创新驱动 激活第一动力（在习近平新时代中国特色社会主义思想指引下·代表委员畅谈抓落实）

? Updated June 25, 2025: This edition has been significantly revised based on reader feedback and new insights.

Most early-stage founders talk about competition the same way: a grid comparing six or eight of their product’s features with those of others — with green ticks neatly stacked on their side and red crosses on everyone else.

While this looks good, if every founder is showing the same grid, how does an investor know what really matters?

Because when an investor looks at your competition slide, they’re not thinking, “Ah, seven green ticks — must be a winner.” They’re asking:

1. Have you mapped the landscape with clarity?
2. Do you serve a need better than anyone else — not just differently?
3. Is your advantage real — and defensible?
4. Is your value proposition crisp, memorable, and sharp enough to stick?
5. Are you reinforcing this edge in your GTM, product, and metrics?

Now look at that tidy little grid. Does it answer any of this?

Why Is Your Competition Grid Failing?

In my work with early-stage founders, there’s one persistent blind spot: how you think about competition. And five gaps show up again and again:

1. Weak awareness of what’s out there – Founders often demonstrate a vague sense of the landscape. They know a few direct competitors, but rarely a complete picture.
2. Overemphasis on product features – The obsession with comparing product features hides the fact that most users don’t care about every feature — they care about what gets the job done.
3. Ignoring alternatives – Sometime, the most dangerous competitor is not another startup. It’s not needing a solution - the fact that the customer may not feel the problem enough to act.
4. Weak sense of overall market dynamics – Terms like red ocean, blue ocean, or buyer hierarchies are often unfamiliar. Without this lens, founders miss the forest for the trees.
5. Narrow view of competitive advantage – Many founders focus on product superiority as the only way to win. But advantage can also come from brand, access, pricing, channel, or service.

A clean-looking grid with more green ticks than the others doesn’t show why your product deserves to win. Because the real battle isn’t product vs. product. It’s about switching customer behavior.

And if your competition slide isn’t helping you tell that story — it’s not helping at all. Then, what will?

Customer-Focused Lens on Competition

Can you narrate the competitive landscape from the customer’s lens, the way customer experiences it? Start with these questions:

• What frustrates the customer today?
• What workarounds have they tried? What have they abandoned?
• What job does your product help them do better, faster, cheaper?
• And critically: how big is the delta?

Unless you offer a 20–30% improvement on what they already have, most customers will simply stick to the devil they know.

So the competition slide is about narrating the real battle: the one between inertia and motivation.

Take Zoom for example. It didn’t win because it had more features. It won because it took 10 seconds to start a call instead of 60. Because audio didn’t drop. Because it scaled to 100 participants without choking. Zoom wasn’t 5% better. It was 10x smoother where it mattered. That’s your real competition — not other startups, but the customer’s current reality and the threshold they need to switch.

So, what actually triggers that switch?

Switching Triggers

Customers may evaluate many features, but they decide based on just one or two. That’s the Power Law of decisions — a handful of factors drive most outcomes.

These dominant factors — price, speed, convenience, reliability — are what I call Switching Triggers. And unless you deliver a 30%+ improvement on those exact dimensions, most customers won’t budge from the status quo.

Switching Trigger: the one or two compelling reasons that push a customer to abandon their current approach and adopt yours — typically when it offers a 20–30% gain over what they are used to.

Identifying Switching Triggers

To spot switching triggers, you need to get specific about who your customer really is. Too often, founders say “our customer” without clarifying which one. But customers aren’t a monolith — they behave differently depending on segment.

The Excel user at a mid-sized firm is not the same as the finance head at a fast-scaling startup. Same job to be done — different pains, budgets, and thresholds for change.

This is why, in an earlier edition of Idea to Seed, I wrote about the importance of Go-To-Customer-Segment (GTCS)— not a generic GTM. Zoom didn’t launch into “enterprise video conferencing.” It started with small teams who just needed something that worked out of the box.

Start Here:

Define your customer segment — not the whole market. Then ask: If you didn’t exist, what would they do?

• Use a workaround?
• Struggle with a legacy tool?
• Or just do nothing?

Now go deeper:

• What frustrates them most?
• How urgent is their need?
• How often does the pain show up?

That’s how you map the behavioral chasm — the gap between habit and change. Winning startups don’t just bridge this chasm — they blow it wide open with a 10x better experience.

I unpack this further in another edition : The Quantum World of Startups.

Quantifying Switching Triggers

It’s not enough to say your product has a “better UI” or “simpler workflow.” You need to translate better into something the customer — and investor — can measure.

But here’s the nuance most founders miss: That quantification must be specific to your customer segment.

Let’s say you serve both freelancers and mid-market teams:

• For freelancers, “faster onboarding” might mean less time spent reading documentation.
• For mid-sized teams, the same benefit might mean lower support costs or fewer escalations across departments.

Same feature. Different impact. Different switching triggers.

This is why we conduct Jobs-To-Be-Done (JTBD) workshops in WISE Tech | SPJIMR Accelerator. The JTBD lens helps you uncover what customers are really trying to accomplish, where they struggle, and what progress looks like — so you can quantify the before-and-after clearly.

For example:

• “Better UI” → 4 hours saved per user → ?10K/month in support cost saved
• “Auto invoicing” → reconciliation time cut from 3 hrs to 30 mins
• “Error alerts” → 40% drop in failed payouts

If you can’t quantify the driver, two things are likely true:

1. You don’t know your segment well enough.
2. You can’t benchmark against alternatives — and neither can your investor.

Quantifying doesn’t come naturally — because it requires doing the hard work of segmenting precisely, observing behavior, and translating benefits into measurable outcomes. But that’s exactly what gives your pitch credibility.

So push harder. Every trigger must be quantifiable. Otherwise, it’s just an opinion.

Benchmark your Product versus Competition

Most founders stop at comparing themselves to other startups. But that's just one part of the picture. Once you've nailed your switching trigger, benchmark yourself against all four types of competition — from the customer's perspective.

1. Baseline (Status Quo)

What is the customer doing today — if you didn’t exist? It could be Excel, manual workarounds, a competitor’s product etc. This is your true starting point. Show values of the quantified switching trigger for the baseline. We will compare our Product’s and Competitor’s Product’s performance against this baseline.

2. Alternate / Workarounds:

As mentioned earlier, not every customer is actively looking for a solution. Some make do with patchy fixes — especially when cost is a trigger. If you don’t factor this in, you’ll misread both urgency and willingness to pay. How does the performance of alternate / workarounds look like on the triggers?

3. Category Leader: ?

This is the default tool most people know — not perfect, but familiar. Think: Tally in accounting, Zoom in video. You don’t need to beat them on every front – just where it matters most in your segment.?

4. Direct Competitor

This start-up or tool is closest to you on the trigger. Here, your job is to show the edge — and if the gap is narrow, to discuss how you plan to widen it. And when anchoring to the baseline gives a complete context.?

Show % improvement (or drop)

Don't just give absolute numbers. Show percentage change from baseline. That’s how investors assess whether you're 10% better — or 10x.

Because the goal isn't to be the "best in features." It’s to win clearly where it matters most.

Example: Zoom

Let’s look at a hypothetical example of Zoom — not to describe their actual internal metrics, but to demonstrate how a customer-focused lens and the TRACE framework might play out.

Zoom’s early success came not from feature overload but from ease of use and audio stability — both of which mattered deeply to their target users.

You can quantify "ease of use" as setup time, and "audio stability" as call drop rate. So, if you were to position Zoom using the TRACE framework and switching triggers, this is how the comparison table might look:

Tie It All Together: One Line to Demonstrate Your Clarity

The problem with the traditional competition feature grid isn’t just visual fatigue. It’s conceptual misalignment. It answers the wrong question — “Who has more stuff?” — instead of the right one: “Why will customers switch?”

A sharp competition slide should do just three things:

1. Identify & quantify the Switching Trigger — that one factor that makes switching worthwhile for the customer
2. Compare against all relevant options — not just direct competitors
3. Anchor your edge against the baseline and category norms — where the customer is today

Because in the early stage, the real battle isn’t product vs. product. It’s product vs. inertia. And the best way to show you're ready?

Can you demonstrate your clarity in one line:

[Customer segment] today [live with pain / workaround]. Unlike [competitor], we help them [make the switch] by [quantified advantage].

Example:

For finance teams at mid-sized startups who struggle with messy expense reports, our product automates reconciliation in under 30 minutes — unlike legacy tools that still take 3 hours.

If you can't demonstrate competitive positioning in one line, then that’s your signal to go back and revisit the triggers, and identify the real edge. Because good slides are not just about storytelling. They’re about signal over noise.

If you found this article helpful and want to dive deeper into the art of building successful startups, please like, share, and subscribe to our newsletter. Thank you for reading—I look forward to continuing this conversation and helping sharpen your entrepreneurial journey.

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