Competition vs Customer

Lately, I've been giving a lot of thought to how much I should worry about our competition.

As the Director of Product overseeing an early-stage product, it's evident that we're operating in a crowded industry vertical.

New players are entering the market every day, each striving to carve out their unique space in the industry. Keeping up with all these new solutions feels like a full-time job in itself.

In search of guidance on this, I turned to some of the industry's brightest minds. Among them, Jeff Bezos and Paul Graham's insights on this matter really resonated with me.

"If you want to discover what sets us apart, it's this: We are genuinely customer-centric, genuinely long-term oriented, and we genuinely like to invent. Most companies are not those things. They focus on the competition rather than the customer, choosing to follow rather than innovate because it feels safer... Our obsession with customer focus has been the key to our unparalleled success." - Jeff Bezos

"At both Viaweb and YC, every minute I spent thinking about competitors was, in retrospect, a minute wasted... Startups are rarely killed by competitors, so you can almost discount that possibility... Success depends far more on you than your competitors... Focus on users, not competitors. The most critical information about competitors comes from what you learn via users anyway... Compete against what someone else could be doing, not just what you can see people doing." - Paul Graham

As I delved deeper into the secret of successful products, it became clear to me that the best use of my time right now is to be laser-focused on our users.

And that's precisely what I intend to do.