Sachin Gupta
Contributor
Sachin Gupta is the CEO and co-founder of HackerEarth. He was formerly a software developer at Google and Microsoft, and now oversees HackerEarth’s sales, marketing and general operations.
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 …
