In some sense, we need our competition and they need us. In startup, this has a lot to do with survival. We don’t attend each other’s barbecues or anything, but we do talk. Despite conventional wisdom, this also applies to competitors and rivals. Over the last 20 years in startup, one of the great things I’ve discovered about most of the players is a willingness to share information, much more so than in the corporate world. Keep Your Friends Close and Your Enemies Closer To truly understand our competition, we need to go beyond just visiting their website, following their Instagram feed, setting up a news alert, or keeping a spreadsheet of their known customers. But how much do we (still) participate in the industry we’re trying to disrupt? How closely are we following advancements, technical or otherwise, in our industry? Do we use our competitor’s product? We need to get in and get our hands dirty. To get out of our vacuum, we can’t just read about our industry, our market, and our competition. Absorbing knowledge in order to take action on what we’ve learned.Browsing knowledge in order to regurgitate it back out and:.Don’t Just Learn by Browsing, Absorb by Doing If we’re going to spend time on competitive analysis - and mind you, lack of competitive awareness is one of the top reasons investors reject growth stage startups - we might as well go all in. Blind spots lead to surprises, surprises lead to losses.

We know who our competition is, maybe we keep a few stats on them, but we have a lot of blind spots. One of the ways this hyper-focus plays out is that we end up just paying lip service to competitive analysis.

Joe Procopio (Photo courtesy of Joe Procopio)

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