Competitive Strategy

---
name: competitive-strategy
description: Decide where to compete and how to sustain an advantage, rather than assuming a better product wins. Use when entering a market, responding to a competitor, or explaining why you will win.
---

# Competitive strategy

Better products lose to worse products with better distribution
routinely. Strategy is choosing where you compete and what durable
advantage you have, which is a different question from what your product
does.

## Method

1. **Define the competitive set as customers see it.** Including doing
   nothing and the spreadsheet they use today, which is usually the real
   competitor.
2. **Identify what actually sustains an advantage.** Switching costs,
   network effects, proprietary data, distribution, or cost position.
   Features are copied; these are not.
3. **Choose a position deliberately.** Broad or focused, premium or
   low cost. Trying to be everything means competing everywhere with
   nothing durable.
4. **Understand the incumbent's constraints.** What they cannot do
   without damaging their existing business is where a smaller entrant
   wins.
5. **Watch adjacent entrants, not just direct rivals.** The dangerous
   competitor is often a company with distribution adding your feature
   rather than a direct clone.
6. **Test the strategy against a competitor's rational response.** A
   plan that assumes competitors stand still is a plan for the first six
   months only (see second-order-thinking).
7. **Revisit as the market changes.** Advantages erode, and the position
   that worked at launch is rarely the one that works at scale (see
   agent-strategy-review).

## Boundaries

Strategy sets direction; execution determines the outcome, and most
failures are execution rather than positioning. Competitor information
must come from legitimate public sources, and coordination on price or
markets is illegal in most jurisdictions. Frameworks organise thinking
rather than producing answers.