How do you know he's progressing faster? With your base of paying customers, you should be able to iterate faster than your competition. If you can't, and if you feel it's that much of a serious technical threat, then you may want to consider hiring a technical professional of your own.<p>At the same time, your business co-founder (presumably you're the one responsible for the technical side of the house while your partner is responsible for sales, marketing and biz dev) should seriously investigate if there is any merit to the competition's revenue model, and whether it's in your best interest to adopt a freemium model of your own (it may not be).<p>Given that you claim to have a working paywall model (something that I think many media companies and media brokers would kill for), your content must be a niche of some type.<p>Attack this problem from as many simultaneous angles as possible (technical/feature-parity, pricing and marketing). If you can learn faster than your competition (that doesn't necessarily mean release features faster -- "learn" is the keyword here) from your paying customers, then you should be in a much better position to stay ahead.<p>The fact that you said that the "[...] products will be functionally identical once both are deployed and out of beta" is a red-flag to me that you either haven't done enough analysis of the competition's feature set, or if you have, then you need to increase the tempo of customer feedback to incorporate into your product.<p>Perhaps you will say that as soon as you deploy new features based on your customer learnings, your competition will copy you. If that's the case, then (from a marketing angle) you will always be first to deliver features and should be able to please your customers faster, hopefully resulting in greater adoption (until you saturate your market).<p>I smell a lot of fear from your post. It may help to reframe your situation in a more positive light, since imitation is usually the highest form of flattery, while competition is sometimes used as a signalling mechanism (to yourself and others) that you picked a potentially profitable addressable market.<p>tl;dr<p>1) Congratulations! You're validating your business model and market with actual paying customers and (now) competition.<p>2) Figure out how long each of you can last if one of you gave the content away for free. Consider freemium for your own offering (teaser content?).<p>3) Increase, analyze and act on feedback from your customers faster.<p>4) Hire better technical talent.<p>Sorry I didn't answer your original question of "What do you do to push through it?" Hopefully the suggestions above will help to combat the dejection and loss of motivation.