Competition analysis / The necessity to look at users (doing nothing, competition with their own solutions)

The subject that Michael brings may relate to user innovation (see Eric von Hippel free innovation and user innovation concepts.) The following passage from Michael Dearing is a great reminder that the user is the biggest competition that founders should be worried.

“A lot of times the founders, who pause on the issue of competition, they pause for the wrong reasons. And they say things like — well isn’t big company XYZ going to do something just like this?”

“That’s totally irrelevant. That’s totally irrelevant. The perfectly competitive product that promises what your product promises is almost never the actual competition. The competition is almost always, the substitute for buying your thing is: doing nothing, or hacking their solution in their daily life, the user I’m talking about. “

“And, so, I think if you’re a friend of a founder, or a founder yourself, steer the conversation more like — wait a minute, I should not worry about big companies because they’re slow, and usually bad; but I should be worried about what’s occupying my target user’s attention today because that’s really what I’m competing against.”

“If you can answer that question, that’s a lot more valuable than a competitive matrix that [like] a consulting firm would do. “ (Michael Dearing @ Greylock, 2015, 36min40sec)

Greylock Partners. 2015. Blitzscaling 03: Michael Dearing on Capitalism, Creativity, and Creative Destruction. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vCdfa_aeI8