Ask HN: My competitors have flawed products but I can't get traction

Problem: I constantly save Instagram Reels/TikToks about restaurants, events, pop-ups, and things to do, but I always forget about them because they get buried in my saves.

Solution: I built Cork. You can send a Reel or Tiktok directly to Cork without even needing to leave the app, and Cork will automatically extract the info in the reel and save it in a map + calendar.

However, I've been finding it hard to get traction while my competitors have gotten traction/funding. I strongly believe my app outperforms all known competitors (their apps fail on reels of popular creators while mine succeeds).

I'm not here for pity or to advertise, but I'm curious why people ship products that don't work for a pretty significant number of inputs when the teams are big enough (employees + funding) to pretty easily solve the problem in a cheap way (as I've done) or at least have a temporary high-performing solution with GPT.

TL;DR: imo my app outperforms competitors in raw performance. why is a team with manpower and funding failing to do something a 2 person team did in a month?

10 points | by saveitincork 1 day ago

11 comments

  • kcsavvy 23 hours ago
    I think you should be open to the idea that your competitors are not competing with you in the way you think they are. They may be fighting (and winning) elsewhere. Fundraising, customer acquisition, specific use cases, communities, niches, etc. Also, they might be losing. From the outside every company wants to look successful - raising money, hiring, growing, etc. The real story is almost never told, so you can’t assume much from the outside.
    • cheevly 22 hours ago
      This is a great answer.
  • leros 1 hour ago
    What's your marketing look like? A bad product that gets put in front of a lot of people will gain more traction than a great product only a few people see.

    A competitor with funding may simply be able to kickstart product awareness with lots of lost spend on advertising. Whereas a bootstrapped company will have a much more difficult time getting off the ground.

  • lschueller 19 hours ago
    Please do not confuse funding with traction. These things are not related necessarily. In best case, a funded team gets traction and will be able to perform in a profitable relation to that funding. Your angle should be building a small but steady user base and build on that. While others are competing against time and expectations, you compete against visbility and trust. Your competitors aren't your competition you should care about. It should be, how to communicate to the users more effectively.
  • cantalopes 20 hours ago
    Not the only thing that matters but still important: i don't think your brand name is good. The name is so generic and hard to search, you picked marketing on a nightmare difficulty level. Besides from recognizability i think even if someone recommended your app directly by word of mouth they would not be able to find it
  • nosioptar 19 hours ago
    I think it'd be a good idea to spend some time on SEO/marketing. I spent a few minutes trying to find your app. I couldn't find it at all via searching ddg, play store, or apple app store. Competitor sites/apps did show up.
  • snisarenko 18 hours ago
    Do you have a link to your product ? I have the same problem, and actually want to try your product

    I can't find it on google

    • snisarenko 18 hours ago
      Ok, i found it. https://www.instagram.com/cork.save/

      So immediate feedback. Why do i need to download an app ? This is HUGE friction.

      Why can't i just DM your Intagram account all the posts/events that i care about, and it can pull directly from there and sent me a web link with a login code to view my organized events ?

      Do you have links to your competitors ?

  • Ethee 23 hours ago
    The actual 'performance' of the product is usually the last thing that matters to the consumer. People happily put up with all sorts of bullshit while complaining about how bad the product is usually for a number of reasons. A lot of engineers get trapped in the idea that if your product is simply less enshittified than all the competition then they should win the product market battle. But product marketing has little to do with those things and more to do with getting the product in front of actual users and making the user imagine using your product every day. We're in an attention economy, if you can't grab a users attention then your product means nothing.
  • erelong 22 hours ago
    Try different marketing approach
  • fragmede 21 hours ago
    First off: congratulations on shipping! Most never get there.

    Genuinely: Who cares about saving reels? Or less bluntly, who are your potential customers and where are you advertising to reach them? Instagram itself is hugely popular, but the general population of Instagram users won't and don't care about saving reels. So either you teach them to (a la the story about the first shopping carts), or you find users who already want to, but don't have a tool for that yet, or are using a competitor's tool. Having not given it a ton of thought, creators themselves would want (and be willing to pay) for you're service. Play up the issue of if their account gets hacked or suspended by Instagram itself, they'll lose access to their reels and stories and posts, so use your service to get an off-site backup. Do you have AdWords setup so you come up when potential users search for your competition? Don't answer this, but what's your targeted/projected CAC (customer acquisition cost) vs LTV(lifetime value of a customer). You probably want to double or triple your ad-spend, but that'll raise CAC, so you want to have a examination of LTV before you commit to that.

    Etc.

    Contact a marketing agency for more in-depth specific help.

    • senordevnyc 4 hours ago
      One of us has completely missed the value prop of this app. I didn't think it was about "saving reels", but rather about easily extracting event details like time / place data from reels that are about a specific event. Saving the reels is just the mechanism.
  • dogomatic 19 minutes ago
    [dead]