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If he hadn’t spent the thinking time, he wouldn’t have come to this realization. By wasting time, he gained experience. It was thus not wasted. Gaining experience is inherently an inefficient process. It’s the nature of the beast. (And it’s tweetable).
Sounds more like survivorship bias than actual good advice.
It only makes sense if you are selling a unique product. Even then though in most online niches are you going to have similar products that people are considering. For example this Drip comparisons page is a waste of time to create according to the above advice: https://www.drip.com/comparisons
My take is that entrepreneurs need to be obsessed with their Market(s) and Domain expertise; which includes also the other players (competition) but not just competition per se.
What exactly were you thinking about when "thinking" about your competitors?
Usually it's copying features "they have Foo, I just need Foo or Foo++". Worse is: competitor A has feature X, competitor B has feature Y, competitor C has feature Z... all I have to do is build X, Y, and Z in one! Unfortunately a lot of product people think this way. I think it's generally a mistake.
Blatant example. The scope on my bench has a floppy drive. You know for saving traces. Yeah like anyone wants or needs that today.
I am fairly mentally exhausted at the moment. When I first read the message, and noted the author, I thought it said: "every minute I spent thinking about computers was a minute wasted." I was like, wow, that's a big change in course. Is he going to become a monk or something? Lol. time to turn off the computer.
I misread it similarly, at first glance.
Side jab... hasn't posted on HN since 2015 but regular on Twitter? What gives?
But on Twitter you can block people and you can delete things easily. pg doesn’t write essays any more either, because now he has a hostile audience like with the Information, or when he said if you have a thick accent learn to speak English more clearly or when he said inequality is less important than growth and he got ragged for that. Writing in public is at best barely worth it for him with his greater profile.
Totally agree with PG on this. This isn’t the first time he says this obviously and has put a lot of thought into this. The quote I really like from him on this topic is: “A startup worrying about competitors is like a fat guy smoking a cigarette as he worries about contracting West Nile Virus.” I like to remind my two friends helping me build our side project right now of this reality all the time. There are so many…
Full text is: > At both Viaweb and YC, every minute I spent thinking about competitors was, in retrospect, a minute wasted. Follow-up tweet: > It may be useful for some companies to think about competitors. That's why I didn't phrase it as a general rule. In particular it may be useful for more established companies to. If a startup has to, though, they're probably doomed. Also a quote from Jeff Bezos: > “If you want…
Full text is: > At both Viaweb and YC, every minute I spent thinking about competitors was, in retrospect, a minute wasted. Follow-up tweet: > It may be useful for some companies to think about competitors. That's why I didn't phrase it as a general rule. In particular it may be useful for more established companies to. If a startup has to, though, they're probably doomed. Also a quote from Jeff Bezos: > “If you want…
Do you think Jeff’s statement holds true today? I’m under the impression Amazon is less customer centric but maybe I am biased.
> Leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Although leaders pay attention to competitors, they obsess over customers.
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