#Founders #Competition #BusinessTips
Have you noticed how many founders advertise their businesses as without any competition? 🤔 Let’s break it down:
– No competition often indicates a small market or a flawed business model.
– Claiming to be the first in the market isn’t always accurate.
– Lack of competition may signal a lack of viability in the business opportunity.
So, what can founders do instead of claiming no competition?
– Focus on your unique value proposition.
– Emphasize how you execute better, faster, and more efficiently than competitors.
– Embrace competition as a driver of innovation and improvement.
Remember, standing out from the competition is key to success! 🌟
What are your thoughts on this? Let’s discuss!
Worthlessly weak people that aren’t valued by their company try to build something while super non confident
Competition means death for them as deep down they know how little they are worth, any competition would mean failure to their eyes, they can’t beat anyone, they can only win by being alone as they are weak people.
Weak people fear competition, they win by playing alone.
read the book zero to one by.peter thiel. The idea that a market is too small is flawed. It is better to get a large share of a small market to be successful.
The premise of many VCs that you want competition goes against core principles of capitalism. A business idea should be determined to be viable regardless of competition.
I’m most cases, they’re just over estimating how innovative their business is.
Well alternatives are not Competition they’re substitutes. Is dominos delivery Competition to uber eats?
Whenever I hear “There is no competition” I recoil. There is *always* competition, and here is why.
Whatever the problem you are solving is, the people with the problem are dealing with it already. They have a solution. They might use 5 platforms and do part of it manually, but they are getting the job done somehow, someway.
That’s the status quo, and it represents competition most definitely.
Now, your solution might be innovative, and solve the problem or serve an unmet need in a fantastic way, and that’s what you are trying to validate. If the market is small, sometimes that’s not a bad thing. It will be easier to get a larger portion of an under-served small market than a small percentage of a large market with lots of competition.
If others tried to serve that market and failed, then you need to dig into why the did. Their product might have been bad. Or, there might be things like switching costs, and network effects that present barriers to entry. Discovery around that is key.
The other option is that they have created something so new that no market yet exists for it. That’s almost worse in some ways, because any business like that is going to have to spend $$$ on marketing to get people to understand the problem before they can persuade them they have a solution.
Competition should be seen as a positive thing, it proves there is already a market. At that point your job is just to be better and unique in some way to differentiate yourself, carve out a subsection of the market or population, then build on top of that before stepping laterally into different demographics/areas.
Sometimes there isn’t much competition. When DoorDash was founded GrubHub had been out for nearly a decade. The problem was, in all that time GrubHub never got the unit economics for suburbs down, so they just never expanded there. So, DoorDash effectively had no real competition. Businesses still did delivery, GrubHub still existed, but for all intents and purposes DoorDash was effectively working with no real competition. What is concerning is when a founder is operating in a space with very few competitors, and as the space grows no one enters. If your company is successful, competition is basically guaranteed.
Well typically as you increase the barrier to entry the amount of competitors decrease. in the robotics space there are plenty of products that solve an immediate problem but the barrier to entry is so high (masters or phd in university, as well as initial funding) that you have literally no competition. If you’re building some B2B SaaS app of course you’ll have competition because anyone can make those.
I would say in the last 6 months this holds more credibility due to GPT-4. But yes, you should be listing out substitutes (i.e. how are people solving it today with the shitty software, process, or tooling they have) in your pitch deck if you’re trying to paint an accurate picture.
This is usually people getting too caught up in their own USP and not having enough experience to understand the assignment 😅. While some projects might not directly compete with anything, its extremely naive for any founder to think they have no competition. And it would be flat-out stupid to say this in a funding pitch, coz it just says you dont know your target market well enough.
You’re right in that, if there’s genuinely no competitors, there’s no market for the product.. And if people are surviving fine up until now without anything, why would they spend money on a product they dont need or want..
A competitor doesn’t have to be the same type of product.. But you should want it to capture an existing market/money stream 😅
(Ie: Washing machine vs Washboard = completely different thing, completely different price-point, solves the same problem but more efficiently)
I think people are just getting too fixated that there’s nothing existing like their product, but that should be a given
I assume that either the market they are going into is dead or they have not done proper market research