I think perhaps you're seeing a false dichotomy here.
In a nutshell, we are new and high-tech, our competitors are established and low-tech, and we are aiming to solve essentially the same problem for mostly the same people in an easier way.
Perhaps a good analogy would be Netflix. They saw the potential for emerging technologies to disrupt an existing market and built a successful business around doing so, all but killing the old video rental store model in the process. What would have happened if, before Netflix had become established, one of the major rental store chains or perhaps a coalition of big movie studios had realised the potential of those new distribution models and the danger to the existing happy cash generators, and consequently thrown $100,000,000 into getting their own service off the ground? Whether or not the new distribution models ultimately took off, it's a good bet that the world would be a little less red today.
Now, we're building a different product and we're in a much smaller niche market, but the basic risk is the same: if an established dinosaur knew about the idea and realised the impact it could have on their happy cash generators, then it would make sense for them to move sideways and block us to retain their customer base, even if they would otherwise have no need to adapt their existing offering. They almost certainly don't know how to do that today, but they have so much more money than us that they could hire a dozen consultants until they found someone who did. Then they could afford to hire a team ten times our size to beat us to market, while using leverage from their existing network to make our lives difficult until our money ran out.
There's an excellent book that I'm reading called "The innovator's dilemma" which seems relevant to your case. The difficulty with established competitors is that their middle management gets in the way--that is, if you're charging less and offering less, then they won't bother competing against you because they're focused on up-market customers.
In a nutshell, we are new and high-tech, our competitors are established and low-tech, and we are aiming to solve essentially the same problem for mostly the same people in an easier way.
Perhaps a good analogy would be Netflix. They saw the potential for emerging technologies to disrupt an existing market and built a successful business around doing so, all but killing the old video rental store model in the process. What would have happened if, before Netflix had become established, one of the major rental store chains or perhaps a coalition of big movie studios had realised the potential of those new distribution models and the danger to the existing happy cash generators, and consequently thrown $100,000,000 into getting their own service off the ground? Whether or not the new distribution models ultimately took off, it's a good bet that the world would be a little less red today.
Now, we're building a different product and we're in a much smaller niche market, but the basic risk is the same: if an established dinosaur knew about the idea and realised the impact it could have on their happy cash generators, then it would make sense for them to move sideways and block us to retain their customer base, even if they would otherwise have no need to adapt their existing offering. They almost certainly don't know how to do that today, but they have so much more money than us that they could hire a dozen consultants until they found someone who did. Then they could afford to hire a team ten times our size to beat us to market, while using leverage from their existing network to make our lives difficult until our money ran out.