While growing a business, acknowledge competition — but don’t react to it
As a startup gains more traction and visibility, it inevitability will attract more competitors.
Great! Bring it on.
Competition keeps us on our toes and pushes us to be better. It forces us to focus on our product, our culture, on faster execution, and the way we interact with our customers. It allows us to think about network effects, technical barriers to entry, tighter marketing, and big partnerships.
For the last year-and-a-half, I’ve spent most of my waking hours convincing people to join, to invest, to commit to the FiscalNote idea. Competition comes as a welcome surprise.
Yet, while an organization needs to know what’s going on in its market, I restrain our employees from being reactive to competition. I’m confident in our ability to build the impossible — that our values around alignment, transparency, and accountability will force us to be faster and better than any competition out there.
Every minute spent worrying about competition, is another minute that could have been spent on creating a new feature, showing a new customer our value, or demonstrating an incredible experience. Distractions will pull you away from building your own, great company.
Moreover, reacting to a competitor’s path and decisions may not be in the best interest of one’s own company. Extreme focus on the customer is how to win in the long-run — not replicating the latest fad or whimsical feature from the competition. Your customers know best what they need; responding to them to improve a product will allow you to see unique solutions to a problem.
For a company to succeed, the creativity, speed, and innovation it must exhibit should not be replicated. Companies that excel in these areas should also stay calm in the face of increasing competition.
As FiscalNote gets bigger, people will inevitably target us. It’s a testament to how far we’ve grown as a company since we were just an idea in a Motel 6. Likewise, any startup experiencing success by bringing innovation to a market will find others attempting to duplicate that success. Focus on becoming the market leader, and your competition won’t be able to keep up.
