Stop obsessing about your competitors.
There will always be competitors. That’s a fact you can’t change. What you can change is the value you add to your consumers.
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I run businesses. Have always done that. Did that in the past, doing it today, and will continue doing that. And every single time we have tried doing something new, there are always questions that are centered around the competition.
Why do you think you will succeed where others have failed?
Don’t you think you are a few years too late? This has already been done by X.
There seems to be nobody else addressing this market. Don’t you think that’s because this problem doesn’t need to be solved?
Each and every single one of those questions is valid, and we need to ask ourselves those questions all the time — when we have just started to think of the business, when we have started doing the groundwork, when we breathe! Yes. All the time. But it doesn’t need to be the focal point of our thought process. Scratch that. IT MUST NOT BE!
CONSUMERS, NOT COMPETITORS
Your business needs to do what will add value to the life of your consumers. It needs to do it in a way that will leave the customers with a smile on their face. It needs to achieve the ‘goal’ of ensuring that the customer, by default, thinks of you when he is contemplating another transaction in your domain.
That’s it. That is all that matters, and therefore, that is all that you need to stay focused on all the time.
In one of the businesses I worked with, the adwords team would be obsessively tracking what our biggest competitors were promoting. If the competitors had a product that was priced lower than ours, all hell would break loose. The sole focus would shift to matching up to that price. After all, why would a customer buy with us if he/she is getting the same product cheaper somewhere else?
And that is absurd on the face of it, isn’t it? If price is the only reason a customer…
