2010 June | Brian Chaney

Competition Is Overrated: Stop Worrying About It And Just Build A Better Product

Your #1 competitor starting out will always be the BACK button, nothing else. – Garry Tan

Suppose you have an idea for a startup, and then do some research only to discover there are already similar products on the market. You become disheartened and wonder if you should abandon your idea.

In fact, the existence of competing products is a meaningful signal, but not necessarily a negative one. Here are some reasons why.

1) Almost every good idea has already been built. Sometimes new ideas are just ahead of their time. There were probably 50 companies that tried to do viral video sharing before YouTube. Before 2005, when YouTube was founded, relatively few users had broadband and video cameras. YouTube also took advantage of the latest version of Flash that could play videos seamlessly.

Other times existing companies simply didn’t execute well. Google and Facebook launched long after their competitors, but executed incredibly well and focused on the right things. When Google launched, other search engines like Yahoo, Excite, and Lycos were focused on becoming multipurpose “portals” and had de-prioritized search (Yahoo even outsourced their search technology).

Competition Is Overrated: Stop Worrying About It And Just Build A Better Product.

Damn. | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine

Damn. | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine.

76 Powerful Thoughts from Paul Graham

Paul Graham is most famous for heading up Y Combinator, a seed-stage startup funding firm, and also for Hacker News, a social news website revolving around computer hacking, startup companies, and as their submission guidelines state, “anything that gratifies one’s intellectual curiosity”. Graham’s essays online are highly regarded for their insight and relevance – and his book, Hackers and Painters, is no different.

1. Nerds serve two masters. They want to be popular, certainly, but they want even more to be smart.

2. An American teenager may work at being popular every waking hour, 365 days a year.

3. Most people seem to consider the ability to draw as some kind of innate quality, like being tall. In fact, most people who “can draw” like drawing, and have spent many hours doing it; that’s why they’re good at it.

4. Smart people’s lives are worst between, say, the ages of eleven and seventeen. Life at that age revolves far more around popularity than before or after.

5. People unsure of their own position will try to emphasize it by maltreating those they think rank below.

6. To become more popular, you need to be constantly doing things that bring you close to other popular people, and nothing brings people closer than a common enemy.