way that becomes mutually beneficial. I support my fellow direct competitors all the time because customers/clients might need different things or prefer different brands, but I tend to be a "tide raises all ships" kinda person (and it's paid off).
Are they acting shady? Remove as a follower or block, whichever you feel like doing.
Considering it's Twitter, people can just make another account and look at your stuff from there, so I'd tend to just remove them as a follower UNLESS they're shitposting about you and trying to drag you or your brand down (then outright block, then write a post about why that behavior will sink a brand fast and destroy trust from future clients and fellow competitors -- basically use it to your advantage and control the narrative to make it good PR for you).
I just read the conversation between you and Joda. There's a difference between a direct competitor and someone who legit cloned your app.
If it's someone who cloned your app, I'd:
- remove as a follower then ignore them because ultimately they shouldn't affect what you're doing -- stay in your lane and worry about yourself and what you're doing
- write a post about it (in vague terms, not calling out the person) -- something about creativity and innovation aren't outright cloning and how we can all bring something different to the table to make similar-but-different products, etc.
Right, in the original case (not this person) where someone cloned my app after abusing a free trial to gain intel, I called them out directly on X, blocked them, and had my payment processor blacklist their email globally. Apparently they had been a problem for other businesses as well as I was told it wasn't the first time someone had complained about that customer email haha
Big fucking yikes. You did the right thing with that. What's funny is they're so stupid. You'd think if they wanted to be a sneaky-sneak, they'd at least create different emails lol
Yeah they were big stupid. They reached out in a "solo founders" telegram group I'm in to tell me that they liked my product and they were going to give it a try for their own group
Then I saw them start a trial. After a few days, when I noticed they hadn't done much with the trial except log into the dashboard and look at all the settings, I reached out -> radio silence
The trial expired and a charge was attempted and they used a stolen or limited credit card, so it failed. Then they quickly canceled their subscription, maybe hoping I didn't notice the failed charge. At that point I looked at their Twitter and saw they had just launched a competing product with a very similar logo and landing page haha
I called them out in that group for pulling that kind of move (and abusing a trial) as well as the tweet I mentioned.
So reckless and stupid. The community of people actually creating and shipping products is pretty small, so it's mind blowing people think they can get away with this...then continue to fuck over other people.
Anyway, I'm glad you were able to ban the email address, and hopefully he's too stupid to create a new one as a workaround. These people don't last in the game anyway.
Yeah this was over 6 months ago. He completely gave up as I predicted he would and the clone site is offline.
Very few people are actually willing to commit to building something over the long term.
Yeah, just a follow for now. They didn't clone anything as far as I know and I didn't even know they existed until recently; they started a few years before me.
I may follow back at some point, but I think it would be too tempting for me to keep looking at their posts and subconsciously adjust my own roadmap.
Instead I just want to focus on listening to what people ask me for and ship accordingly.
If following them back is going to derail you, it's not worth it at all. Stick with your game plan and strategy.
Ultimately, we don't know someone else's strategy (or if they have one (lots of people don't) or if it's even working), so if you start to switch up what you're doing/how you're doing it because you got distracted by someone else, it could lead you to a dead end.
Keep holding the line with your approach. You're already doing things right by listening to people and giving them what they ask for.
Blocking doesn't really do much. They can use a different account anyway. Also it might bring unwanted drama, at least for my level of following. The only time I did it was to send a message.
Most of the time I'd ignore, or remove them (as a follower), so they less likely to see my content without following me again.
I think regardless of the competitors following us, we should not oversharing. I stopped sharing revenue and growth tactics a while ago. And only share some of them at a very high level (eg: not going to share keywords / channels / campaign details)
I agree. Talking about MRR brings engagement but I don’t think it’s worth it.
I never talk about marketing strategy / campaigns publicly either, only in private groups with people I know already
Danny blocks direct competitors and copycats... and I always see a post go viral like "wow, really, blocked me because i'm building a competitor?"