Competition. When do you pay attention and how much?

Everyone has a competitor. Well at least I hope so. Otherwise you may have other market challenges. Competition is a good thing. The saying “all ships rise” means there’s a concentration of resources going towards a specific problem and so, any market amplification should aid all. The next question comes in how you compete and the answer gets nuanced pretty quickly.

The question of how much attention you should pay to your competitors ultimately comes down to timing and rate of market adoption.

Competition is in the eye of the buyer

The brutal reality — do your target buyers care and are they aware of your competitors? Of course it’s important to know who your competition is, what they’re claiming and how they are showing up in the market. You should set up trackers to keep a pulse on what’s going on. As we all know, market dynamics constantly change.

Stay true to your core

However, over-rotating or changing what you do because of a competitor is never a good idea, especially when you’re early in the market. As you put all your resources behind launching and acquiring customers, stay true to your core and purpose. Build for value and listen closely to what your buyers want and need. I guarantee you early market competitors are also spending time figuring things out.

Clay, the current Martech “darling” has been building a valuable product for GTM teams to solve the problem of targeted outbound at scale, which has previously been fraught with error and if we’re honest with crappy results. Clay took a few years to figure out the distinct use-cases and what’s most interesting is how they went to market early on. I highly recommend listening to Pavilion’s interview with Clay’s co-founders. The relevant take-away was the CEO’s comments at 25 minutes about how much attention you need to pay to your customers (assuming you know who that is) vs the competition. That’s all that really matters. As you get bigger and start competing directly with other players, then you need to devise different approaches and strategies.

He claims “Early on, you can ignore the competition but you do need to tie what you are doing back to your mission”. Now, of course you need an agreed mission and purpose to start with but that’s for another blog post.

What’s your moat (or wedge) onto the market?

If you’re playing in a market with larger, established vendors, you may need to take a tech-based approach to solving an old problem. There’s no shortage of investments that claim to solve problems with AI-powered tech.

As an early stage company, it’s hard to compete on just specific features, especially if your competition is larger with a deep engineering bench. However, with a pure-based new technology approach, you can absolutely get the attention of early adopters, especially if the incumbents haven’t innovated in a while. Remember big ships turn a lot slower in a wide open sea than small powerful tug-boats. I personally witnessed this during my time at Honeycomb as we carved out the new Observability market competing against large players like DataDog and New Relic.

Pick your GTM approach beyond product

Here’s some other ways to find a wedge into your customers:

• Tell a strong brand story with a compelling long term vision
• User’s ease of adoption and onboarding goes a long way
• Execute a well thought out distribution strategy via partners and allies
• Clear and simple pricing and packaging is appreciated especially if you need users to take it up the chain to a decision-maker
• Rapidly innovate and ship new, sought after features.

Kyle Poyar’s Growth Unhinged SaaS benchmark recently shared a new playbook which is to lean more heavily on product, and build a remarkable one that stands out. I believe Clay did that early on which is a key reason for their early success and strong adoption. If that’s your chosen moat, lean into it hard and give it 1000%.

Beyond product specifics, there are other ways to win. Who are your early adopters and what incentives can you provide to get early traction? Perhaps your founders have an amazing vision with investors and backers going ‘all-in’. The market loves a good story and if compelling, people will pay attention. It turns out, FOMO is quite powerful.

Writer’s latest CEO podcast is a good example of that. They certainly had me leaning in when May Habib shared her vision about how AI can help verticals including healthcare, legal and insurance who aren’t exactly early adopters of new technology.

Pricing is often an afterthought and many PLG companies have gained traction with a free version. It has to perform as advertised and of course be easy to use and self-serve.

Big D and Little D

I recently joined a Gartner CMO webinar about the major trends influencing CMOs in 2025 and while I wasn’t expecting to learn anything earth-shattering new, I did pick up on this one nugget that’s worth sharing. It’s the Big D and little D.

By little D they mean how to differentiate when you’re competing in a deal with another vendor on say product capabilities. In other words on the ground, in the field and getting deals over the line. It’s no easy undertaking but there’s a difference between that and Big D which is how your entire business is differentiating on a macro-level, compared to other players.

As a marketer, are you creating a whole new category? Definitely Big D. Or perhaps changing the shape of an existing market segment. Thinking big picture and longer term is all about how you affect Big D. It’s a good framing to think about different strategies and techniques to use which will vary based on your stage and maturity.

Isn’t competition fun?

Competitors keep it interesting. It’s never boring. Imagine a basketball game where there’s little competition and one team sweeps with a huge point margin. Not so fun, eh. As a loyal Warriors fan, I love watching a tight game and seeing those winning 3-point shots from Steph Curry mid court. Nothing quite like it.