I have no competitors! Why don’t I make money?

The Trap That Eats Start-ups and Entrepreneurs.

You should be worried if your boss or client ever says “we have no competitors, we are the best at what we do, and no one does anything similar to what we do”. You should be downright scared if you ever hear yourself say something similar.

“But, having no competition is good!” a novice entrepreneur might say. Sure, the imagination of owning an entire market to yourself sounds like a shortcut to world domination. Someone has to be first, after all. But, like with most shortcuts in life, in 999 out of 1000 cases, the world you will be conquering will turn out to be a desert, an empire of dust.

Photo by Tanya Nevidoma on Unsplash

The Bad News and The Worse News

There are two distinct possibilities when you hear this sentiment: either the person saying “there’s no competition” is just wrong, or, far worse, they’re right.

The best-case scenario is that the speaker is simply making an error. They are looking at competition in too narrow a context, or are being product-centric to the point of ignoring the customer. Maybe they simply overestimate the efficacy of their solution. A reframing exercise can bring clarity. By reviewing the value proposition, user personas, and ideal (vs actual) use cases, you can…