Founder Lesson
Over the years I’ve struggled with how to think about competition. There are obvious competitors in your industry that you can find with a simple Google search, but I’ve found that the best founders think more deeply about this topic.

The best founders fixate on their primary customer value proposition and who else fully or partially provides this value. This is not only important for obvious competitive reasons, but has even more value when you are initially developing the product and need to “feel the problem deeply” to create real engagement differences. This is what enables your startup to be the best in the world at the problem you are solving.

Who does the exact same job for your customers that your startup does in the exact same way? This is your competition. This is who you’ll compete with for customer engagement.

In this podcast/video, an amazing founder explains his thoughts on direct, secondary and indirect competition.

Get Right to the Lesson
I’d recommend listening to the entire thing, but to get right to the point go to minute 21:54 of this podcast/video

Thanks to these folks for helping us all learn faster
Des Traynor (@destraynor), co-founder of Intercom (@intercom)
This Week In Startups (@TWistartups )
Jason Calacanis (@jason)
Jacqui Deegan (@jacqKD)
Jacob Beemer (@jacobbeemer)

Please let me and others know what you think about this topic
Email me privately at dave@switchyards.com or let's discuss publicly at @davempayne.