Competition
You know those helpful emails you get where someone says “Here’s someone doing something like you”, and you have to grit your teeth and accept you might not be the only dog in the race?
Up until now what I’ve seen has been sufficiently different to not make me worry. But one last week was dangerously close. Great Question: a platform that systematises customer discovery and validation.
It’s like the big Chimp rises up to protect me from getting hurt, but does it badly by talking utter nonsense. Catastrophising is its go-to response – “There’s no point bothering with Familiarize because someone else (in California) has got there first – and now they’re going to swallow up 100% of the global market”.
Fortunately, after several hours (or days), my level-headed brain eventually kicks in and sees competition as a “good thing”; it shows there’s a market.
And in this case, the rational brain had extra ammunition to blast the Chimp (who had only read part of the email). Because the email linked to a press release saying Great Question had just got $2.5m seed funding from Y Combinator and others. In fact it had gone through Y Combinator’s accelerator programme, giving it access to some great clients, Adidas, Linktree etc. Kind of Grrrr, Kind of Whoop-whoop.
With the Chimp left to pursue other lines of emotional enquiry (school holidays have begun), I signed up for Great Question’s product and saw that in fact it was pretty different (more industrial-scale research) – with a different target audience (pretty established companies running hundreds of customer experiments). Nonetheless it looks really good.
Digging into a competing product gave me - and my UX designer Tom - huge insight into its setup, features, language, workflow. It made me realise I need to get better but I also need to be different.
It also made me realise how once you’ve launched, you reveal a lot to your competitors. You can’t stand still, otherwise people like me will just copy you. Probably faster.
Who’s the competitor?
You can’t look at competition through your eyes. Only your customers’ eyes. If you offer the same as a competitor for a lower price you might get the gig; if you seem different and that difference matters to them you may not.
For Familiarize, my biggest competitor isn’t Great Question. And it won’t be the next lookalike startup that springs up (sensing investor interest). No, my biggest competitor is Doing Nothing. It’s not a Silicon Valley startup – it’s plain old head-in-the-sand, “build it and they will come” thinking, that many business owners operate to avoid finding out their product may not be what their customers really need.
I think this has been my biggest learning over the past six months with Familiarize – finding out my competition isn’t another product; it’s inertia, apathy, sometimes arrogance, often fear of customers or of wasting time, fear of paying to do something they could do themselves.
And for some businesses, these feelings are too strong and I can’t overcome them. I may never persuade them to invest their time and a little money getting to know their customers. And even for those I can, I know these anxieties or habits persist – and I’m always one step from being frozen out.
In many ways, I find this pushes me to keep getting better, keep upgrading my product, improving what I say, being more empathetic – and more humble: the customer is always right and if we disagree I’m probably wrong.
Here’s some tips to reframe competition:
In your conversations with customers, try to find out what they did before you came into their life, what would they do if you weren’t here? Would they turn to someone else or do nothing (the latter isn’t very reassuring).
I have seen so many competitor positioning 2X2s in pitch decks, conveniently showing white space around the pitcher. We don’t define the axes on which we compete, our customer does – find out which axes your customer uses and then re-map your competition.
Helping your customer switch to you means they need to loosen their Habits and quieten their Anxieties. Make a table of your customers’ Habits and Anxieties, validate them with real customers – then check off how you address them in your product, brand, copy, social proof etc.
It’s easy to find direct competitors, but that’s just a market share game; instead focus on the Job your customer is trying to get done – this will open your eyes to all manner of competitors you hadn’t considered. For instance, noise-cancelling headphones, summer camps and a new stud wall all might compete with paying for a co-working space during the (long) school holidays.
Review sites are gold when it comes to understanding how your customers perceive you and your competition. For me, reading reviews of Good Question on Product Hunt was like sitting in a focus group; direct feedback on what people loved about the concept, the product, features – and why. As well as what was missing. Where do your customers wax lyrical and vent?
I was going to write '“chill out about competition”, but I don’t mean that – chill out about obvious competition; there’s usually plenty of market for you and hundreds of lookalikes.
Find out what they would do if you weren’t around. Find out what they love about you. And compete to not only keep them, but use this to scale-up and find others who feel the same.