Under-doing your competition

Conventional wisdom says that to beat your competitors, you need to one-up them. If they have four features, you need five (or fifteen, or twenty five). If they are spending £10,000, you need to spend £20,000. If they have fifty employees, you need a hundred.

This sort of one-upping, Cold War mentality is a dead end. When you get suckered into an arms race, you wind up in a never-ending battle that costs you massive amounts of money, time and drive. And it forces you to constantly be on a defensive, too. Defensive companies can’t think ahead; they can only think behind. They don’t lead; they follow.

So what do you do instead? Do less than your competitors to beat them. Solve the simple problems and leave the hairy, difficult, nasty problems to the competition. Instead of one-upping, try one downing. Instead of outdoing, try under-doing.

The bicycle world provides a great example. For years, major bicycle brands focused on the latest in high-tech equipment: mountain bikes with suspension and ultra-strong disc brakes, or lightweight titanium road bikes with carbon-fiber everything. And it was assumed that bikes should have multiple gears: three, ten, or twenty-one. But recently, fixed-gear bikes have boomed in popularity, despite being as low tech as you can get. These bikes have just one gear. Some models don’t even have bloody brakes! The advantage: they’re simpler, lighter, cheaper and don’t require as much maintenance.

Another great example of a product is succeeding by under-doing the competition: the Flip- an ultra simple, point-and-shoot, compact camcorder that’s take a significant percentage of the market in a short time. And just like the bike, it records and stores — no menus, no big screen, no viewfinder, no effects, not even a lens cap.

Don’t shy away from the fact that your product, website, software or service does less. Highlight it. Be proud of it. Sell it as aggressively as the competitors sell their extensive feature lists. Sit back and watch what they are doing wrong but over complicating things.

I see it all the time in my network, similar concept or businesses which are competitors to mine. They may seem they are ahead because they may have, say, a broader audience, more featured content, better systems — and they probably think they are ahead. I sit back. Watch, and capitalise on their mistakes. Don’t one-up your competitor, under-do them.