Your competition is only your competition if they can keep you from getting to your customer. If they can’t, then they are merely a part of the ecosystem – part of your industry.

Best,
J.

Every time I start to think about competition too much, I remember a Jeff Bezos quote which is something like: Focus on the customer, not the competition. At the end of the day, competition is a form of validation but ultimately your users only care about what is going to work for them.

In a network economy though, competition takes on some different aspects. People don’t want to be where other people aren’t… this is the toughest challenge facing entrepreneurs on the web– building community is a lot harder if someone else already has a big, diverse, and robust community

I was recently at a tradeshow where my main competitor was located two booths down from me. For the first day or so, we just kind of gave each other silly looks and it was awkward. Then we started to talk and went for lunch together. Several things became apparent:

- the e-learning market is enormous and there’s plenty of room for multiple vendors.
- the key is to ‘niche thyself’, as Guy Kawasaki recommends. Make your product different enough from each other to target different segments.
- You can learn about yourself from how your competition perceives you.
- And, who knows, maybe someday these will be the guys interested in buying your business or vice-versa