Dodo Digest: Competition Is a Feature, Not a Bug

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Hello everyone,

I've been noticing a pattern in the AI space lately. We're moving beyond chatbots that simply answer questions toward AI assistants that can actually do things for us.

TL;DR
- Meta's Muse is expanding quickly, while new challengers like Underdog are taking different approaches to personal AI agents.
- The next wave of AI products isn't just about answering questions. It's about taking action, connecting to your tools, and getting things done.
- Competitors can reveal what your product is missing, where customer expectations are heading, and which trade-offs matter most.
- Comparisons like OpenAI Dots vs. Grok Bot show why there isn't always one winner. Different products solve the same problem in different ways.

Meta's Muse is a good example. It launched on mobile in September and reached the iPad just a month later. It can connect to services people already use, help manage everyday tasks, and even make purchases on their behalf.

What's interesting is how quickly this category is growing. We're no longer just competing over who has the smartest chatbot. We're starting to compete over who can build the most useful assistant for everyday life.

And the competition is getting interesting.

THE SIGNAL

Meta's Muse is part of a growing wave of personal AI assistants, but it's far from the only player in the space. Another AI assistant called Underdog has entered the picture.

What caught my attention wasn't simply that another competitor had launched. It was the approach.

Underdog's creator, Sigil Wen, is taking a privacy-first route. The assistant runs directly on a user's computer rather than relying entirely on cloud-based inference, keeping personal data on devices the user already owns. The trade-off is that it uses a smaller model than some of the leading cloud-based assistants.

That's a very different set of priorities from building an assistant around cloud infrastructure and powerful hosted models.

And that's exactly what makes this interesting.

Two companies can look at the same problem and arrive at completely different answers. One might prioritize convenience and access to powerful models. Another might prioritize privacy, local processing, and lower operating costs.

Neither approach has to win everywhere. Different users care about different things.

WHY THIS MATTERS

I think there's a lesson here that applies to every founder.

Competition isn't just something you need to beat. It's one of the clearest ways to understand what your market actually wants.

When a competitor launches, don't just look at their features and start copying them. Look at the decisions they've made.

What problem are they solving differently? What are they prioritizing that you aren't? What are customers responding to? And what trade-offs are they willing to make that you might not be?

We're seeing this play out across AI agents, too. A recent comparison of OpenAI's Dots and Grok Bot looks at everything from account eligibility and usage limits to computer access, permissions, and model control. The interesting part is that choosing between them isn't simply about which one is smarter. It depends on what you need the agent to do and how much control you're willing to give it.

That's a useful way to think about competition more broadly.

You don't need to match every feature your competitor releases. You need to understand why that feature matters to their customers and whether those customers are yours, too.

Sometimes a competitor exposes a gap in your product. Sometimes they validate a market you've been building toward. And sometimes they show you that an assumption you've held for months was wrong.

All three are valuable.

The founders who benefit most from competition aren't necessarily the ones who react fastest to every launch. They're the ones who pay attention, learn from what they see, and make deliberate decisions about what to build next.

WHAT WE SHIPPED

This week, we shipped Dodo Payments v1.118.3, with updates across checkout, payment methods, subscription management, and developer tools: https://docs.dodopayments.com/changelog/v1.118.3

One of the bigger updates is Multi-Subscription Checkout. Customers can now purchase multiple subscription products in a single checkout and receive one invoice, while each subscription keeps its own billing schedule, trial, and renewal date.

We also introduced the Moderation API, allowing developers to screen text and images before they reach their products. Responses return an allow, flag, or deny verdict, making it easier to build content moderation directly into an application.

Alongside that, we shipped:
- New Payment Methods: GCash for the Philippines, AlipayHK and FPS for Hong Kong, and Touch 'n Go for Malaysia, expanding local payment options across Asia.
- Apple Pay in India: Customers in India can now pay using Apple Pay, with INR subscriptions supported through RBI mandates.
- Ethoca Alerts: Merchants can opt in to automatically refund eligible payments when Mastercard and other non-Visa card alerts arrive, helping prevent disputes from becoming chargebacks.
- Customer Email Logs: Merchants can view emails sent to customers, check delivery status, inspect the exact email, and resend it when needed.
- Test Mode Emails: Developers can test the full customer email experience before going live, with test emails clearly marked.
- Right-to-Left Checkout: Checkout now supports right-to-left layouts for Arabic and Hebrew.
- Subscription Cancellation Tracking: API responses and webhooks now identify who cancelled a subscription, whether it was the customer, a merchant user, an API key, or the Dodo team.

We also improved payout management with configurable payout settings, clearer payout dates, and reserved balance visibility. Account verification now follows a simpler checklist-based flow, and the dashboard has been redesigned to make settings and navigation easier to manage.

Finally, Dodo Sync 1.0 is here. The open-source package for syncing payments, customers, subscriptions, and licenses to your own database now includes faster batch writes, improved reliability for serverless environments, and safer handling of credentials in the CLI.

It's a substantial release, with improvements spanning the customer checkout experience, merchant operations, and the tools developers use to build around Dodo Payments.

ONE LAST THOUGHT

You don't have to be the first company in a category to build something people love.

Sometimes, someone else entering the market is exactly what helps you understand where the real opportunity lies.

Pay attention to your competitors. Learn from their decisions, question your assumptions, and keep improving the things that matter to your customers.

The goal isn't to build what everyone else is building. It's to understand the market well enough to build what they're still missing.

Also, join our loving Discord community: https://discord.gg/dodo-payments-1305511580854779984

Best,
Rishabh Goel
Co-Founder, Dodo Payments

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nse/dodo-payments/2026-10-12/3925

From

Rishabh Goel · rishabh@dodopayments.com

Sent

12 October 2026 · 11:00 UTC