As a long-time entrepreneur, I’ve seen the same pattern play out many times: new founders fixate on competitors, prices, and market moves. It’s natural to compare, but obsession rarely produces sustainable advantage.
Your own north star matters more than competitors’ headlines.
Measure progress against what you control: product clarity, customer value, unit economics, and repeatable
sales motions.
Define a few leading indicators that predict long-term success
(e.g., activation rate, time-to-value, churn reduction).
Practical steps
- Create a 90-day performance plan with 3-5 measurable outcomes.
- Run weekly “health checks” on the levers that drive growth, not the latest press release from rivals.
Pricing wars often erode margin and brand equity for everyone, including incumbents.
Instead of chasing price cuts, compete on value, not price.
How to win on value:
- Articulate a clear, quantifiable value proposition (ROI, time-to-value, ease of use).
- Invest in customer success to turn price into a marginal factor rather than a differentiator.
- Consider packaging and unbundling features to reveal higher perceived value.
Competitors can reveal market boundaries, customer pains, and gaps you’ve missed. Use competitive signals to validate your hypotheses, not to dictate your strategy.
Use competitive signals constructively:
- Map competitor weaknesses you can exploit, but avoid chasing their feature lists.
- Run small, disciplined experiments to test your own value propositions, independent of competitors’ moves.
- Collect customer feedback to confirm that your differentiators resonate.
Your brand, culture, and product decisions come from distinctive trade-offs you’ve already made. Document what you do uniquely well and why it matters to your target customers.
Exercise: The 3x3 Advantage Grid:
- List 9 elements of your business (e.g., customer segment, onboarding, support, pricing, packaging,
speed to iterate, reliability, integrations, community).
- Rate each on: 1) you own it fully, 2) you influence it, 3) it’s a crowded space.
- Prioritize areas where you own or strongly influence and where the impact is high.
In sports, elite athletes obsess over their own training, recovery, and execution, not every rival’s play. Translate that mindset to startups: optimize your practice, reps, and feedback loops.
Practical coaching habits:
- Daily micro-improvements: replace a single time sink with a faster process.
- After-action reviews: what worked, what didn’t, and what you’ll do differently, with data.
- Transparent team rituals: share wins, losses, and learnings to build a culture of rapid experimentation.
A laser focus on customer outcomes can reveal opportunities competitors miss. Sometimes a “non-traditional” customer segment is underserved and more lucrative than chasing the same market.
Customer-centric playbook:
- Conduct 1-on-1 customer interviews weekly to surface real pain points.
- Build a lightweight value map: for each customer segment, quantify the primary problem, the solution,
and the measurable benefit.
- Use that map to prioritize product bets and messaging.
Set boundaries for competitive analysis: time-box it, and end with a decision to act on your own plan. Create a decision framework: if a competitive signal meets X criteria, consider it; otherwise, ignore. Institutionalize “quiet hours” focused on deep work, product development, and customer insights.
Thanks for taking the time to read this blog post. I hope you found it informative and thought provoking.
My name is Paul Lomax, a serial entrepreneur for over 4 decades, CEO of Bluedog Cyber Security, SaaS
founder, Non-Exec Director, C# developer and SaaS Startup Advisor.
Over many years I've gained knowledge and insight into how to build a great business, and exit when the
time is right.
I'm available for freelance work, non-executive directorships and advisory roles. Check out my Services Pages for more information. Please feel free to
reach
out
and let's discuss your requirements.