In the parent reply, I walked you through how I became interested in OP's competitor, and how I set out to find the competitor's "subpar" app, but nonetheless an app that OP was worried about.
*I finished that reply with a lead, Hovercards.
...
Before we look at Hovercards, a question has been bothering me for the last 6 minutes. Why? Why was OP worried about his competitor, still a nebulous entity at this point, especially when OP states: our product is superior in every way. That type of comment is usually made with confidence. And OP shows that confidence... in the first sentence of the fourth and last paragraph of his post. So the question is still, why is OP worried?
Two words: first move.
Now, if you're not familiar with the concept, no worries, we'll use Chess to describe the idea. According to wikipedia:
The first-move advantage in chess is the inherent advantage of the player (White) ... Compiled statistics support this view; White consistently wins ... usually scoring between 52 and 56 percent.
...
Now let's recall what OP had to say about his competitor's product, in comparison to his own:
... their implementation is tolerable at best. The design is subpar and the UX caters to the wrong use cases.
The first remark about implementation, only he would know how true his statement is - there's an interesting point about this part of OP's remark, but I'll bring that up later.
What about OP's comments on the "subpar" design and the UX? How are we supposed to interpret that? I have a hunch. But before I give it, let's get a better sense of what Hovercard is.
*Here's the description on Hovercard's landing page:
HoverCards is a chrome extension that lets you preview social links from youtube, twitter, reddit, soundcloud, imgur, & instagram. So next time your friend sends a video you're too lazy to click, just hover for cards!
"Neat", I thought. But this seems too much like a toy, and one that limited you to previewing only 6 sites. At this point, I started to recall one of my side projects that I released also as a Chrome extension.
It was an extension that tried to satisfy the following use case: when users went to specific videos, hoping to find a specific scene or line in the video, my app would allow them to search through the video.
Magic? Nah. With a bit of questionable DOM traversing and content-scripting, I manage to pull and index the transcripts of youtube videos that provide transcripts.
By the end of all this, I had a full-text search engine sitting in a pop-up window in Chrome; as you typed, you were given lines from the video; as you cliked, you were moved to that point in the video.
Sounds like a pretty cool app, no? At the time of this writing, my app y2cake had one 5 star review, and 43 users. That 5 star review may have been from my friend. Anyways, what did any of this have to do with OP's dilema?
Now that I think about it. Not much. (Not true, I had a bigger point to make, but I had to cut it out lest I stay up to 5 and miss my conference call at 10 A.M.)
I try hovercards out on reddit. I accidentally keep my cursors on a link that isn't supported by Hovercards.
I let my cursor hover on another link, but once again, a Hovercard does not appear. Why? This new link takes you to a website that isn't a part of Hovercard's list of supported sites: youtube, twitter, reddit, soundcloud, imgur, & instagram.
In fact, most links lead outside of reddit. This is a problem.
Does Hovercard's team know that a vast majority of sites aren't youtube, twitter, reddit, soundcloud, imgur, & instagram?
I don't know if Hovercard will respond to my question. The reason why they wont: I haven't asked them, yet.
But I did ask one question, I ask OP if Hovercards is his competitor.
His response, maybe, in my next reply.