Every startup founder has the experience of their investors, advisers and friends periodically sending them links to competitors. “Check this out FYI”

When I was running @fieldbookapp I would both love and hate this.

Love, because I knew it was important to be aware of competition and I was glad that my supporters were keeping their eyes out and thinking of me.

Hate, because of course competition raised my hackles and instantly activated a fear response.

The natural reaction is not the healthiest reaction.

The natural reaction is to feel threatened and to immediately look for reasons to dismiss the threat.

Common ones include:

• These guys are jokers, their product sucks
• Looks like their blog/Twitter is dead, probably not doing too well
• This product doesn't have key feature X
• We can be cheaper / give away more for free

Again, not the best reactions.

The reality is that, unless a competitor already has a pretty dominant position (like Salesforce for CRM or Zoom now for conferencing), you actually *don't need* a crisp differentiator, because there are enough customers who aren't using *anything* right now.

If you're up against an entrenched incumbent, you need a reason for people to *switch* away from them, to you.

If not, it's generally more important to just focus on executing your own product vision really well.

And if you just found out about a competitor because a friend sent you a link, they can't be dominant—if they were, you would have already heard about them from your user interviews.

(You *are* doing tons of user interviews, right? Of *course* you are.)

A better way to check out startup competitors is not to seek out where they are weak, but where they are strong.

Review their product, marketing, and business model; steal ideas where you can or just add them to your stock of possible ways to solve each problem.

That way when you're designing your product, onboarding flow, pricing tiers, landing page, etc.—you can run a max() function over {everything everyone else has done} unioned with {all the ideas you've had}, instead of just relying on the latter.

That way you're never doing *worse* than your competitors, *and* you have the chance to do better.

Assuming, of course, that you have good judgment about which ideas are best—which is your actual competitive advantage, in the early stage.