Ask HN: My competitors have flawed products but I can't get traction

I think you should be open to the idea that your competitors are not competing with you in the way you think they are. They may be fighting (and winning) elsewhere. Fundraising, customer acquisition, specific use cases, communities, niches, etc. Also, they might be losing. From the outside every company wants to look successful - raising money, hiring, growing, etc. The real story is almost never told, so you can’t assume much from the outside.

Please do not confuse funding with traction. These things are not related necessarily. In best case, a funded team gets traction and will be able to perform in a profitable relation to that funding. Your angle should be building a small but steady user base and build on that. While others are competing against time and expectations, you compete against visbility and trust. Your competitors aren't your competition you should care about. It should be, how to communicate to the users more effectively.

Not the only thing that matters but still important: i don't think your brand name is good. The name is so generic and hard to search, you picked marketing on a nightmare difficulty level. Besides from recognizability i think even if someone recommended your app directly by word of mouth they would not be able to find it

I think it'd be a good idea to spend some time on SEO/marketing. I spent a few minutes trying to find your app. I couldn't find it at all via searching ddg, play store, or apple app store. Competitor sites/apps did show up.

Do you have a link to your product ? I have the same problem, and actually want to try your product

I can't find it on google

The actual 'performance' of the product is usually the last thing that matters to the consumer. People happily put up with all sorts of bullshit while complaining about how bad the product is usually for a number of reasons. A lot of engineers get trapped in the idea that if your product is simply less enshittified than all the competition then they should win the product market battle. But product marketing has little to do with those things and more to do with getting the product in front of actual users and making the user imagine using your product every day. We're in an attention economy, if you can't grab a users attention then your product means nothing.

Try different marketing approach

First off: congratulations on shipping! Most never get there.

Genuinely: Who cares about saving reels? Or less bluntly, who are your potential customers and where are you advertising to reach them? Instagram itself is hugely popular, but the general population of Instagram users won't and don't care about saving reels. So either you teach them to (a la the story about the first shopping carts), or you find users who already want to, but don't have a tool for that yet, or are using a competitor's tool. Having not given it a ton of thought, creators themselves would want (and be willing to pay) for you're service. Play up the issue of if their account gets hacked or suspended by Instagram itself, they'll lose access to their reels and stories and posts, so use your service to get an off-site backup. Do you have AdWords setup so you come up when potential users search for your competition? Don't answer this, but what's your targeted/projected CAC (customer acquisition cost) vs LTV(lifetime value of a customer). You probably want to double or triple your ad-spend, but that'll raise CAC, so you want to have a examination of LTV before you commit to that.

Etc.

Contact a marketing agency for more in-depth specific help.