1. Founders and CEOs don’t have a good way to think about competitors. Some ignore them, others obsess over them. Neither is optimal.

IMO, the right way to evaluate competitors is through a customer lens.

2. Specifically, being obsessed with your customers’ problems will help you see early if a competitor is solving their problems better than you are.

The bigget thing that matters wrt competition is if your customers are choosing or switching to a competitor over you.

3. And if you see this happening, you need to root cause it with extreme urgency, figure out why your solution is falling short of your customer needs, and fix it.

4. Sometimes it might seem like customers aren’t switching you out and the competitor is an adjacent product. But the adjacency might be a wedge into a suite that wil force you out in the future. Square Payments led to POS, Capital, Payroll, Invoices and Marketing.

5. So it’s important to have a holistic view of customer problems. It’s also important to understand how customers make buying decisions and how various products work well together.

6. Square never thought of the core merchant problem as payment acceptance; the real problem was helping merchants grow their business, which meant accepting any form of payment, accessing working capital, hiring and paying employees, etc.

7. What matters about competitors is not how much they’ve raised or what their revenues are or who they’ve hired, but how well they solve customers’ problems, whether customers are choosing or switching to them, and whether they are strategically entrenched within the customer.

8. You cannot really develop this perspective on competitors without customer obsession - deeply understanding their problems and decision making, not just at the product level but at the organizational level.

9. tldr Starting with the customer is an excellent way to build great products and companies, and oh by the way, it also helps you easily assess competitors. Do it yourself, then train your execs and company to be similarly customer-centric. You will be better off for it.