Death by Competitive Analysis

This week we read a very interesting article: "Death by Competitive Analysis" in which Blank underlines that competitive analysis are no more than sales documents for investors and/ or an attempt to rationalize the founders assumptions. They assume that you know why customers are going to buy your product – because my competitors have these features, we need them too! Therefore, a competitive analysis drives a maximum feature set rather than optimizing for a minimum efficient feature set.

When having understood what features matter to customers, building a competitive analysis makes sense! So basically only then, when entering an existing market where competitors, customers and the basis of competition is known. However, most of the startups enter a resegmented or even new market which is why product features that differentiate them from existing incumbents, or even that never existed before need to be highlighted. (Understand your customer needs and don’t orientate yourself on competitors)

Having done the SWOT competitor analysis this week this article helped us to understand that we can’t use any kind of indirect competitor as an assurance or even validation that our product satisfies consumer needs and that we shouldn’t just copy any of their features without testing if our customers actually need it. After 100% having understood specific customer needs in our specific niche, we need to highlight product features that differentiate our product from the existing ones.

Read full article here:

https://steveblank.com/2010/03/01/death-by-analysis/