Plenty of startups don't start because someone else is already building the rough idea.
Peter Thiel may disagree, but the vast majority of successful businesses can not avoid competition.
Example: Stripe would have never started!
This is business. Choose your competition.
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@chrishlad
- Competitor's product is used but only reluctantly
- Competitor is slow to innovate, or make improvements
- Start in a market your competitor isn't in -> plenty of Stripe clones came out in other countries before Stripe expanded. The Australian one is now worth ~$1B.
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@zachtratar
Competition is a great market validator. And at least 90% of existing incumbents, even if new, are either
a. not solving the problem very well
b. ignoring a large segment of the market (e.g. in b2b SaaS companies typically either pick SMBs or enterprises)
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@zachtratar
I believe the point of “Escape Competition” is more based on how a certain thing is done. Money transmission was competitive before PayPal but money transmission via email that was free wasnt
You can escape via 1, distribution 2, product experience 3, product value 4, retention
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@zachtratar
Exactly. Even if you spring up a new idea, you'd have competition in no time.
Whether you like it or not, when you start a business, you start competing.
It's less about the idea and more about the execution.
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@zachtratar
It's the great idea fallacy. You don't need a unique idea to succeed and you don't need first mover advantage.
Being second is often better.
Better execute perfectly on a simple idea than execute poorly on a brilliant one.
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@zachtratar
It's because VC's and doomers preach bootstrapped market fit before you even launch. It takes a lot of faith to start something without capital
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@zachtratar
I think Stripe's niche was providing a developer-friendly API? They avoided competition because other API providers weren't nearly as developer-friendly as them.
I could be wrong on this.
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