You vs. Yourself
Companies don’t get killed by competition, they usually find creative ways to commit suicide.
Competition is a curious thing. It can make founders go crazy. It can turn them into obsessive, win-at-all-costs lunatics. “How much did they just raise?”. “Who did they just hire to run marketing?”. “What did they add to their latest release?”. “Who just offered to buy them? How much?”.
Measuring your company against competitors is an absolute waste of time. Even if you’re in an extremely competitive space, your competition should never act as the measuring stick for your success.
The key to successfully growing your business is to have a healthy obsession with constantly measuring and improving a handful of metrics that determine the health of your business.
The existence of competing products is a meaningful signal and you should by no means ignore them — look over your shoulder every now and then — but make it a few times a year, not a few times a week.
If the real validation of any business is its customers (and it is), then it makes more sense to keep the focus on them. One of the advantages of this approach is that customers lead you to down interesting paths to interesting discoveries. Keeping a finger on their pulse helps you work out what next to build. For example, Steward Butterfield started Flickr started as an online game but observed customer interactions and realized that the inbuilt photo sharing tool was a more compelling product.
Note: being customer-centric doesn’t imply that you ask customers for every feature to build — it’s looking at their pain points and asking yourself with making the experience 10x better for them. It’s not asking if customers want a faster horse, it’s figuring out the problem — in this case, faster, more efficient mobility — and creating something that gets people to their destinations 20x faster with less work required on their part.
In reality, the fight with competition is for market share. That said, you’ll sooner die from failing to provide a valuable service than from your competition taking all your share of the pie, leaving you to starve to death.
Strong brand names and brand value in itself only carry a passing weight. Rather, the new economy will be defined by those who sit closer to the customer, who really “get” them, and who anticipate a solution before customers can even visualize or express it themselves. Strong brands are customer obsessed brands.
The business model canvas is designed with this in mind, keeping the customer segment and the value proposition at the heart of the business while giving only a cursory nod to the competition.
In the end, it is not your purpose to beat another company. The only thing that matters is that you win over more and more customers.
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