Competitive Advantage
Factors that enable a person, team, company etc. to outperform competitors.
nicole and
Competitive Advantage
In more physical industries, there are generally diminishing marginal returns: the next acre you plant and next oil well you drill is probably not as productive as the last one—because if it were, you would have done it first! But the next user of a software platform is often more valuable than the previous one, because they increase the size of the network.
“At both Viaweb and YC, every minute I spent thinking about competitors was, in retrospect, a minute wasted... It's exceptionally rare for startups to be killed by competitors — so rare that you can almost discount the possibility... Inexperienced founders usually give competitors more credit than they deserve. Whether you succeed depends far more
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Your competitive advantage is not that your designs are secret, but that you have a strong relationship with your community of customers.
Jeff Jarvis • WHAT WOULD GOOGLE DO
Before he was Han Solo or Indiana Jones, Harrison Ford was a carpenter. In 1964, Ford moved to Hollywood to become an actor. “But I arrived on a metaphoric bus full of people who had the same ambition,” he said. So he came up with this plan to prevail over the competition. As Ford spent time around the other aspiring actors on that metaphoric bus, ... See more
Our startup gets cloned all the time
If you're building in public and you get any semblance of success, you will inevitably also get cloned.
Here's why you shouldn't be too worried:
1. Founders who clone are less likely to fight on a long time horizon.
I can name 3 jenni… Show more
All of the things you can do 'slightly better' add up to your core advantage.
The ultimate competitive advantage is actually giving a shit about the problem you're working on. When Airbnb had just a few dozen employees, Rocket Internet raised $90 million and hired hundreds of people to clone and crush them.
Stew Fortier • Tweet
millions of dollars of funding can't compete with a company having a soul
"Obviously we think about competition to some extent. But I feel my job is mostly getting people not to think about our competition. In general I think there’s a tendency for people to think about the things that exist. Our job is to think of the thing you haven’t thought of yet that you really need.... You want to be looking at what’s possible and... See more