3 Competitors Every Entrepreneur Needs To Beat

Too many entrepreneurs view their competition with a Coke versus Pepsi mindset. Competition is rarely as simple as slightly differentiated products. Beating the other guy isn’t what makes a great company or profitable. Instagram, Swiffer, and Nest didn’t battle clone wars, but rather had to compete with consumer habits and perceptions. Breakout products face competition from the formidable inertia powering the status quo. Success therefore comes from taking on the three real competitors every innovator must really beat: the way it was done, the way it should be done, and the best way you have the means to get it done.

Your Biggest Competitors

#Inefficiency & Habit

These are your first real competitors. Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer laughed at the iPhone because he couldn’t envision people using a mobile device differently. Steve Jobs didn’t compete on audio quality or battery life, but focused on empowering users to get more out of their mobile computing device than just a voice call. People shared large files before Dropbox. Dropbox just made it so much easier that new users were not only willing to change their habits, but encouraged others they shared files with to do the same. To beat the way it was done, your solution needs to be a ten times improvement over the past.

#2 The Conventional Way

The hardest competitor to take head on is the way it should be done. Many startups run out of cash striving to create the perfect product. You and your team have spent months covering your white board with every conceivable feature and functionality your product should possess. Your vision of perfection, like the sirens tormenting Ulysses, will send your companies crashing on the shores long before you have a large enough user base to keep the enterprise afloat.

When it comes to coding: don’t get it right, get it written. The good is no longer the enemy of the great when we live in an ever changing world where new products and technologies are released daily. But today, with big data and the cloud available to all, the best businesses don’t sail the seas alone. Get your product into users’ hands as quickly as possible and incorporate the crowd’s feedback to iterate. The more you involve your customer, the more loyal they will become. Go back and look at what Kickstartr looked like five years ago (they couldn’t even afford to buy an “e”). The crowd – your customers – will provide the data you need to chart the best course for your company and bury any competitor that goes it alone. Solve one thing ten times better and you will have ten more times to better one thing.

The competitor that keeps me up most nights is the reality of finding the best way you have with the means to get it done. Every product you have ever loved was a compromise from the ideal vision of its creators to the realities of shipping on time, on budget, and on price point. Anyone who has ever manufactured a physical product that had to be on the shelves for Christmas shopping knows how painful these choices can be. Every entrepreneur builds their business with limited resources, but competes with unlimited passion.

#3 Overcoming The Fear Of Nothing

The greatest joys of my career have come from figuring out how to make something out of nothing. Ten years ago this week, I launched a digital music store that went head-to-head with Apple iTunes. I had zero advertising budget, but was determined to compete. My only option was to do something so original and outrageous; the world would have to notice. In 2004, I produced the first ever Concert in the Sky with Sheryl Crow on a United Airlines flight from Chicago to Los Angeles and drove millions of music fans to our fledgling store.

Sometimes innovators just need to build something that solves one universal problem perfectly. Snapchat didn’t have millions in the bank when Evan Spiegel took on Facebook, Instagram, and dozens of mobile communications apps. What Snapchat did have is a clean, simple app that solved the problem of teens finding unwanted photos publically posted in social media. Now the company has the usage patterns and data of 700 million photos and videos per day to add the features and functionality that I am sure is still on Evan’s white board.

Don’t focus on the other business in your market. At the end of the day, your toughest competitor will always be the face you see in the mirror every day.

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