Step 1: You must at least be more awesome than every other company in your marketplace.
If you’re not, why the hell would anyone buy from you vs your more awesome competitor? If you do not definitively believe you are the most awesome company in your market, stop trying to win, and go back to strategy/product development. You’re not ready yet kid.

Step 2: When you are more awesome than all competitors, your job is now to become more awesome than you were yesterday.
Raise the standard! The only concern for a market leader is to improve the standard of their industry. It’s your job to make sure next quarter is better for everyone involved. You have to push up the ceiling. Keep climbing.

Getting to first place is cool. Staying in first place, for a really really long time, is much cooler, and much harder.

As soon as anyone else thinks you’re #1, a target immediately forms on your face, and people will start to compare their product to yours. Good competitors will ask themselves, “How can I make my thing, better than their thing.” Great competitors will return a legitimate answer and set about creating that reality.

There isn’t a second to waste! When you’re #1 you need to predict what moves your competitors are going to make in order to dethrone you, and make those moves before they are able to.

#protip Don’t tell anyone that you’re working on a better idea than them. Let them spend money and effort developing their idea, let them get cocky and excited, and then when they’re 95% of the way there, release your superior version, making their project obsolete before they even get to launch it. Epic death blow. May require spies.

Getting to the top is not the end game. It’s the first fucking inning!

The game is everything after that. You have to constantly climb higher than where you’re at. If you’re a true market leader, then “higher” usually doesn’t exist yet. You have to will it into existence. This isn’t for the faint of heart, but then again, the faint of heart would never make it here in the first place.

The second you let your guard down, someone WILL come along and absolutely wreck your shit.

If anyone else is capable of wrecking your shit. Your shit deserves to be wrecked. Simple as that.

#protip make sure no one else has the capabilities to wreck your shit. If you determine that they do, wreck their shit first.

Thank you for reading,

Jordan Laubaugh
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Snapchat: JordanLaubaugh

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