Most indie devs and early startups make the same mistake.
They look at their VC-funded competitors and try to keep up feature by feature. They think if they can just rebuild enough of what already exists, they’ll get traction.
They won’t.
Why copying features never works
If you are smaller, you will always be behind.
You will always have fewer resources.
You will always be building yesterday’s product.
You are setting yourself up to lose a race you never wanted to run.
This is how founders burn out.
This is how products get bloated.
This is how you lose your edge.
The better approach: fix what sucks
There is this story about a restaurant owner who used to visit top-tier restaurants in his city.
But instead of copying what they did well, he focused on what annoyed him.
He saw that every fancy place had a long wine list but nothing for beer lovers. So he offered beer tastings.
He saw how cold and formal service felt. So he made his friendly and casual.
That was his edge. He won not by imitating but by doing the opposite.
(This is from the book “Setting the Table”)
Bring that mindset to dev tools
This applies perfectly to SaaS, tools and platforms.
Your users are probably not looking for feature parity. They are looking for relief.
Relief from bad support.
Relief from terrible pricing.
Relief from complexity.
You do not need to beat AWS or Stripe or Vercel at everything.
You need to beat them at the thing that makes people curse at their screens.
The Sliplane example
We run Sliplane, a managed Docker hosting platform.
There are a hundred hosting providers out there. Many of them are good. Some are great.
But what kept coming up in conversations were two things that sucked across the board.
- Support
Most platforms push you into public forums or gated support tiers. We reply like humans. Even to non-paying users. No tiers. No excuses.
- Pricing
Every other platform has dozens of microcharges and unpredictable billing. We charge per server. That’s it. You can run one service or a hundred. No surprise bills.
That’s what we bet on. And it works (for now at least :D).
People didn’t care that we didn’t have autoscaling on day one.
They cared that we actually answered emails.
They cared that their bill didn’t give them anxiety.
What to do instead
If you are building in a crowded market, do not copy.
Start by asking:
- What makes people hate using the market leader?
- What do users tolerate because they have no choice?
- What do you hate about using those tools?
Then pick one or two of those things and go all in.
You will not win by doing everything.
You win by doing something differently, and doing it incredibly well.
Your unfair advantage is not feature parity
It is fixing what nobody else bothers (or better, by definition cannot) fixing.
That’s the wedge.
That’s what makes people try you.
That’s what gives you time to catch up on the rest.
Cheers,
Jonas, Co-Founder of Sliplane