Startup Competitive Advantages that Work
blog.asmartbear.com
Startup Competitive Advantages that Work
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Re: Startup Competitive Advantages that Work
#2I like it! These advantages sound very good. But my problem is that these are reformulations of the 'fake' advantages for purposes of marketing to VCs, rather than any substantial actual difference IMO.
It seems to me like fake advantages Passion + Feature = Real Adv One Thing and PhDs / MBAs is simply one way of saying Dream Team. I mean as a marketing term 'Dream Team' is even less substantial than PhDs / MBAs.
Re: Startup Competitive Advantages that Work
#3It's good to see someone admit that they didn't have an advantage in the market place and then built something great.
Re: Startup Competitive Advantages that Work
#4I like it! These advantages sound very good. But my problem is that these are reformulations of the 'fake' advantages for purposes of marketing to VCs, rather than any substantial actual difference IMO. It seems to me like fake advantages Passion + Feature = Real Adv One Thing and PhDs / MBAs is simply one way of saying Dream Team. I mean as a marketing term 'Dream Team' is even less substantial than PhDs / MBAs.
I would take a proven entrepreneur over an MBA and a proven uber-coder-geek over an MBA any day of the week, and most VCs would too.
Re: Startup Competitive Advantages that Work
#5I like it! These advantages sound very good. But my problem is that these are reformulations of the 'fake' advantages for purposes of marketing to VCs, rather than any substantial actual difference IMO. It seems to me like fake advantages Passion + Feature = Real Adv One Thing and PhDs / MBAs is simply one way of saying Dream Team. I mean as a marketing term 'Dream Team' is even less substantial than PhDs / MBAs.
I would take a proven entrepreneur over an MBA and a proven uber-coder-geek over an MBA any day of the week, and most VCs would too.
Not a real dichotomy though...
Re: Startup Competitive Advantages that Work
#6He makes a fair point, those are definitely competitive advantages.
Now the question becomes, most companies won't have them but they will still be expected. Then what?
Of course, where do we draw the line? semi-fame? is that competitive advantage? I have 20,000 twitter followers? 100,000? 1 million? (or mailing list members, rss feed subscribers, whatever metric you want).
Re: Startup Competitive Advantages that Work
#7Good article.
Asking questions like "what would you do if someone will fully copy you" is a bit dirty trick. Abstract competitors are always better, so it's meaningless to talk about them. Real competitors, even very smart and mighty, can't cover everything - they must limit themselves to something (market niche, demography, geography, price range etc.), and this may become a chance to avoid competition.
Re: Startup Competitive Advantages that Work
#8None of these are competitive advantages that are the opposite of the suggestions from the previous post about things that are not competitive advantages.
There are plenty of people who are passionate about their startups, working in a team of talented people, with customers, and insider information.
If a company went to a VC and used these competitive advantages, they'd be shot down in a second. Imagine this scenario:
Hi, I'm jargon. I am really super passionate about this idea and it's in my knowledge domain, because I have retail store. I'm a programmer with a retail store who has this software that I wrote to help me manage my retail store. I got 5 other retail stores on my block to buy it because it is so awesome. No other company is going to be able to compete with it, because all I care about is retail store software. Plus, we got Donald Trump to market it for us!
What VC in their right mind would ever invest in something like that?
Re: Startup Competitive Advantages that Work
#9I like it! These advantages sound very good. But my problem is that these are reformulations of the 'fake' advantages for purposes of marketing to VCs, rather than any substantial actual difference IMO. It seems to me like fake advantages Passion + Feature = Real Adv One Thing and PhDs / MBAs is simply one way of saying Dream Team. I mean as a marketing term 'Dream Team' is even less substantial than PhDs / MBAs.
I would take a proven entrepreneur over an MBA and a proven uber-coder-geek over an MBA any day of the week, and most VCs would too.
Denigrating MBAs is no different than denigrating degrees in CS or CE. The question is always 'what do you bring to the table?'
This might illustrate how utterly moronic your statement was:
> I would take a proven entrepreneur over a random CS grad and a proven uber-coder-geek over a random CS grad any day of the week, and most VCs would too.
Sure... it's still true. But it's only true because your original statement is utter nonsense.
Re: Startup Competitive Advantages that Work
#10I like it! These advantages sound very good. But my problem is that these are reformulations of the 'fake' advantages for purposes of marketing to VCs, rather than any substantial actual difference IMO. It seems to me like fake advantages Passion + Feature = Real Adv One Thing and PhDs / MBAs is simply one way of saying Dream Team. I mean as a marketing term 'Dream Team' is even less substantial than PhDs / MBAs.
I would take a proven entrepreneur over an MBA and a proven uber-coder-geek over an MBA any day of the week, and most VCs would too.
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