Add new features. Improve the product. Make it do more. Make it kick ass. Put more work in. Make it scale better. Make sure your product is far better than the competition. Integrate it with other useful tools... etc etc. Maybe tackle a few "hard" problems.
Bad developers whine and complain that their product has been stolen.
Many people seem obsessed with the fact that Campfire is so much easier to write than, say, Mathematica. And so it is, particularly after 37signals gave away the toolkit to do so. But if you're trying to make money with a chat app, building it is the least of your problems: There's probably thirty or forty chat apps sitting on Sourceforge right now. Your biggest problem is Metcalfe's Law: nobody wants to use a chat app which their friends aren't using. What you need is publicity. Ideally, you want to convince half the readers of Techcrunch to try out your chat app in the course of a single week.
Google handed 37signals that publicity on a plate, and they ran with it. Complaining about your product's imminent extinction at the hands of a mean, nasty corporate behemoth might be a good idea even if your competition is Microsoft -- obviously, your odds of getting those guys to back down are infinitesimal, but at least people might hear of your existence, it might be better to burn out than to fade away, and you never know: Maybe there will be room for more than one company in your product space, and if you play your PR cards right you might emerge with a reputation as the "classic", "alternative" brand and be able to ride Microsoft's coattails to fabulous wealth. Or modest wealth, anyway. This is how Apple Computer managed to stay alive long enough to be rescued by Steve Jobs.
But 37signals got extra lucky because their opponent was Google, which treasures its reputation as a kinder, gentler company that is certainly not mean like Microsoft, and is unwilling to tarnish that reputation over what (to them) is a simple demo app. So, when challenged, Google folded immediately and left 37signals in possession of the field. More importantly, Campfire is now a household word, at least in households where people read Techcrunch or Digg.
Meanwhile, you're welcome to try to compete with Campfire yourself. Bolt on features, make it do more, add plenty of nifty-looking toggle switches and a skinnable interface, make it scale so well that it runs on a netbook, etc. Go nuts. Don't skimp on the work if you don't want to: Work day and night! Just don't come crying when you can't make any headway in the market because it turns out you've been working on the wrong things.
http://www.quantcast.com/campfirenow.com
In the world of chat, Campfire is pretty small. It's pretty funny for you to say they are in possession of the field - they've only done 10m chat messages since they started!
Some random math: Been going almost 3 years - 1000 days odd 10m messages sent! (From website)
That's an average of ONE message every 10 seconds.
MSN User: Okay, I use msn, but I can't get to it at work.
Non-Chat User: Um, I'm not sure how that works.
Yahoo User: I use yahoo, I'm busty_hot_chick_16@yahoo.com
Business User: Guys, just go to campfire.1234.com and sign in.
It's just a very solid, inexpensive private web chat that we don't have to host ourselves. It works everywhere, unlike IRC, SILC, and AIM, which almost everyone filters. It is completely brilliant for conducting meetings. We're all smart people; could we have built a substitute? Sure, if we wanted to be in the chat business.
So, I think along with "time" and "expertise", you should also add "tolerance for needless pain".
You know, last time I checked, the BSD devs were still using icb. Maybe Campfire is also for the people without the time or expertise to set up icb. =)
* IRC runs its own custom protocol, which firewalls go out of their way to block.
* IRC has archaic limits like 7-bit clean text and short lines.
* IRC requires custom client software.
* IRC can't natively include binary data, images, or rich content.
* IRC can't provide transcripts without more archaic software to log in and watch channels.
* IRC's authentication support is significantly worse than that of the web.
* IRC's authorization features are limited to chankeys and +i.
It's in use on millions of websites. It's the most used groupchat protocol on the internet.
So I'm not quite sure where you get your data from.
Maybe you personally hate IRC for some reason, but to say "I can't imagine why anyone would waste time using it in 2009." Is just idiotic.
By "in use on millions of websites", I presume you're cheating by saying that any website that mentions IRC is "using" IRC.
Here's a few more.
http://www.quantcast.com/p-1as4Vqt4eFyrI/traffic/syndicators
You could probably change Mibbit to use the MibbitChat protocol and most of your users would never care.
I already layer things ontop of IRC such as typing notify, recent chat on channel join etc...
IRC is a simple, solid chat protocol. It's about as ugly and broken as HTML IMHO.
You don't get users by forcing them to use some swanky new protocol/system off the bat. That's a recipe for quick failure.
You know, I made the same mistake in 1998; we started (and got funded) a company that basically took IRC and:
* Added arbitrary TLV encoded data to messages
* Used link state routing to solve the netsplit problem
* Used FEC to provide reliability over the resulting mesh network
But even though you've kept current on IRC and I wrote it off a long time ago, I'm pretty sure I can still win an argument that IRC is archaic and ready to go.
Those problems you 'solved' are not problems any user cares about though. They want IRC to be easy, and usable as a webchat.
But the world certainly wants to be able to upload files and images into group chats. No user cares about IRC; they want group chat to be easy as using a website.
I assume your startup failed. Perhaps that's tainted your view a tad.
You are the opposite of right; IRC is dying, and will be replaced with web chat systems with backend protocols nobody thinks about.
Why would I count page views? Counting profit is much more fun.
I think you'll see an explosion in online webchat this year and next, and IRC will be one of the clear winners. I don't like the protocol, it's a complete mess to be honest, but that's what'll happen.
Ah, I should have gone ahead and written "the field of battle", which is what I meant. Which, in this case, was their own small piece of turf, not the entire world of online chat. Obviously they don't dominate the world. Nor do they seem to want to. They seem perfectly content to own their particular chat niche, and they probably would be happy even if that niche were little more than "users of other 37signals products talking to each other".
Umm I'll bear that in mind thanks ;)
Good Internet entrepreneurs might do this. Good developers might be good Internet entrepreneurs but then again , they might not be. I know I'm a pretty good developer and I have some ideas about cool web applications which might make some money and some ideas about the most effective ways to compete. But, you know something? I won't kid myself that my development skills or my native intelligence would automatically tell me how to respond to competition. I respect marketers, managers and investors who literally make it their business to know how to compete.
"Bad" as in "being a bad sport", not incompetent.