IMO starting with "first of all we were there first" kind of sets the tone for the whole message.
Here's how I would have written the same message:
Hi! Lotus has a great product. We should know, as they reached out to us for inspiration before. Our team has prior experience building billing engines, so we have a very good understanding of the space.
From a product perspective, our coverage is more extensive. We provide more advanced coupons, usage-based components and billing use-cases. For example, we offer credit notes and refunds, small examples that are not listed in their API. Our product covers more billing edge-cases and deeper features.
While we don't know how many customers Lotus has in production, our top user is invoicing 5M customers a month!
Overall, we believe at this point that our product is more advanced. We wish them luck though, the more products in this space the better.
(Lago co-founder here) Thanks for your message Louis, we always welcome genuine and actionable feedback and appreciate the time you invested into writing an example!
No problem! If it's helpful I'm glad. I do believe the original message wasn't meant to be snarky/arrogant at all, it just read that way. Maybe it reads a lot better in French! :)
