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“Every minute I spent thinking about competitors was a minute wasted”

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Re: “Every minute I spent thinking about competitors was a minute wasted”

#81

Post by nikki93 »

turdnagel wrote: post #21
ronilan wrote: post #2

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).

True, but you can sometimes make up for that inefficiency with learned wisdom - other people's experiences. (Sometimes that comes in the form of tweets.)

Actually the only experience you can experience is your own, IMO. Reading a tweet is you having an experience involving someone saying something and you interpreting that and maybe imagining what they experienced, but it's different from actually experiencing what they had experienced from their perspective. The cost of experiencing from your perspective is still the same amount of attention, and the "innefficiency" is in not being able to experience more with the same amount of attention, it seems like; but on that; I don't think there is inneficiency or any making up for it, it's just about choosing which kinds of experiences to have (they still happen at the same rate of attention conversion).

Re: “Every minute I spent thinking about competitors was a minute wasted”

#82

Post by rvn1045 »

A lot of what you need to do in your startup is actually just obbvious. Spending time thinking about competitors or other things that are out of your control is a waste of time. When asked how the amazon business will be different 10 years from now, Bezos often says the same thing - that 10 years from now customers arent going to wake up one day and say i want amazon to deliver slower, i want less selection from amazon or i want higher prices. so just focusing on those three things and not worrying about what your competitors do or dont do would put you much farther ahead. youve just gotta figure out what those three or four things are for your business - the core stuff that customers really want and just keep focusing on making those things better.

Re: “Every minute I spent thinking about competitors was a minute wasted”

#83

Post by rocqua »

ajkjk wrote: post #46
xfitm3 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think Jeff’s statement holds true today? I’m under the impression Amazon is less customer centric but maybe I am biased.

From three recent years working there, absolutely. They bend over backwards for their customers, always. The problem, and where most of the bad reputation comes from, is from people who aren't their customers -- warehouse employees, if you're trying to get things shipped to retail customers, or the actual employees, if you're trying to do anything. And, probably, their over-obsession with customers is why they've bee…

How does 'giving your customers fake goods' not hurt customer service? It seems like a customer first approach should be tougher on this.

Re: “Every minute I spent thinking about competitors was a minute wasted”

#84

Post by anotheryou »

NicoJuicy wrote: post #78
wayoverthecloud wrote: post #71

Man but it's so hard to stop thinking. People said to build an MVP. I did. Comparing it with competitors, it looks empty. It gets the job done but what about other 107 integrations with third-party APIs my competitors provide? Even if I show it to my potential customers, it feels like cheating. I feel like if they know about my competitors they're bound to leave my software for sure. This sucks, even more, when you a…

I've build Tagly/Handlr as a knowledge base for a company ( MVP as they say - http://handlr.sapico.me ), they went for SharePoint. After 2 years it's back on the table. And I've been dogfooding it ever since. The only thing is performance. But for it's porpose, it's perfect. A lot of things have more features, but I've build it as a managable HN with hierarchical tags. Which is kinda unique.

I super interested in Knowledgbases and "hierarchical tags" are close to a few concepts of mine, too.

I think handlr could use a tagline and an elevator pitch somewhere. From the looks I thought it might be a more general HN clone and even after a few clicks it doesn't really reveal to me what it actually does.

Re: “Every minute I spent thinking about competitors was a minute wasted”

#85

Post by mateo1 »

lbacaj wrote: post #14

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…

>“A startup worrying about competitors is like a fat guy smoking a cigarette as he worries about contracting West Nile Virus.”

It is really important for the fat guy to determine if he is near Nile River, or an area infected with the WN virus and work out the chances of contracting the virus.

Sure a startup is "flimsy" in many ways, but doing good and adequate market research, determining what you have to offer that is better than current competition (when it exists) and considering if it's worth it is definitely something to thing about.

Worrying isn't useful, researching and planning is. If you have competition, study it and include it in your considerations and plans.

Re: “Every minute I spent thinking about competitors was a minute wasted”

#86

Post by katzgrau »

chii wrote: post #40
sitkack wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This makes me think of the relationship between gestation time and maximum age of the organism and the number of offspring. Maybe the next VC craze will be handing groups of 20 year olds 10k$ and some advice.

> groups of 20 year olds 10k$ and some advice. not that bad of an idea imho. a VC fund with 100mil can fund 10,000 groups of kids this way. Gives kids new opportunities socially (reduces teen delinquency), and the VC could hope to recoup if/when one of them becomes unicorn status.

That's a horrible idea.

Whoever is in charge of this fund is responsible for dolling out 100mm of other people's money.

How in the world does this group of investors responsibly filter and vet 10,000 suitable companies in a time effective manner? How do you effectively keep track of the founders and the money?

Are checks being written to 20 year olds without much scrutiny in the hope that a unicorn shows up without any real statistical basis for expecting such an event? I'd steer clear of that fund.

Re: “Every minute I spent thinking about competitors was a minute wasted”

#88

Post by skrebbel »

lbacaj wrote: post #14

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…

This is the key quote, because it implies that PG thinks that a startup is like a fat guy who smokes. In other words, you're highly likely to go bust, and competition is lower on the list of reasons you could go bust than many others (shit product, no market, wrong market, founder infighting, etc). It's because he focuses solely on high-risk-high-reward companies.

His insight might not be as useful if you're not running a high-risk enterprise. At the other extreme of the risk spectrum, if you're opening a new gas station, it may be useful to check where the current gas stations are.

If competition can put a serious dent in your business then either you're so big that you can't reasonably be called a startup anymore (eg Instagram vs Snapchat, Uber vs Lyft eg), or your market is too small to be considered a "high risk, high reward" company (and thus you're not a startup by PG's definition).

Re: “Every minute I spent thinking about competitors was a minute wasted”

#89

Post by dijit »

I hate to be a dissenting voice here. And I agree that “worrying” is a problem, but you should absolutely be looking at your contemporaries.

My studio recently released a product that seems to be being praised for the fact we did not construct it in a vacuum and learned from the misgivings of our own product and other products in the same genre.

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