Your competitors don't matter

Startup competition is hard to ignore.

From investors wanting to know who is in the market before investing -- and how they’re doing -- to your customers asking you how you’re different. The media won’t even write a story about you without mentioning a competitor or two. This is a shame and harmful to your business.

On the one hand, I get it from the customer’s perspective: nobody wants to be the sucker to sign up for a product or service that’s not the best in the category. That’s the customer’s right and the customer should pursue the answer to that question.

But paying any mind to your competitors is not something any Founder or Product Manager should bother themselves with. Even with the occasional glance, you’ll be susceptible to their influence and any influence whatsoever is bad for your business.

Everyone who is in business with aspirations of building something great will never get there by looking at what anyone else does -- especially their competitors. How do you build something exceptional, groundbreaking and market leading if you focus any of your mental energy looking at how others are doing it?

By signing up for your competitor’s product, all you get is feature parity.

By reading your competitor’s marketing, all your marketing starts to sound the same.

By reading about your competitor’s latest fundraise, all you get is anxiety that they’ll have more money to “out execute” you.

Sorry to throw Samsung under the bus, but what you get is a Samsung phone rather than the iPhone by spending any time at all looking at your competitors.

With Podia, my goal is to build the iPhone and spending even a minute out of my day thinking or caring about what my competitors are doing only negatively impacts that goal.