Competitive Analysis is Pointless
A Better Use Of Time
Many startups begin their development process by examining the competitive landscape to determine what to build. They come up with an idea and look at the competitors they need to beat to take over the industry. They assume that to succeed, they need to become bigger than their competitors and take all of their customers so they can beat the “800-pound gorilla”. The problem with this is that the product they launch is often a pale imitation of the competitor’s, without the customer relationships, reputation, and iterations gained through battle-hardening the product.
What startups predominantly don’t do is focus on a set of potential users who have a particular issue or are trying to achieve something in their lives. This is much more fertile ground for a novel solution that can be presented to the user, making competition temporarily irrelevant. The product is built around a specific person’s reality rather than a competitor’s feature list. This is a doubly beneficial tactic because many competitors will try to create a copycat product, which will never be as good as the original. Copycats can never beat the original by imitation alone. Only by doing something genuinely different can they hope to disrupt it. This is more of an exercise in positioning. Perhaps your solution has already been done, but yours solves the problem in a novel way and is distributed to the right people more efficiently.
Superhuman’s Rahul Vohra didn’t look at Gmail and try to beat it feature-for-feature. He found a specific type of user, people who lived in their inbox and were borderline obsessive about email efficiency, and built exclusively for them. He charged $30 a month when email was free and had a waiting list. He never tried to take Gmail’s customers. He found the people Gmail had never bothered to build for.
If you’re looking at competitors to determine your product’s roadmap, be careful. Using their feature spec as a list of necessities for your product is acting like a big company when you’re, in fact, the underdog. Being nimble, solving a specific problem for a specific person, and iterating from there is how underdogs win. The alternative is spending years building something the market already has.¹
¹ Competitive analysis does have a place in seeking investment. They want to understand a product’s potential, and you should too. Market analysis is completely different from product development, though. Many tools are competitors in the same market but offer completely different products, especially at the beginning.