Cool dialogue between PG and Jeff Atwood (StackOverflow cofounder) on the tweet thread -
From Jeff:
“You can always borrow concepts and ideas from other startups, too. It's good to look, and understand the competitive landscape in detail, but not to obsess over.“
“Every minute I spent thinking about competitors was a minute wasted”
141–150 of 166 posts
Re: “Every minute I spent thinking about competitors was a minute wasted”
#142bs. it's like telling a PhD candidate no need doing reference research. being a good startup is not only about solving customers problem well, but solving in the best way and preferably first to solve.
Re: “Every minute I spent thinking about competitors was a minute wasted”
#143Totally 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…
> 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.
The fat guy should certainly do that, but first of all he should quit smoking and eating KFC. Those are more existential threats.
Re: “Every minute I spent thinking about competitors was a minute wasted”
#144Almost every link to Twitter posted here, when I click on it from an Android...gives me a "you're rate limited" page. Odd.
Re: “Every minute I spent thinking about competitors was a minute wasted”
#145I call bullshit. If he thought about competitors, it obviously affected his actions. So how can he know, he would be where he is today, if he hadn't thought about competitors? This is just another Silicon Valley bullshit statement...
Re: “Every minute I spent thinking about competitors was a minute wasted”
#146You 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.
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.
I think the tech world's use of the word "commodity" is interesting. "becoming a commodity" really means "fail to establish a monopoly".
Re: “Every minute I spent thinking about competitors was a minute wasted”
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
I dont understand your point. I THINK you are suggesting that BlackBerry (RIM) would have been well served paying attention to competitors, particularly Apple. But that is what ultimately sent RIM on a downward spiral: focusing on competitors instead of customers. If they had focused on being the premier business oriented device things might have turned out different.
There are multiple factors at play, but focusing on only one factor can lead anyone to draw the wrong conclusions as you and the gp have done. The gp mentioned RIM as a clear example of a company that did not focus on its competitor (Apple) and paid dearly for such a mistake, but that’s an incomplete reading of history. First of all, Apple was only one of several competitors including Nokia, Samsung, SonyEricsson etc…
I disagree. The last few years of BB included touch screen devices including some with touch keyboards. My view is that had BB leaned into the enterprise security solution that made the devices popular with businesses in the first place their story might have turned out different.
Re: “Every minute I spent thinking about competitors was a minute wasted”
#148That's coming from a guy whose startup Viaweb was essentially made completely irrelevant by a competitor (Amazon) with a better strategy. Does anyone really buy things on Yahoo stores anymore? If you want to grow fast and sell out, then you probably don't need to worry about competitors, but if you want to stay in business for a long time, you do need to worry about having sustainable competitive advantages.
It's one of the pieces of advice you get, have a plan how to exit. He exited way before then, what Yahoo did is down to them.
Re: “Every minute I spent thinking about competitors was a minute wasted”
#149YC explicitly moved from Boston to SV to pre-empt competition.
Re: “Every minute I spent thinking about competitors was a minute wasted”
#150I call bullshit. If he thought about competitors, it obviously affected his actions. So how can he know, he would be where he is today, if he hadn't thought about competitors? This is just another Silicon Valley bullshit statement...
Yep and there are always versions of what I will call the 'deathbed' story. It usually is spoken by a person who has made it spending time on their deathbed saying they didn't have to work as hard as they did.
Not only that but what is exactly the definition of 'worry'? It means different things to different people and maybe what he did was obsessive compared to what someone else did or would do in the same exact situation.
Look I am obsessive with computer backups as much as I can. Luckily I haven't really needed them. Wouldn't it be really stupid for me to say years from now 'boy I wish I hadn't spent so much time worrying about backing up my systems?'. (Of course not and that's obvious).