How to beat competition

I can't believe this !

I just took a very short break from working on my start up idea ( to give some time to my other passion - film making) I come back and find yet another competitor to my yet-to-be-launched business idea. And I had thought this was one of its kind, unique business idea when I started working on it. Eventually I did find "similar" ideas already floating around and the latest was the 15th. Competition is something every entrepreneur WILL face today or tomorrow. So how to take advantage of your competitors.

1. Know them first. In and out - read every piece of information you can find about your competitor to understand his strengths and weakness.

2. Know yourself ! Yeah, know your strong and weak points from the customer's perspective, not yours. Remember, perceived value of your product is always going to be different from your cost and effort.

3. Learn from other's mistakes. This is crucial since startups don't have the luxury of making costly mistakes. So learn from your competitors mistakes and work on to avoid them

4. Don't just copy your competitor's features and products. Probably, your absence is a certain space aligns with your company's vision or makes you stand out from the crowd, so think twice before jumping to work on that feature your competitor has in his product.

5. Be his customer, this helps in understanding the benefits and problems your prospective customer faces.

6. Strengthen your strong points than working on your weak ones. Make your USP stronger.

7. In a sales pitch, if a customer brings up the competitor's feature that you don't have, find out the customer's actual business and explain how your product addresses the need rather than getting into a comparison of the features.

8. Make sure you market your advantages loud and clear ! Bang on !

9. Keep a close watch on competitor's products. Competitor analysis is not a one time activity but a hygiene factor.

10. Lastly, may be having a competition is not that bad. As they say it's easier to get a decision from a customer when he has a choice between product A and product B rather than between product A and nothing.