Competitive Analysis

"We have assigned people into groups for the quarter to own a competitor. Their job is to essentially spend a lot of time immersing themselves into the product of the competitor, really trying to think through the lens of, do a SWAT analysis... then we have the competitive war gaming day where every team comes and presents."

"the first step in a good positioning exercise is to really understand, what do we have to position against? So put another way, it's like saying, what do I have to beat in order to win a deal? So in positioning work we call this competitive alternatives."

"Most folks will discount the status quo, but they shouldn't because in B2B we lose about 40% of our deals to quote-unquote, 'no decision,' which actually means we lost to the spreadsheet, we lost to pen and paper, we lost to interns. And if we're not positioning well against that, we're never going to get the customer to come off of that."

"What we should be doing is giving them a way to think about the whole market and say, in the case of Help Scout, 'Look, there's shared inbox and then there's help desk software and then there's us.' And I don't care who the vendor is, I'm going to put them in one of those buckets."

"For a long time it was when someone says, 'Hey, why are you betting on Venmo?' I'd be like, 'Try and send me a dollar that I can use now,' and there was only one app you could do it with."

"When we talk about category, I think it's really what would be a good way to explore your space and your relevant categories would be to go to G2 Crowd or Software Advice or any of those type of review sites or directory sites and learn about how they've categorized products based on feature sets."

"I can tell you from using it what instructions they were given, that team was given. I can tell you what they were optimizing for. I can tell you what constraints they were under."

"Why use this instead of Yahoo Yellow Pages? But more than anything else, why use this instead of the Yellow Pages?"

"Twitter had the fail whale and it was down half the time... our product, we were innovating faster... and we totally lost for no reason related to product at all."

"The idea is you try to understand who are the comparables or the competitors in the space, and you sort of build a little bit of a head-to-head and sort a stack chart of where's everybody going..."

"understanding what's happening outside of the walls of our business better than a lot of people. And maybe that's talking to a lot of other people who are founders talking to a lot of other people, starting companies, going to read all the comments on new financial products on Product Hunt."

"Category designers do compete, but not against a product, not against a company, not against a brand. Category designers compete against the status quo. ... The enemy is the status quo. That is to say the way it is now."

"We call that developing a landscape. And we're looking for what are the words... What are the brand names, first, and then what language are they using in this space? Because we have to be distinctive. If a brand name isn't distinctive, you lose."

"At Thumbtack example, we had a spreadsheet which tracked hundreds of verticalized competitors where somebody would try to pick off the electricians category, the wedding category, the lessons category, and very few of them got traction for the simple reason that we could upsell customers into a thousand things."

"Use your competition, know it, and take it, and set ambitious goals, and believe in yourself, and you can do amazing things."

"My suggestion was to start by looking at what companies are publicly traded and/or owned by private equity that are large and that also are hated by their customers, and to try to intentionally find where there's a knowable big market within incumbent combined with the software is horrible."

"The press often writes about competition like, 'Oh, it's a shotgun blast.' When, later, I would learn it's more of a boa constrictor."

"Knowing what your competition is doing is extremely important... But blatantly saying, 'Hey, we're going to copy all of these best tactics or all of these flows because, hey, they're doing better than us. Let's just rip them and do exactly the same.' That's where things really go wrong because every single experience is very unique to their customer, to their channel."

"What makes Netflix hard to copy? ... Original content ... Brand ... Personalization ... Economies of scale ... Network effects."

"Understanding whether or not there is a type of power in place is hard... It comes down to the hard part is industry economics is what really are the economic relationships and it's very hard."

"People often think that they get scale economies through data. And I'd say that that's possible, but it's rare. And the reason it's rare is not because there aren't scale economies in data, but rather that the range of scale that the existing competitors have are often large enough to be able to put them in shouting distance of each so that the differences in their cost per unit is not that great."

"Netflix in an earlier phase was fighting Blockbuster... If you look at the Blockbuster site, their UI site, you couldn't tell it different from Netflix. They just copied it. And so all that thoughtfulness about which things you put first and how you structure it and all that to make this suitable was mimicable."

"What's the competition for solving that problem? How do they solve it today? And what are the alternatives? How else do people solve this? What are the workarounds?"

"We want to have a way of looking at the world that puts all of the competitors into Loserville. And then we want to say, okay, if you can deliver on that and if that promise is compelling to customers."

"I mean, everybody that does branding, one of the things that they do is they analyze the competitors of the company. You just look at a landscape of what are all the competitors doing, what is their visual vibe, and do I lean into that or do I avoid that? If I lean into it, then I'm immediately getting this... Everyone that looks at it understands I'm a FinTech company because I look like a FinTech company. If my whole thing is I'm trying to be divergent from that, I'm trying to show how different I am from the status quo, then you use it as a reactionary thing of I want to do nothing like that and do something really different so people understand this isn't just another FinTech company."

"Macro research is big picture, strategic, business focused, forward-looking innovation, look at the market, look at competitors, long-term research to understand where the product should go next."

"We really have three pillars when it comes to competition. So the first is hold true to our vision... The second philosophy we have is really a grow the pie philosophy... And then the last one is we want to lean into our strengths."

"I think it's always about doing the right thing for the customer. Everyone has always been shameless to be shamelessly inspired by other people's ideas. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I think copying ideas can be done in poor taste and can be done with taste."

"I think where you start to get into some of these very vertical applications... our models are probably never going to be as capable as some of the things that Harvey's doing because our goal and our mission is really to solve this very general use case."

"In that section I put in what's going on with our business? What's happening with our products? What's our point of view on the market? Who are our competitors? A SWOT analysis, key risks that we might be facing."

"The fourth area is you have to know the competitive landscape. You have to know the industry. You have to know the trends. I consider this one of the fun ones. There's some good industry, people to follow. You can do that."

"And then they'd say, 'You're the same as some of other company.' And I would say, 'Hey, now I've got a new slide in my pitch deck that shows all the players and the huge gap in the market that we believe we're going to fill.'"

"One of the most important things that we did was we didn't really worry about competitors at all. We actually just saw where is there a gap in the market that we can uniquely fill, and what can we solve a problem, a core problem that people currently have today?"

"Go have a conversation with sales and see why people were buying competitors? What was your win-loss analysis? Why are we losing? What do you think is the issue?"

"How do we figure out what we want to be when we grow up versus what we currently aren't or wish that we were or see other players in the space being... I think there's room for several generationally important companies to be built in AI right now."

"The great startups, they create movements not so much by criticizing the incumbent, but by showing the weakness in the strength of the incumbent."

"I think that having a good pulse on competition helps as just a friendly reminder that there are others out there doing this and thinking about things very similarly, possibly, to how we're thinking about it, so how do we differentiate ourselves?"

"I looked on the App Store and the number one app in the United States was an app called Sarahah, but the entire app was in Arabic... the strongest signal that you could ever have that people want something."

"Don't focus on your competitors is terrible advice. It's amazing advice for product teams... But as an overall missive, don't focus on your competitors is terrible advice. And if I'm being charitable, it's just outdated."

"In a competitive situation, the fundamental aspect of power is something that's going to give you some sort of advantage. Usually it's in asymmetry of some kind. If two fighters are equally balanced... it's 50/50. For a strategy you need to exploit in asymmetry of some kind."

"You have to be either differentiated or low cost, there's no way to protect yourself if you're not one of those two."

"The ultimate way to compete to win is to never actually be forced to compete."

"Not every great thing is going to be invented by you... At the end of the day, you're just robbing your user base of the opportunity to have a better product if you're not making the best possible product for your use cases."

"I actually think that the most interesting markets, you have to think of them like currents where you're there's something happening in the market that's creating this current where you can have a plank of wood that you've put on the river and it's going to pull you forward. Versus a market that doesn't really have that momentum to it, you're going to have to build something really big and fancy to make any progress."

"The more dominant a marketplace is relative to the number two in its space, the more profitable that business is... you don't want to be in the middle of the pack, but even being number one but just barely number one doesn't give you any of the benefits of a marketplace model."

"Who's your competition? Because if you're competing against Walmart, why are you surprised that they keep lowering their prices? That's what Walmart does, right? That way you decide which space that you're going to operate in. You've built an enormous set of boundaries around what you do."

"In everything always talk from the customer's perspective, from the market's perspective, from the competitor's perspective, the very small number of PMs do that."

"You can copy and paste one of your competitor's positioning documents into ChatGPT and say, 'Is this a better fit for what they have said than my thing?'"

"It's the years and years and years of evolution of the underlying workflows of the product to support the customers, but also the customers evolving those workflows to make them work the way they do. And so how does that impact AI companies? You could say, 'It's easier than ever to build forms on a database application.' And so I'm like, 'Yeah, okay, that presumably drives the incremental value of every new one of those to zero, right?'"

"Competitive myopia, don't fall for it... your competitor, if you think of what they do as an iceberg, the top side, what comes out of the water is what they've shipped in terms of features, but it's based on all this stuff that they've built in terms of research and understanding of their customer base and everything else. And so you're just seeing the manifestation of what they were thinking maybe a year ago, based on what they're shipping now."

"We had this idea that we're going to reinvent radio... and Spotify and Rdio and Apple Music... they were all going to chase this smaller owned recorded music opportunity... and I think we just got it wrong. It should have been obvious that inevitably all of your music in any format was going to be delivered as a stream from the cloud."

"bringing an outside in perspective, really benchmarking against your competitors and your competitive set... our buyers are shopping all over the internet. They're shopping on High Street, they're shopping in different places. And so we have to be aware of the broader context of where they're spending their dollars helps us make better decisions over time."

"When iPhone was introduced, Microsoft basically say this will never work. They were in a position of a market leader, they own Windows mobile operating system that was running on pretty much all the phones in the world... They haven't realized how impactful it is. So this is a competition coming out to the market with something that is completely different. And not only disrupt the market but actually create crisis for pretty much everyone else."

"Waze was focusing on the daily commuters. So we wanted people to use our application twice a day, when you go to the office and when you come back home. And Google Maps is something that you are being used not that frequent... So a different use case and obviously different product that is built for the specificity of the use case."

"Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's longtime business partner, has this amazing quote. He says, 'Fish where the fish are.' And he gives this example, he says, 'If you're a fisherman and you see a large pond and all around the pond, there's a whole bunch of fishermen and they're all elbowing each other out of the way... You actually want to walk off into the forest and find a small fishing hole with lots of fish and very little competition.'"

"The biggest mistakes I've made have been going into business models where other people have repeatedly failed and thinking, I can do this better... you can't take a brilliant management team and change a bad business model. Ultimately the business model wins."

"With AI, it's just intensified because you have 10 players pursuing the same market opportunity and so your ability to actually bring the product to market to differentiate yourself from the competition has become more strategically important than it was previously."

"The attributes of that business and that product category mean, you have to win on how much do people love your product and feel an emotional connection to it, and choose your brand, your product over the other, almost not rationally, but emotionally... In many ways it's capitalistic. This is how we win this market"

"I don't think we've ever had this sense of arrogance of just... no matter how big we are, we've always got this healthy dose of paranoia that we need to keep working on improving things and being better."

"The thing I would say is bring the insight. Know thy customer. Know thy market. Know thy competitors. Know thy numbers. Know thy product."

"Using this type of lens is an effective way to identify genuine threats... not just necessarily just everyone, generic people... identifying genuine threats, not that just, this data can be used to gain comprehensive insights like determining your position and impression share."

"Every single day, every single time somebody is pushing your code to production and you're releasing a feature or an enhancement, you are making the product better or you're making the product worse, but the products never remain same. So with every release that your competitor is making and every release that you're making, you are either making chess points, moves against them, positive points, or you're going negative."

"The success of a company is a direct relation of what the competition allows you to do. I feel like not many people talk about that, but in many cases in my professional career... every single instance when I looked at a company accelerated their growth or there was a deceleration of growth, it was a direct relation to what the competition allowed you to do."