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Guest Post: Ruchit Garg, CEO, 9Slides --- Wannapreneurs, Customer Focus and Competition Anxiety

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I have met numerous wanna-preneurs over coffee meet-ups where folks have ditched their idea after working on it for long, simply because they found a successful competitor. Really?

Ruchit Garg, CEO of 9Slides, an app which synchronizes speaker tracks with slides -- Photo Credit Yatharth Gupta

Why do you worry about having competitors? I think it’s a reason to celebrate.

Here is why I think so:

  • You now have market proof of your base idea. Imagine how much you might have spent on trying to discover that.
  • You now have a reference point, enabling you to get started and ‘pitch’.
  • You now have to-dos and not-to-dos in what you are attempting to do.
  • You now have some folks who already have experience in the same domain who can potentially power your company when you are ready to hire.

If this is your first company, believe me, the above are so valuable that otherwise you would spend tremendous amount of time and money before you are in business.

Instead of worrying about competition, you need to focus on customers. Remember, you are in the business (or trying to be in it) because you have this great idea/product/service you want to serve/sell/provide to your customers and not because you want to beat that competitor.

I personally spend several hours every week talking to our trial and paid users of 9SLIDES in order to understand their motivations and things which would make them happy customers. That contact point will be where new ideas and revenue generation will originate. It won't be happening just sitting in the office, dreaming up something with which nobody can compete. Customers, as it turns out, are just as nimble as you would want to be. You kind of have to learn from them how to adjust your sails. 

If you do it right with focus on customers, you can win over customers and change the ball game. But if you sweat about competitor and spend energies on trying to find ways to defeat them, believe me you are more likely to lose it.

Moreover, even if you don’t have competitor today, you would have at least one tomorrow. They could start late and can raise LOT of money and appear to be huge. At that point, what makes more sense -- raising a bigger round than they, or having a cadre of customers who love the product you made for them, and with them? I think it makes sense what the logical conclusion should be. 

Ruchit Garg is serial tech entrepreneur working on his next startup called 9SLIDES. He can be followed on twitter @ruchitgarg or can be reached over email at ruchit@9slides.com  

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Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    Thanks for contributing Luis.  With more information, there will be more competition, but with more competition and more information, there will be lean ways and efficient ways to deal with that and stay in touch with customers.

  • Anonymous
    May 25, 2012
    You are right serve/sell/provide three foundations of a business. Nowadays we deal with very sophisticated competition and very good climate for new ideas althought we need to keep in mind that the way you manage your service is going to talk by itself and the best one is to hear a good talk about ones activities and results

  • Anonymous
    June 08, 2012
    Ruchit : So apt is the observation.. In my WIPRO days , we had to file the most painful report end of the week. It was called OLR- Order Loss Report.  Obviously system with invoicing could track the OWR - Order Win Report.. We were reluctant to file but later in the strategy training session it was explained of how OLR would accelerate the sales. Contesting with competition was compared with Law of Physics . Competition causes Friction. Friction causes heat . Heat causes expansion.. That means more prospective customer. It was to determine that how much is the market size and we used then the Blue Ocean strategy http://bit.ly/MTuksr .

  • Anonymous
    September 21, 2015
    What informative article. http://www.google.com. Thanks.

  • Anonymous
    September 22, 2015
    It won't be happening just sitting in the office, dreaming up something with which nobody can compete. Customers, as it turns out, are just as nimble as you would want to be.http://briskcars.com/services/airport-transfer/ . Thanks for this post as well.

  • Anonymous
    October 01, 2015
    CEO of 9Slide is a name of a app which synchronizes speaker tracks with slides. In this way Customer Focus and Competition Anxiety become very easy. These slides also help to update current market competitions level which helpful for every business man. any how, I actually got a list of news apps at http://www.myeditingandwritingservices.com/ and name of that app also in that list. So, I like to read more about that app and i come this post during my browsing.

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    December 01, 2015
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    December 02, 2015
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    December 02, 2015
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    January 12, 2016
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