Fighting the ‘copycat’ stigma in SaaS: 3 tricks that work

Whatever idea you have for a platform that solves an “unaddressed market need,” it’s almost a given there’s a team somewhere working on something similar.

In fact, it’s not uncommon for two or more founders to launch similar companies and products within months or weeks of one another. The second one to put out a launch press release isn’t automatically a copycat but is often perceived to be so.

This perception is something we as a company have wrestled with for an entire decade, as have many others in the SaaS domain.

Outbrain and Taboola are native advertising companies founded in 2006 and 2007, respectively. After years of battling for online supremacy in the world of “Content you May Like” links, the rivals even came close to an $850 million merger in 2020.

Both were successful in their own right. nRelate, a third player in the space took a different “anti-clickbait” approach to content recommendations and successfully exited to Ask.com in 2012. SmartGift and Loop Commerce were similar competitors in online gifting and the list goes on.

Investors might not care much about what your boilerplate “founded in” date says and be more concerned about product-market fit, cost-of-acquisition, ARR and a path to profitability. However, in the battle for awareness and consideration amongst potential customers, perception plays an important role.

There’s a certain first-to-market advantage that you get. It always stings to hear a prospect say, “Oh you’re like a cheaper/newer version of [your biggest competitor].” It stings even more when you know you have a superior product.

In my experience, even if you came to market before or around the same time as your main competitor, you may, for whatever reason, be stuck with a pesky perception that your company just popped up overnight. Whatever the reason, this perception can drag on your momentum, especially when you’re trying to establish yourself in a new market.

In our journey of breaking the “copycat” myth, I have learnt a lot about brand-building. There are things I wish we had done sooner and things I am proud of getting right. Based on my experience, here are three ways brands can push back against the stigma of being a copycat platform:

Lean into and promote your data

It’s hard for anyone to argue with data (or at least with its existence). One of the great things about being a SaaS company is that you most likely have all kinds of proprietary data. Chances are you have some kind of data that’s unique to you and your platform. If you are fighting the copycat perception, it’s a great time to lean into your data — especially if you’ve been around for many years.

So many SaaS companies are sitting on a gold mine of data that could be looked at and used in all kinds of creative ways. Pull it, analyze it, package it up into a report and present it to prospects and the press. If you are able to lift the hood and show 10 years of data to a prospective customer and illustrate a specific trend in that data over time, you can put to bed the idea that you just popped up overnight and provide the prospect with a solid example of your core value proposition.

Data also helps you forecast trends and user behaviors. The wise use of data presents opportunities to predict which way your industry will move and allow you to position your company as a thought leader.

Double down on your product

If you’re wrongly positioned as a tagalong in your industry, it’s easy to constantly think about and watch what your competitor is doing. In my experience, it’s easy to get distracted and caught up in product feature wars.

This is a major mistake. It alienates existing and potential customers, and gives them things they don’t want or need while sapping valuable dev resources. Listen to your customers, build the product they need and build it well. Product innovation should be inspired by customer feedback and your own primary research and industry reports. This approach will capture a lot of what your competitors are focused on.

It can be tempting to engage in a race to the bottom with price. This is also a bad idea. Endlessly lowering your price to buy market share is a dangerous game. First of all, being the “cheapest” only contributes to the perception of your company being a low-cost version of your competitor. That said, you also can’t price so high that procurement decisions get pushed off indefinitely, especially in tougher economic times like we are facing now.

The key is balance and understanding how to properly price a SaaS product.

Revisit and reinvent your marketing

One of the biggest reasons you may be perceived as a copycat is because, well, you are one — at least in terms of marketing collateral and your website. Again, it’s easy to get caught up in checking out your competitor’s website and trying to keep updating yours against it. But in the end, you just get a website where you could swap out your competitor’s name and logo and nobody would know the difference.

You should also consider differentiating your brand voice and persona. Fast-food restaurant chain Wendy’s, for example, uses social media to great effect. Having a distinctive voice can help you stand out in consumers’ minds against competitors who are offering many of the same things.

If it’s been some time since you revisited your forward-facing customer touch points and message (website, social profiles, online profiles) at a strategic level, this is a good way to fight back against the copycat perception. Maybe it’s time to take an entirely different approach to your website content and design, and eliminate the question of “Who copied whose website?”

Try starting from scratch and ask yourself, “If none of my competitors existed today, how would I design my website?”

Finally, don’t underestimate the importance of communicating with your competitors’ customers. This isn’t just to poach them but to understand why they chose someone else instead of you. Sometimes it’s just about loyalty, but a lot of times, it’s about nuances you would never have picked up on. These conversations or industry surveys are a great way to know what your company is lacking and build that into your product.

Parting thoughts

Competition is a fact of life in business. It doesn’t matter if your software is for data analytics, martech/adtech, cybersecurity, CRM, graphic design or accounting. Chances are you even personally know the founders of your competitors.

It definitely stinks to be perceived as a copycat in the market, but you don’t have to stand by and accept the label. If you leverage your most valuable assets, stop trying to keep up with the Joneses and have a strong product marketing strategy, you can start to shift perception in your favor.