Focus on Your Users, Not Your Competitors

Entrepreneurship should focus on customers and real problems, rather than pay excessive attention to competitors. Consider Threads’ sudden rise and fall in 2023. Downloads opened July 5; on July 11, Mark Zuckerberg announced over 100 million registered users, making it the fastest-growing social platform. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and ChatGPT took 77, 54, 28, eight, and two months respectively to reach 100 million; Threads took five days. Yet by late July, active users had fallen over 80%. Its surge and decline can primarily be attributed to excessive competitive awareness: watching rivals rather than starting with user needs. Chasing a momentary wave ultimately damaged product competitiveness. From day one, Meta’s Threads team had one clear goal: replace Twitter. It made limited interface innovations and otherwise copied Twitter, while racing development. The objective was not an excellent social app but a Twitter replacement, so matching Twitter mattered more than perfection. Useful essentials such as search, trending rankings, and viewing only followed accounts were missing. The team waited for Twitter to stumble. When Elon Musk abruptly limited ordinary users to a few hundred tweets daily in early July, provoking a backlash, Threads rushed out, abandoning unfinished features. Users left once novelty faded and the product proved insufficiently useful. Threads’ success was a blitz against Twitter, driven by a rival rather than designed entirely around users. That also caused its rapid cooling after the initial burst. Every product that stands the test of time starts from one place: meeting customer needs. The focus is the problem, not existing competitors. Musk did not build Tesla by focusing on Toyota or Volkswagen. While incumbents showed little interest in electric cars, he designed a new EV architecture, reorganized the supply chain, and departed from traditional pricing and sales, including irregular price increases and cuts. After over a decade of setbacks and repeated near-bankruptcies, Tesla’s market value now exceeds US$800 billion, larger than all global automakers combined. Focusing only on beating rivals might have produced a faster Toyota. Focusing his Mars ambition on traditional aerospace rivals such as Boeing would similarly have made a new rocket architecture difficult. Redesigning rockets produced SpaceX and later Starlink. SpaceX became the first private company to send people into space, opening a new era. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos also emphasizes customer-centric management: ‘Often we must focus on the right things and avoid unimportant distractions. For example, do not focus too much on competitors.’ He says, ‘Do not worry about what competitors do; they do not pay you.’ Watching competitors may make you number one; watching customers may make you unique. Had Bezos watched other e-commerce companies every day, AWS would not have developed. Focusing only on Walmart or Target would not have produced Alexa or Echo smart speakers. Rather than fixating on existing rivals, focus on customers and the problem. Small startups struggle to overtake giants using the same business thinking in established competition. Solve present problems with a future-oriented perspective: understand fundamentals deeply, uncover latent needs, rethink the status quo, rise several levels in perspective, and look far enough ahead. To do something distinctive, understand customers and needs carefully and face yourself honestly. Competition matters less than knowing what you are doing and whose urgent problem you solve. That is the key to winning.