This kind of recommendations are so simple but they have a really deep and truly meanings.
“Every minute I spent thinking about competitors was a minute wasted”
111–120 of 166 posts
Re: “Every minute I spent thinking about competitors was a minute wasted”
#112You have no idea how relevant this is to me at exactly this moment! About an hour ago, I found out that a competitor (a larger incumbent player) released a feature today that I had built and released 6 months ago! I've been panicking the last couple of hours, but now it's back to the grind. I've got a lot more feature ideas in mind, and this is just that extra push to do the things I've been putting off.
I'm in the process of ideation/brainstorming/prototyping for my very first product. I can't decide between educating myself on what my competitors are doing, or focusing on what makes my own product special.
Daniel I understand you're tenacious, but the real thing to focus on is getting the product to the point where anyone can use it to solve any problem well. Almost always this is easiest if the person that you're solving the problem for is yourself.
Take the Overcast podcast app, for example. I was one of the first users of it. The way its evolved over the years is directly because the founder uses it routinely. He didn't start by including the less obvious features right off the bat, he started by building the obvious ones. Only after he was happy with it did he start to pull in other features from other apps.
Some products you just can't do this with. I get it. I truly do, but try your best to find some sub-problem and ship it. Even if it's only to yourself.
I happened to befriend a number of successful startup founders ten years ago, before they'd made it. All the people I've seen sell companies had grit, myself included, but only the ones that shipped fast sold them for more than $Xm, myself not included.
SHIP.
(If you need more advice, better tailored to your product feel free to email me, but the most important advice will always be to ship.)
Re: “Every minute I spent thinking about competitors was a minute wasted”
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
If both you and a competitor could build a feature, then it was a feature that was going to be built anyway. The art is to position and brand yourself in a way that allows you to build unique features that wouldn't be useful to a competitor because you are attacking different market segments. If you can't position, then you become a commodity and you're competing purely on price.
This is true, and a useful book on positioning is: https://www.amazon.com/Positioning-Battle-Your-Al-Ries/dp/00... Furthermore, one way to avoid ending up in a feature for feature fight to the death with a bigger player is to think instead in terms of “job to be done”: https://hbr.org/2016/09/know-your-customers-jobs-to-be-done By planning what you work on by focusing on what the customer is trying to achieve you’ll…
The "job to be done" is essentially just another term for the customer's need, right? To me, the main utility of that phrase is that it emphasizes the mindset of the customer much more than looking for a need.
Re: “Every minute I spent thinking about competitors was a minute wasted”
#114Man 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…
All you need is a different angle. Read Blue Ocean Strategy.
Honest question: what did you get out of the Blue Ocean Strategy book?
I tried to read a sample on the Kindle app, but the text was simply ... impenetrable. The main idea, whatever it was, was couched in layers and layers of jargon.
When I contrast their jargon-laced writing style (e.g value innovation) with the lucid writing style of Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell, I wonder how they managed to sell 4.5 million copies.
Re: “Every minute I spent thinking about competitors was a minute wasted”
#115Funny - I have an email from pg from 2011 where YC didn't fund OpenRent [1] due to our competitors being too dominant. As head strong (and certainly naiive) young founders at the time, we continued with our vision anyway. Thankfully we have gone on to become by far the largest rental agency in the uk, and have driven real change (see tenant fees ban) in the industry. I mention this as when it comes to investment deci…
I used OpenRent to find my last flat in London. It was great!
Re: “Every minute I spent thinking about competitors was a minute wasted”
#116This kind of recommendations are so simple but they have a really deep and truly meanings.
He goes into it in more detail, point 4 here: http://paulgraham.com/startuplessons.html
Re: “Every minute I spent thinking about competitors was a minute wasted”
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
You shipped 6 months ahead, therefore your game is better than the larger incumbent - so keep playing the way you were. All incumbents eventually get beaten - why not by you? Over a long enough timeframe, the better player always wins.
I’ve seena company creating “Google Photos” two months before Google. Sometimes a competitor is really a competitor.
Because they hold the keys to the door ( Android), but Apple holds the others.
Sometimes, a competitor isn't playing the same game.
Re: “Every minute I spent thinking about competitors was a minute wasted”
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
If both you and a competitor could build a feature, then it was a feature that was going to be built anyway. The art is to position and brand yourself in a way that allows you to build unique features that wouldn't be useful to a competitor because you are attacking different market segments. If you can't position, then you become a commodity and you're competing purely on price.
Anyone can build a feature you can. Some market segments have existing players and people shouldn't be afraid to play competitively. You don't live in a bubble and you can innovate all day but your customers are still the same people with the same needs. Either you are solving them, in which case someone else will too. Or you are trying to sell them your toy project and convince them they have a problem that it solve…
> I have yet to see a feature only moat.
Features that induce a significant network effect can potentially lead to a moat. No contracts necessary.
(Maybe this is what you meant when you mentioned "size" as a moat-building mechanism.)
Re: “Every minute I spent thinking about competitors was a minute wasted”
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It does, and I think the problem is more that Amazon's internal processes and tribal knowledge are a bit clueless when it comes to fraud. Their perspective, historically, has been to allow as many products as possible on the site, because one of the way they get and retain customers is by 'having everything'. Their metrics don't incentivize large purges. I think it's a bit of an arms race between fraudulent sellers and the retail org's processes and engineering, and unfortunately the latter iterates much slower so they can't keep up.
Also, the warehouse processes at least are heavily designed around catching mistakes like mislabeling, but less so intentional fraud like fakes (or - they were a few years ago, imo). And they tend to treat fraud like a big data problem ('what can we do to lower this statistic') instead of case-by-case: 'we need to get rid of every fraudulent seller'. Which, like, if you try really hard to move a needle from, say, 80% to 95%, that ultimately means you are vocally okay with 5%, which is stupid.
Re: “Every minute I spent thinking about competitors was a minute wasted”
#120In the US Civil War, general Sherman was brilliant at logistics and military science and had one of the most prescient views of the wars length and brutality at its outset. And yet, US Grant was made the overall field commander by Lincoln. Of Grant, Sherman argued he himself was better at generaling than Grant in almost every way except this: Grant doesn't give a damn what the enemy does out of his sight, but it scar…
Can't say I understand any of this. So Sherman thought that Grant's lack of preocupation for enemy' action out of sight was a virtue? Why?