I am obsessed with my competitors. I literally track them everywhere. Meticulously and relentlessly.
When I started Skcript back in 2013, I was obsessed over my competition that I would give a lot of damn about it. Few years went by, and it was 2016, and the feeling of never being able to ‘pause’ (not stop) my running started sinking in. I went on a drive one nice evening to see how I cloud overcome this mindset and move on to focus on other things that we could do at Skcript.
What I realized about analyzing by competition was something different.
People say that competition is good. And that you will have to be obsessed over your competition. The real reason behind that is not to keep your company updated all the time, but to know what your customers really want. Period. It is that simple.
Knowing what your customer wants is more important than watching your competition closely. It is probably the only single metric that will matter to you when you are new to the market trying to create something good.
Watching your competition and being obsessed over them comes as a part of knowing your customers well enough.
Post that long drive I had in 2016, after being stressed, the one thing that changed in me to build great products that matter, is where I looked at my competition.
Earlier, I used to obsessively follow them everywhere. On social media, get more information about them from friends, and my major stress came in when I used to hear news saying that they on-boarded say 2000 more users on-to their platform.
Today, all that I look for and the one metric that helped me grow our revenue was to analyze my competitors’ feature set and figure out why they built it like they did. Considering my competitor as one of my biggest and free user-testing providers made all the difference.
Ultimately, we all are here to solve a customers’ problems. Not our own problems.