Your Competitor Is Not Who You Think
Mash Bonigala A founder came to me last month with a competitive analysis. Twelve slides. Feature-by-feature comparison against four other startups.
I asked who their customers were using before they found the product. The answer was a shared Google Sheet and a weekly standup.
That’s the competitor.
The startup-vs-startup illusion
Most founders define competition as other companies that do roughly the same thing. It feels logical. Investors ask about competitors. Analysts publish market maps. It’s natural to position yourself against the names that show up in the same conversations.
But for most early-stage companies, your real competitor isn’t another startup. It’s the status quo. It’s the cobbled-together workflow that’s annoying but familiar. It’s the manual process that everyone complains about but nobody has prioritised fixing.
The spreadsheet. The email chain. The intern doing it by hand every Friday.
Why this matters for positioning
When you position against another startup, you’re fighting over a thin slice of the market that already knows it needs a solution. That’s a small group.
When you position against the status quo, you’re talking to the entire market. Everyone who has the problem, whether they’ve looked for a solution or not.
This shift changes everything about how you communicate. Instead of “we’re like Competitor X but with better analytics,” you’re saying “you’re losing eight hours a week to a process that should take ten minutes.” The second version is about the customer. The first version is about you.
The switching cost you’re actually fighting
Here’s what founders underestimate: switching from nothing to something is harder than switching from one tool to another.
When someone already uses a competitor’s product, they’ve already decided the problem is worth solving. You just need to convince them your solution is better. That’s a feature conversation.
When someone uses a spreadsheet, you need to convince them the problem is worth solving at all. That’s a much harder conversation, and it requires completely different language.
You can’t win that conversation with a feature comparison. You win it by making the cost of the status quo visible. Show them what they’re losing. Show them what breaks at scale. Show them the risk they’ve normalised.
How to find your real competitor
Ask your last ten customers three questions:
- What were you doing before you found us?
- What finally made you look for something better?
- What almost stopped you from switching?
The answers will tell you more about your competitive landscape than any market map. You’ll hear the same three or four patterns, and those patterns are your positioning gold.
Stop building comparison pages
If your marketing site has a “vs Competitor X” page but nothing that speaks to the person still using a spreadsheet, you’ve got it backwards. The spreadsheet crowd is ten times larger than the crowd already shopping for tools.
Write for them. Position against their current reality, not against companies they’ve never heard of.