Comments on: Competition

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By: Mark

Mark — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 21:41:42 +0000

in terms of competition, if your chasing you shall never catch but if you stop chasing and start thinking new ideas, getting feedback from your customers and genuinely listening to what the public are demanding you shall over take any competitor.

By: jon

jon — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 08:15:07 +0000

It’s easy to get distracted by your competitors. When you’re in an emerging space in particular, you constantly feel the strain of every success that your competitors have. Your instinct is to prevent this by knowing what your competitors are up to and then beat or match them on all fronts so that they no longer have an advantage over you.

Unfortunately, this never works.

If you’re chasing the competition you’ll never pass them – by definition really. How can you ever beat the competition if you’re always just trying to match or beat them at their own game? In the end this will stress the team and you’ll always be #2 (or worse) in your space. Not a good solution…

So what should you do about competition? Ignore them. Ignore them as much as possible. Ultimately you should listen to your user base to determine the direction you should take, not your competition. In some cases your users will tell you that they want a feature your competitor has…great! Give it to them. The key thing though is that you only provide them with the features they ask for. In a weird way this actually makes you more efficient because if your competitors come up with a really great feature you’re still aware of it and can integrate some version of it into your own product(s). On the other hand though, if they waste their time on a feature that turns out to be a flop, you never need to worry about it (since presumably your users won’t push for this) and you don’t have to waste the resources to develop the stuff that didn’t work out.

By: Ben Atlas

Ben Atlas — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 00:27:06 +0000

There is a positive aspect of competition that is often ignored. Especially in the open source world. And last I checked Automatic the parent of ID is where it is today because of the open source. You can learn a lot from what others are doing this saves tremendous amount of trial and error time. Cross pollination is king!

By: db0

db0 — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 05:37:54 +0000

Well put. I find it especially annoying how the IntenseDebate has a very vocal minority about the Facebook connect. Many of these people are technogeeks who just need to have the latest shiny tech to show off on their blog and they end up playing the importance of it up tenfold.

Glad to see you playing the game right

By: Nikolaus Bauman

Nikolaus Bauman — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 03:20:33 +0000

I agree Jon – at the risk of oversimplification, I like to think of it this way – if you're ever thinking more about your competition than your customers you might need to reevaluate things.

If you're trying to catch up, win a race, then you're not doing what you need to be doing, which is iterating in order to test out your hypothesis with your customers/users. After all, the only real "win" in business is a win for your customers.

If you are thinking about the competition, then hopefully it's in a way that allows you to focus on playing a **completely different game**. In which case, you're not racing, or catching up. You're using them to inform you and your company what you don't want to be (again, for the benefit of the customer): http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch02_Have_an_Ene…