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Comment by jamiequint | Hacker News Reader

You should know who your competitors are, but focusing on them is a waste of time.

"The last thing you want is to find out that hundreds of other people have already thought of it and Andreesen just backed three of them."

This is a pretty naive point of view. Who cares if they are all startups.

Spend the time and energy this post recommends spending on your competitors and direct it towards your own customers instead.

Also see #4 here: http://paulgraham.com/startuplessons.html

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I once listened to Alexis give a lecture on the founding of Reddit. One of the more memorable points he made was recalling when they found "Digg". They were still in development, and someone had sent them a link. They spent 30 seconds looking at it, then said "cool", and kept on working.

My own thoughts is that the competition turned out not about features, but community. One might have thought Digg had a big leg up, because they basically had Kevin Rose using his role on Tech TV to promote it. However that was also a disadvantage. Eternal September is the death of most online communities, and they brought it on themselves. Reddit fortunately had pivoted to a platform for communities (sub-reddits) so as they picked up steam, the bad network effects were mostly concentrated to the default subs.

"You should know who your competitors are, but focusing on them is a waste of time." I agree. The point of this post is that entrepreneurs very rarely actually know who all their competitors are and this is a way to get a complete picture. As I say at the end, then it's time to move on and get going.

I agree. If a company is not actually delivering value to your customer segment, then they're not a competitor. Just another wannabe and irrelevant IMO.

This is an interesting POV. There's this school of thought in business/marketing that continuous positioning is absolutely crucial for the success of any business because it allows you to offer better value to your customers. Not sure if I completely agree but most companies have to react when the competition changes a major part of their business model or does minor biz dev like dumping their prices.

Possibly for startups that are past product/market fit (not many seed stage investments). Pre-product/market fit focusing on competition is a waste of time.

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