It can sound quite weird… However, the worst habit for a startup is to keep a close eye on your competitors.
You can ask why? Well, let’s understand.
While you keep a close eye on your competitors, you definitely put yourself in a catching-up position. You’re not writing the rules anymore, you’re following them.
Copying things your competitor does at first transforms your product into a late trailing replica of the other.
Then you take over the way of thinking, lose your identity, and begin to dissolve.
After spending some time with the thoughts of others, you make the conclusion that concurrency comes up between products, how better one is versus the other, and lose the focus on marketing and sales.
The worst to endure here is when you start to dig into their product to find a match for a good functionality which would be nice to have on your own. This is a slippery slope for you means you do not do tests, do not know how to work with your customers, and even worse, don’t understand your audience. That’s the way to oblivion and disgrace for your product.
Are you sure you want this for your startup or product?
You should go quite the opposite! People should talk about your product, not comparing to others.
I’m not trying to tell you must not copy. Copying itself is a normal process. Nevertheless, you can copy and outperform your analogs, but there is a note. There is a big difference between competitors and analogs. Analogs remain analogs while they work in a different market like another country, another target market, or different sectors of the market economy. The competitors are those products that remain in your target market or want to enter it and remain an actual threat for your customers to be poached. The competitors are those which you want to literally kill or at least grab a bigger slice of the cake.
