Why attacking your competitors online is dumb

Let's say a competitor copies your feature. They lift your positioning, write a misleading comparison post, or just take a cheap shot at you on X. And let's say you're 'right' – they actually did the thing, and it's actually annoying.

Still don't do it.

This isn't a moral argument about keeping it classy. I just think public competitor attacks never work, and there are much better places to put the energy.

You're only talking to your own fans

When you attack a competitor publicly, you reach two audiences: your fans, who already agree with you, and their fans, who will immediately get defensive. Your fans cheer. Their fans roll their eyes. The people actually evaluating their options – the ones who matter – are unlikely to switch to you because of a zinger of a tweet.

You're also, the moment you go on the offensive, opening yourself up to scrutiny. We're not perfect and we've made loads of mistakes! Whatever you're accusing a competitor of, like copying something, overstating a claim, or making a bad call, there's a good chance you've done some version of it too, and someone will find it.

If you're open source, this gets even more awkward. PostHog is built on the work of many others, and we think others should be able to build on ours too. Attacking a competitor for being "inspired" by us kinda misses the point of open source.

You're doing their marketing, with your audience

PostHog has more users than most of our direct competitors. When we publicly name a competitor, we're lending them our audience – introducing thousands of developers to a product and telling them it's worth being upset about.

So you fire off the tweet, they get more traction than they would have otherwise, their team screenshots it for the all-hands, and you've spent your energy on this instead of on your product.

Most people didn't see the thing you're upset about

If you're in a competitive market, you're probably monitoring it closely. Social listening, Google Alerts, the Slack channel where someone drops every mention. You are primed to notice competitor activity, and you see a lot of it.

Your users are not doing this. Most people didn't see the post that's been annoying you since Tuesday. They're not tracking the nuances of your competitive landscape at all. Nobody cares.

The urgency of wanting to respond scales with how much it bothered you, not with how many people actually saw it. Responding publicly does more to surface the original thing than to rebut it.

What to do instead

I'll admit, we've got this wrong before. When we threw together isgoogleanalyticsillegal.com, it was meant to be tongue in cheek but we still got criticized for going directly after a competitor, which was fair.

This is what we try to do instead:

Make fun of trends, not companies. If something in your market is genuinely dumb, be funny and critical about that without naming anyone. The joke lands, people share it, and you haven't handed anyone ammunition.

Publish detailed, honest comparisons. The instinct is to make yourself look great and them look bad - lots of ticks for you, lots of crosses for them. The better move is genuine honesty about tradeoffs – where you're stronger, where you're not, who each product is actually for. PostHog does this, and I think it builds trust that no amount of positioning copy can buy. I'll admit we haven't always got this right, so where we have made factual errors, we fix them as quickly as possible when they're pointed out.

Bid on competitor keywords. If someone is searching for your competitor, you should be showing up. I know a lot of people think this doesn't work, but a) data disagrees with you, and b) sometimes we're reaching PostHog users who weren't aware we also did [thing]. You know when someone asks in a forum 'what do you think about X?' and the response is 'I actually like Y'? This is the ads equivalent of that.

Correct factual errors privately if they actually matter. Contacting a competitor to say "Hey, this isn't accurate, it should be this" takes five minutes and either fixes it or motivates you when they are annoying about it. We have seen this succeed in both directions. We have happily accepted PRs to our website to set the record straight!

But mostly: use your anger to outship them and build a better product.

Further reading

• How not to be boring
• 40 things we’ve learned about marketing for developers

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