Know the Enemies (and Know Yourself)

If you know your enemies and know yourself, you can win a hundred battles without a single loss.If you only know yourself, but not your opponent, you may win or may lose.If you know neither yourself nor your enemy, you will always endanger yourself. -- Sun Tzu from The Art of War

Many war strategies from ancient era apply directly to startups. Entrepreneurs are not fighting physically with each other but they are working towards outperforming the competitors to win the market. As said by Sun Tzu, a great military strategist (and the author of The Art of War) in China around 6th century BCE, knowing the enemies, as well as knowing yourself, is crucial to win a battle. Thus, entrepreneurs should spend a good amount of time researching the idea, the market and the competitors and the inner strength of self before jumping into the battle by building the product that he/she envisions.


Many entrepreneurs come up with great ideas, which they dream of turning into the next billion dollar business. They are so excited and passionate about it and pour in a lot of effort, only to find out a few weeks/months later that there are many startups out there working on exactly the same idea and already have decent traction, which could be quite demotivating.


It is true that what matters the most is the ability to execute so some people may say it doesn't matter. However, if you knew your enemies earlier, you could've spent some time better positioning/strategizing your startup in the market, benchmarked against the existing startups/products and come up with a better solution/design. After all, you would like to avoid facing all-star teams heavily backed by well-known VCs directly. It would be stressful, frustrating and energy draining.


So what can one do to know the enemies better? (focused mainly on mobile apps because that's the future!)

• Look for similar apps on Apple App Store (iOS), Google Play Store (Android), Amazon App Store for Android, Chomp (iOS & Android). Choose a category your app belongs to and you should skim through at least a couple hundreds of apps in that category due to huge number of apps out there.
• Definitely try using the apps you thought are similar to your idea and/or you thought interesting quite extensively. I've met a successful serial entrepreneur (10+ startups and still counting) who has downloaded and used a few hundred photo apps on his iPhone in order to prep for his yet another startup.
• Jot down goods and bads of the apps you try and reflect it upon your idea. You can polish and refine your idea through this.
• For the ones you thought are quite similar to your idea, find the companies behind those apps and research them. Crunchbase would be a good starting point. You might be able to find useful information about the startup on AngelList.
• Also, go to the company website and read the blog if it has one. Find the founders of the company and read their blogs if they have it. You should check out their tweets, Linked in profile and Facebook page as well. You can email/tweet/call them and ask some questions as if you're an app user or someone else other than their competitor. They will probably get back to your email/tweet/call kindly with answers.
• You can probably get useful information by asking questions on Quora as well.

All of the above give you a better idea on who you are competing with. If you think you can do better than competitors after learning about them, push your idea as hard as you can. Otherwise, think about how you can position your startup/product idea so that it minimizes the friction with them. Remember, "a clever fighter is one who not only wins, but excels at winning with ease." (by Sun Tsu)

What other methods do you use to research your enemies and your idea? Please share!