Is your competitive advantage some feature in your software? Ease of use? Your reputation?
Think again.
In today’s world, products are easy to copy and improve on. What took you a year to develop, takes your competitor only 3 months to copy. Some of your competitors will copy what you do and improve on it to be even better than yours. Your product maintained a competitive advantage for just 3 months.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the software industry. If you have enough cash, you can develop pretty much anything at record speed. When Covid19 hit, and Facebook saw the rise of Zoom, Mark Zuckerburg decided that Facebook should develop its own video conferencing solution. A month later, they announced the launch of messenger rooms.
The large tech companies have more money, more talent, more experience, and a stronger brand. How do you maintain a competitive advantage in this business environment?
Well, there is one thing you have that most companies don’t: Agility.
If you can move faster than your competition; be quicker to adapt to market conditions, be willing to sacrifice existing audiences for new and better ones, and keep finding new product-market fits as the old ones disappear. If you can do all that better than most competitors, you stand a fighting chance at winning.
Your product’s competitive advantage today is momentary and fleeting. An agile business can last a long time.
Additionally, there is one thing that your largest competitors have that you don’t have, which makes you stronger: An inherent aversion to risk. If you learn to manage risk, not avoid it and move fast enough, you might grab enough market share before you wake up the sleeping enterprise competitor.
As a startup leader, your quest is not the search for the ultimate feature. It’s the quest for building the most agile and innovative organization in your industry. That is your true competitive advantage.
