The perfect competitor: a must-do exercise in product vision
As a 10-year product manager in some really great startups (and a few crappy ones), I sometimes get the false impression that I’ve seen it all.
About 1.5 years ago, I started my own startup, and it was hard — doing marketing & sales didn’t seem to come naturally, and at some point, I even had to learn how to code. But I was always confident about our product work. Well, until…
I’ll rush through the exposition — we had an idea, built an MVP, made some big sales, got stuck and pivoted. Nothing out of the ordinary. A couple of months into the pivot, we were finally starting to feel favorable winds.
We were pretty far along into development with a new MVP, and customer feedback was finally crystal clear — almost everyone we talked to immediately got it, and some conversations led to pre-launch design partnerships with really great companies.
We were feeling good, and had a 6 months roadmap ahead, with high-level plans for 5 years into the future. Then, one Linkedin outreach led to a conversation with a potential customer, that mentioned they had just started using AltCo (not their real name), so she’s not in the market for another solution.
I’ve never heard about AltCo before, so I didn’t pay much attention. There are a lot of players in our space (Creative Asset Management), but most aren’t great, and being the awesome PM that I am, I’ve done a very exhaustive feature-by-feature comparison with all major players in the industry.
Getting curious nonetheless, I checked them out, and WHAM! They turned out to not be shitty at all. Quite good, actually. And had a bunch of cool features. Great UX too. Oh, and it turned out they closed a fairly large fundraising round. The more I snooped, the more I got discouraged. I mean, these guys basically have what was supposed to be our roadmap for the next 2 years!
The week was coming to an end, and not wanting to ruin his weekend, I decided to wait before telling my co-founder that we needed to either find another idea, or go get some grown-up jobs.
After a long, semi-catatonic weekend, we finally had “the talk”. He was unimpressed. “Yeah, they’re good. So what?”.
I was trying to explain that it’s all over. I’m not over-dramatizing — I was 100% sure it was. I’ve seen so many delusional founders that had an idea, and after finding out it had already existed, immediately turned and said “yeah, but we can do it better!”. I had zero interest in being one of those founders.
Trying to prove my point, that we were a dead-startup-walking, I turned to some of our trusted advisors. Astoundingly, none of them were fazed either. One actually shouted: “that’s great! I was getting concerned about why there are no startups in this field”. The consensus was — competition is great, but now you need to find your differentiation.
“Differentiation?”, I asked. “They are basically us. How are we supposed to differentiate from ourselves?!”.
We started researching other “close encounters”. Slack vs. Teams; Miro vs. Mural; Dropbox vs. Google Drive (and box, and about 99 more).
Startups have a lot of conflicting truths. While it’s common knowledge that competition is good, there’s also peter Thiel teaching that competition is for losers. It’s all very confusing, really.
But still, little by little, it became clear. If the market is large enough, it’s going to end up with multiple, distinct players. While Dropbox and Google Drive seem similar, they do target different audiences and offer different features. Yes, the core offering is the same, but as you dive in, the differences are huge. Same goes for every other mature market we looked at. Is Airtable the same as Monday.com? Sure, but also, not really.
As we dug deeper, we soon realized that all the competitors, AltCo included, suffered from the same issue — they were great if you had endless time to spend on being more productive (paradox intended), but they just required too much manual work to get anything done.
We decided to focus on using AI assistance to not just enable, but actively help design teams stay organized (sorry for buzzwording AI here, I know you’ve had enough). This not only made sense from a competitive analysis standpoint, it also made sense personally, as both I and my co-founder had previously worked on AI products).
This new understanding, while it can seem small, had a huge impact on our company. Almost instantly, everything changed — our roadmap, marketing, even the questions we asked while interviewing potential customers. It made us hyper-focused and very aware of every decision. Until then, we were solving a problem; Now, it felt like we had a vision for how to do that.
Once a PM, always a PM, what blew me away most of all was that it never would have happened if we hadn’t encountered that “perfect competitor” (it later turned out to not be perfect at all, but that’s another story altogether). I thought about all the companies I had previously worked for. We had a beautiful, carefully-planned roadmap too. What would have happened if we had one day found out a new competitor that is basically us, two years into the future?
If I were to go back to being a PM, and started working on a new product, I’m sure that one of the first things that I would do is to get all stakeholders into a room, and present to them their own version of AltCo.
Thanks for reading this. Startups are exactly the rollercoaster they’re said to be, which is why it’s been a while since I blogged here.
Whether you’re a startup founder or a product manager, I invite you to ask yourself, and perhaps your team:
“If you found out today that a new startup came out of stelth mode, and they have already built everything you planned for the next 2 years; and if they’ve done a solid job in executing your plan — what would you do then?”
Quick note! We’re launching on Product Hunt today (Jan. 12th). If you’re curious to see how our story continues, please join in the discussion, ask questions, let us know what you think in the launch page comments:
https://producthunt.com/posts/tagbox
