You’re Not Competing With Who You Think
One pet peeve I have when listening to pitches is hearing “there is no competitor.” The only reaction this elicits from me is “you don’t understand the market.”
The more common version of this mistake is subtler. In more than a few pitch decks I’ve reviewed, the competitive landscape slide lists a handful of direct competitors offering similar solutions, complete with a feature comparison matrix showing how the company wins on most dimensions. This is either because the founder believes those are the only “true” competitors, or to make the solution stand out by highlighting its advantages against others in the market.
While this is technically fine, it’s incomplete. It’s a narrow view that doesn’t reflect everything else the customer might do instead, and founders who only track direct competitors will be blindsided by alternatives.
Reframing competition
Competition is not a feature comparison. The real question is: what else can customers use to solve their problems? And might those alternatives be more suitable for the problem at hand?
A core idea behind the popular Jobs to Be Done framework is that customers don’t buy products, they hire solutions to do a job.
When thinking about competition, instead of asking “Who else is providing a solution similar to ours?” ask “What job is the customer hiring for? How can we get them to hire our solution for it?”
Getting the job done
Jobs have always existed. What changes is the solution.
Take a familiar example: buying daily necessities. Decades ago in Indonesia, buying these items meant going to the wet market or mom-and-pop shops in the neighborhood. Then came the supermarkets and the proliferation of convenience stores, followed by online marketplaces like Tokopedia and Shopee where you can buy anything without stepping out of the house. Then came super apps with GrabMart and GoMart, and most recently, quick commerce platforms where you can get things delivered in under 30 minutes. The job never changes, but the solution continues to evolve and get better.
A better solution doesn’t make the preceding ones obsolete. With quick commerce, people are still buying from mom-and-pop shops, convenience stores, and supermarkets. They are all still competitors in getting the job done, but each differs in experience and the additional jobs it fulfills, like stretching your legs by walking to a nearby convenience store, or buying from a store you know sells something for cheaper.
Direct and indirect competition
Competition, then, includes both direct competitors and alternatives:
- Direct competitors: same solution, same job. Tokopedia vs Shopee, both online marketplaces where you can buy non-urgent daily necessities without leaving home.
- Indirect competitors and substitutes: different solution, same job. Convenience stores vs quick commerce. Different formats, but both get you something quickly, and the choice can be influenced by speed, price, or experience.
What this means for pitching
In addition to comparing with direct competitors, show what the existing customer behavior is and why your solution is better than the alternatives.
The feature comparison matrix answers “why are we better than X?” But the slides should also answer:
- What is the customer doing today? Before your product, how was the job being done, and why is that solution inadequate? This shows you understand the market from the customer’s perspective, not just the competitive landscape.
- Why will the customer switch? Not from a “we have more features” angle, but from “the existing solution fails the customer in this specific way, and here’s why they’d hire us instead” angle.
Show a before and after: what the customer’s workflow looks like without your product, and what it looks like with it. That’s more compelling to an investor than a grid of checkmarks.
What this means for building
This isn’t only about the pitch.
If you think your only competition is other startups with similar features, you’ll build a roadmap that chases feature parity. But if your real competition is inertia or an existing habit, the job changes: understand what the customer currently hires to do the job, and why. The customer frustrated with their current workaround is a very different ICP from the one perfectly content doing nothing. Knowing which one you’re building for changes everything downstream.
. . .
The founders who win aren’t the ones who out-feature the competition. They’re the ones who understand what they’re really up against.