You only compete with one thing
When I first went to work at Microsoft, there was a person on my team who decided it would be useful—it would get him some notoriety internally—if he wrote a weekly email summarizing Microsoft's competitors. We were the Excel team, so it was really the spreadsheet competitors, Lotus and Borland—what they were doing and what was new and what feature
... See moreJessica Livingston • Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days
Brian at Reforge says: One of my strong beliefs is that startups should rarely think about competitors and most should think about alternatives. Alternatives are the other ways your target audience are solving the problem today. If you focus on competitors, you are likely to make three critical mistakes: 1. You Will Lack Differentiation - When comp
... See moreThere is an all out war for search supremacy right now between two trillion dollar companies, with one having everything to win and the other everything to lose. In those circumstances a standard VC model of buying growth does not work even if you have a huge war chest, as you will be outspent no matter how big your investors are.
As a founder of a ... See more
As a founder of a ... See more
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When you feel like you have to start out competing with the largest player in the market, you end up chasing your competitor’s growth instead of bettering your own offering.
Paul Jarvis • Company Of One: Why Staying Small Is the Next Big Thing for Business
Of course, we should also keep in mind "do not compete for the sake of competition". Sometimes, after a prolonged period of competition, the only goal becomes simply beating the competitor. For example, in the Microsoft-Google competition, Microsoft for a long time saw defeating Google as its goal, and invested heavily in search. It wasn't until a
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