Following on from yesterday's post about an urgency mindset, I saw a related social media post this morning.

In this post, a founder describes that he is developing a booking/CRM app for the food industry. He's been working on it for quite some time, with the goal of adding as many features as possible in an attempt to ensure it aligns with the ideal customer's needs.

A competitor has released a similar app, but it is of lower quality. The competitor's app is targeting many other popular verticals, e.g. doctors, trades, yoga studios, etc.

The founder's idea was to target one vertical at a time. After seeing this competitor's release, he is torn between rushing their app to launch or modifying it to match the competitor's version.

This is a common dilemma. What do you think they should do?

First of all, it's concerning that they are in an ongoing development phase, trying to get the app "perfect".

The goal should always be to release a product that satisfies the customer's #1 need, and then methodically iterate from there.

For context, we're not discussing hyperscale startups like Uber or OpenAI, for whom the race to market saturation is an important part of their business model.

Nor are we discussing commodity services businesses - who need to be as efficient as possible to compete mainly on price and reach.

Back to our founder:

In my view he's already lost the race to launch (assuming that matters at all) so the first action to take is to launch their app.

Secondly, he should not worry about competing. He should stay true to their strategy of being the best option for the food industry.

In a specialised market, understanding the customer's needs and solving them is key.

Trying to appeal to multiple segments with limited resources is almost guaranteed to fail because the task is too great.

We should not completely ignore competition.

Competition shows there is a market

We can learn from their marketing, and mistakes; and improve on their popular features.

If we believe we can create something of value, competition is just one of many things to worry about.

It's nothing to obsess over.