Jason Sherman

In this episode of Strap On Your Boots, I explore why studying your competition can be valuable, but watching them too closely can actually hurt your startup. Drawing from my experience building products like Spinnr, I discuss how competitor research can lead to feature creep, distract from your original vision, and create unfair comparisons with companies that have far more resources. Instead of constantly reacting to what competitors are building, I’ve learned to focus more on customer behavior, repeated feedback, and the specific problem I’m trying to solve.

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Get ready to strap on your boots. I’m your host, Jason Sherman. I’ve spent a lot of my career building companies in markets that were already crowded. I’ve built social platforms, video apps, SaaS products, and other technology where there were already established companies doing something similar. I never really looked at that as a reason to stay away from an idea. Usually, I was interested in the market because I had used the existing products and felt like something about the experience could be improved.

I’ve always thought of it as trying to build a better mousetrap. Most successful companies didn’t invent an entirely new category that nobody had ever thought about before. Social networks existed before Facebook. Search engines existed before Google. Smartphones existed before the iPhone. Sometimes the opportunity comes from looking at something people already use and wondering why it works the way it does. Maybe you can simplify it, combine things differently, focus on a particular problem, or approach the customer from another direction.

For years, I’ve also taught entrepreneurs that they should understand their competition. I still believe that. I want to know who else is operating in the market, what they’re offering, what customers seem to like about them, and where people are frustrated. There’s a tremendous amount you can learn from watching another company succeed, and probably just as much from watching one fail. If somebody has already spent millions of dollars discovering that a particular approach doesn’t work, I don’t necessarily need to spend my own money discovering the same thing.

I’ve done that kind of research throughout my career. I’ll look at pricing, features, customer reviews, marketing, websites, and the overall experience of using a product. Sometimes I’ll find something another company does really well and acknowledge that they figured something out. Other times I’ll immediately see an opportunity because something feels unnecessarily complicated or there’s a problem they haven’t addressed.

Where I’ve changed my thinking is around how much attention I give that information after I already know what I want to build.

I’ve experienced this firsthand over the last couple of years with one of my business partners. He likes to explore almost every competing platform he can find. He’ll sign up for accounts, request demos, test features, and spend time figuring out how different products work. There’s value in doing that, and I’ve certainly learned things from the information he brings back.

The problem is that I’m often sitting there actually building a similar platform while all of this research is happening.

I might have a very specific idea for the MVP and a clear picture of the problem we’re trying to solve. Then suddenly we’re looking at another company’s platform and discovering fifteen features they have that we don’t. Another competitor has a different dashboard. Somebody else has an interesting onboarding process. Another company just announced a new feature. Before long, there are all these additional ideas floating around that weren’t part of the original reason I wanted to build the product.

I’ve learned that there’s a point where research stops helping me focus and starts interfering with the vision.

That’s especially dangerous during the early stages of a startup because an MVP is supposed to be limited. I’m trying to figure out the smallest version of my idea that can actually solve the problem and give me useful information from real users. If I keep looking at companies that have been developing their products for five or ten years, it’s very easy to convince myself that my MVP needs everything they have.

Then the product starts getting bigger before I’ve even learned whether the original idea works.

There’s also something more subtle happening when I spend too much time looking at competitors. Their decisions start influencing mine. I begin thinking about the market through their interpretation of it. Maybe I change the interface because theirs looks a certain way. Maybe I add a feature because three competitors have it. After enough of that, I have to ask myself how much of the product still represents the idea I originally had.

I’ve always believed that there has to be a reason for building another company in an existing market. If I’m going to spend years of my life creating something that already has competitors, I need to have some idea about what I want to do differently. That’s the part I don’t want to lose simply because another company has more features or a larger development team.

And there’s an enormous temptation to compare yourself with those companies because they usually look much further ahead than you are.

You might be five people working out of your homes, while the company you’re watching has a thousand employees and hundreds of millions of dollars behind it. They can have separate teams working on mobile apps, marketing, enterprise sales, customer support, analytics, security, and twenty other things simultaneously. Your entire company might be sitting on one video call trying to decide which three features you can realistically finish this month.

I’ve been in that position enough times to understand that copying their roadmap isn’t going to make my startup become them.

It may actually prevent me from building the thing that gave me a reason to enter the market in the first place.

A good example of this for me is Spinnr, the video friendship platform I co-founded. When I started thinking about that product, I wasn’t trying to recreate one particular social network. I was thinking about a problem I had noticed across social media for years. We have all of these platforms that supposedly connect us with other people, yet there still aren’t many good places online where you can simply meet someone new and develop an actual friendship.

I had been using online communities since the days of AOL chat rooms, so I had a pretty long history to draw from. I had watched MySpace come and go. I had watched Facebook completely change how people connected online. Then Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, dating apps, video chat platforms, and all sorts of other social products came along. I had used many of them myself, so when we were developing Spinnr, I already had opinions about the parts of those experiences that I liked and the parts that never really worked for me.

Instead of finding the five most successful social apps at the time and copying their current features, I looked across that entire history. I could take the spontaneity I remembered from old chat rooms, think about what made profiles useful on social networks, look at what video added to communication, and consider how modern apps made it easier to discover people. I was essentially cherry-picking ideas from twenty years of online social interaction and then combining them around the particular problem I wanted Spinnr to solve.

That’s a very different process from opening TikTok tomorrow morning, seeing a new feature, and deciding Spinnr needs one too.

And I think that’s an important distinction. I’m completely comfortable being influenced by what came before me. Every entrepreneur is. We don’t build companies without any knowledge of the products we’ve used throughout our lives. I’ve been influenced by thousands of websites, apps, businesses, movies, interfaces, advertisements, and experiences. The danger for me comes when I’m watching competitors so closely in real time that I become reactive.

If another social platform changes something on Monday and I’m reconsidering my roadmap on Tuesday, I haven’t really learned whether their decision was good yet. I don’t know why they made it. I don’t know what internal data they’re seeing. I don’t know whether their customers asked for it. I don’t even know whether they’ll still have that feature six months from now.

I’m only seeing what they decided to put in front of the public.

With Spinnr, we’ve been able to keep the platform running and watch people continue finding it organically without us actively spending money on marketing. That gives me information I care about because it’s coming from the behavior of people actually using what we built. I can see whether someone signs up, what they do afterward, where they struggle, what they enjoy, and whether they come back. That tells me something about our product instead of somebody else’s.

There’s another problem with watching competitors too closely that I think affects founders psychologically. You almost always end up comparing your startup with companies that have resources you don’t have.

I’ve been there many times. You look at another company and see that they just raised fifty million dollars. Then they announce twenty new hires. A few months later they’re at every conference, they’re running ads everywhere, they’ve redesigned the product, and they’re releasing features faster than your small team could possibly build them.

It’s very easy to look at that and feel like you’re losing.

The problem is that I don’t actually know what’s happening inside that company. I don’t know how quickly they’re spending the money. I don’t know whether those new employees are making the company more efficient. I don’t know how much they’re paying to acquire each customer or whether those customers are staying. I don’t know how much pressure their investors are putting on them. I’m looking at announcements designed to make the company look successful and comparing those announcements with everything I know about my own company, including every problem we’re dealing with.

That’s an incredibly uneven comparison.

More importantly, I can’t operate my company as though I have their resources. If I have five people and they have five hundred, I have to make different decisions. They may be able to pursue ten customer segments simultaneously while I need to choose one. They might spend millions of dollars testing several marketing channels while I need to find something we can test for a few thousand dollars. They can assign an entire team to a feature that would consume most of my development resources for months.

I’ve learned that trying to keep pace with that can pull a startup into some terrible decisions. You start hiring before you’re ready. You spend money because everybody else appears to be spending money. You add features because competitors have them. Eventually you’re using your limited resources trying to resemble a much larger company instead of taking advantage of the fact that you’re small.

When I find myself getting pulled in that direction, I try to bring my attention back to the people who matter much more to the business: the customers.

I’ve probably said the word feedback thousands of times over the last twenty years. I’ve said it on this podcast, written about it, taught it in courses, and repeated it to entrepreneurs I’ve worked with. That’s because customer feedback has consistently given me information that I couldn’t get from sitting around with a team guessing about what people wanted.

A competitor can show me what they’ve built. A customer can tell me what they’re struggling with.

That’s where I want to spend most of my time listening.

I’ve learned that customer feedback becomes especially useful when I hear the same thing repeatedly. One person can have a very specific preference that doesn’t represent anybody else. If five or ten customers independently describe the same frustration, I start paying much closer attention. At that point, I can go back to the product and ask whether we’re actually solving the problem we set out to solve, and whether there’s something we’re missing.

Sometimes that process leads me right back to the competition. If customers keep asking for something and I discover that several competing products already provide it, I’ll absolutely look at how those companies approached it. I might try their feature, read reviews, see what customers like about it, and figure out whether there’s a better way for us to handle the same problem. Now I have a reason for doing the competitive research. Something happening inside my own business led me there.

I think that’s different from starting every morning by checking what everybody else is doing.

When I’m building a product, there are already more possible directions than I could ever pursue. Every customer conversation creates ideas. Every person on the team has suggestions. I have my own list of things I’d like to improve. Then there are bugs, technical issues, design changes, sales requests, marketing ideas, and all of the unexpected things that happen while running a startup. If I add every competitor’s roadmap to that pile, eventually there’s so much information coming in that it becomes difficult to decide what deserves attention.

I’ve had to become much more comfortable leaving things out.

That’s difficult for me because I’m a builder. When somebody shows me an interesting feature, my mind immediately starts thinking about how I could create my own version of it. Sometimes I can already picture how it would work before the conversation is finished. Then I have to ask whether building it actually moves the product forward or whether I simply became excited because I saw somebody else doing something interesting.

Those are very different reasons to spend development time.

This is also why I still believe so strongly in the MVP. When I talk about a minimum viable product, I’m thinking about the smallest version that allows me to test the central idea with real people. I don’t need it to compete feature for feature with a company that’s been operating for ten years. I need it to do the particular thing I believe should be done differently well enough that somebody can experience it and respond.

Once people start using it, I have something much more valuable than my assumptions. I can watch what happens.

Maybe the feature I thought would be the centerpiece of the product barely gets used. Maybe something I considered secondary becomes the reason people keep coming back. Maybe customers start using the platform in a way I never anticipated. I’ve had all of those experiences over the years, and they’re reminders that the market has a way of changing the plans we make while sitting in a room designing a product.

That doesn’t mean I automatically build whatever customers request either. I’ve had customers ask for features that would take the product in completely different directions. Sometimes a request makes sense for that particular customer and almost nobody else. I want to understand what they’re asking for and, more importantly, why they’re asking for it. The problem underneath the feature request is often more useful than the feature they proposed.

If someone tells me they need a particular button, integration, or workflow, I’ll try to understand what they’re attempting to accomplish. There may be another way to solve that problem that fits the product much better. That’s where I think the founder still has to maintain a vision. Listening to customers doesn’t mean handing them control of the roadmap any more than studying competitors means handing the roadmap to them.

I’ve become much more interested in balancing those inputs.

I want enough awareness of competitors that I’m not operating blindly. I want to know if somebody enters the market, changes pricing dramatically, introduces something genuinely innovative, or discovers a business model that customers are responding to. I also don’t need to spend every day watching them.

I’d rather spend that time talking to the people using what I’m building.

When I think about the companies I’ve worked on over the years, the most useful changes usually came from understanding a problem more deeply. Sometimes a customer showed it to me. Sometimes I noticed it while using the product myself. Sometimes the entire market shifted and forced us to reconsider an assumption. Those moments gave us something concrete to respond to.

So I still study competition, and I still think entrepreneurs should understand the landscape they’re entering. I just don’t want another company deciding what mine becomes.

If somebody else raises a hundred million dollars tomorrow, good for them. If they release twenty new features, I’ll probably take a look eventually. But I still have to wake up the next morning and work with the team, customers, resources, and opportunities that actually exist inside my own company.

After years of watching startups come and go, I’ve found that there’s always going to be somebody with more money, more employees, more features, or more attention. Trying to keep up with all of them can consume as much time as you’re willing to give it.

I’d rather know what we’re trying to build, understand why our customers are there, and keep listening closely enough to recognize when they’re telling us something important.