One: If we’re not talking to our competition, we won’t have the right sense of our place in the market. Before our conversation, especially right at that moment in my company’s lifecycle, I would have said we were on even footing. The reason - he had started seeing our name everywhere and he realized we were way too far ahead of him. We wound up getting a few drinks and soon he admitted he was winding down his company. Many years ago, when my startup was having a particularly bad stretch of what I’d call “negative traction,” I happened to bump into a fellow founder of a direct competitor during a convention where we were both speaking. Then we just have to prove that we’re the best provider of that solution. It’s hard enough convincing the world of our startup’s reasons to exist, so having another company in our space to compare ourselves against, if not several competitors, justifies the need for the solution we’re all providing. 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.

Keep your enemies close