Why having a huge competitor can be good for indie hackers

Recently OpenAI announced that ChatGPT can now chat with PDFs, but it doesn’t faze Damen—maker of PDF.ai—one bit:

I’m optimistic about PDF.ai! Because I don’t think ChatGPT will ever implement small PDF-related features that customers desperately ask for. Sure, I believe small players will go away or not even want to get started, and big players with VC money will die once they burn all their money soon. PDF.ai is bootstrapped and profitable with a very healthy margin. We don’t have a mission to become another unicorn; several million dollars in ARR is good enough for me, and that’s my goal in the next 1-2 years. I’m 1000% confident we can make it! Because of this, I’m even more optimistic! We’ll stay, not only that, we will be the best in Chat PDF! – @damengchen

So far seen them take on OpenAI, NextJS, Xiaomi, Lensa… and they’re still standing. This upends conventional wisdom on its head. When a huge, VC-funded tech corp comes in, by right we indie hackers should be out-competed by now.

The law of the jungle right? Monopoly kills off all the other smaller competitors… right?

But the indie ogs like @​damengchen @​levelsio @​dannypostmaa are riding the big waves like pros, waves that OpenAI throws at them with every new feature announcement. They’re unfazed, because:

• big guys releasing the same feature might be a good thing as they have a huge marketing budgets, and it in turn expands the entire pie as it goes more mainstream.

• generic feature by big competitor versus specialized features, better workflow, intuitive UX by indies. Plus the big guys won’t develop the feature to the depth that the specialized apps do, because that’s not their aim. So there’s still a market for the indie version.

• the AI landscape is changing so fast. Indies being able to ship fast is an advantage over big teams.

David 1, Goliath 0.