How much of them beating you was marketing and how much was customer service?
World class customer service by itself can be a market beater, even when the product you are backing up is more expensive / lower quality for the same feature set. People like to know that when they have problems, they'll get answers quickly.
2/3 marketing, 2/3 customer service in my case. Which adds up to 4/3 because one of the products was both bad marketing and bad customer service (or rather nonexistent).
> Are you really sure it was that much better than the competition?
In user testing our tool was easier to use. Feature wise we had every feature they had. They were clearly copying us on features (and visa versa) though so I can't say we were "that much" better. We were a couple months ahead of them and, as I said, less buggy and easier to use.
The biggest indicator I have though is how the press handled it. The press coverage for our competition was much better. They would get a full TechChrunch article for a feature we launched months ago and they wouldn't even mention us in the article.
World class customer service by itself can be a market beater, even when the product you are backing up is more expensive / lower quality for the same feature set. People like to know that when they have problems, they'll get answers quickly.