“We don’t really have any competitors.” I hear some version of this from founders all the time, usually said with a lot of pride and a little relief. And I understand where it comes from. You’ve looked around, you’ve searched for companies doing exactly what you do, and you came up mostly empty. Nobody has built quite this thing, for quite this person, in quite this way. It feels like wide open space.
Here’s the problem. Your customer has never once thought about it that way. If the problem you solve is real, people are already solving it. Just not with you.
Your biggest competitor is the workaround
When founders say they have no competitors, what they usually mean is that no other product does the exact same thing. But a competitor isn’t only a company that looks like yours. It’s anything your customer would use, cobble together, or put up with instead of buying from you.
And people are endlessly creative about working around problems. Think about what is really sitting in your customer’s way right now:
- A spreadsheet someone built three years ago that the whole team is now afraid to touch
- A homegrown system an engineer stitched together on a slow week
- A tool built for something else entirely, bent to fit the job
- A shared doc, a group text, a whiteboard, a stack of sticky notes
- Pen and paper, which is still undefeated in a lot of offices
- Hiring a person, or adding the task to someone’s already full plate
- Doing nothing and living with the pain
Positioning expert April Dunford calls these competitive alternatives: what your customers would do if you didn’t exist. It’s the most useful definition of competition I know, because it’s the one your buyer actually uses.
And workarounds are tough competitors. They’re cheap or free. Everyone already knows how to use them. Nobody has to get budget approved, sit through a demo, or migrate anything. The spreadsheet doesn’t need to be good. It just needs to be good enough to keep you out.
The trouble with “it’s all white space”
When I hear “there’s no competition, it’s just white space,” I hear one of two things. Either nobody has this problem badly enough to solve it, or they’ve already solved it well enough that they stopped looking. Neither one is the good news it sounds like.
Buyers and investors hear it the same way. Telling a room you have no competitors doesn’t make you sound visionary. It makes it sound like you haven’t talked to enough customers yet.
There is a kind of white space worth chasing, though. It’s in the message, not the market: an angle nobody in your space is claiming, a customer nobody is speaking to directly, a pain everyone else glosses over. You find that kind of white space by studying the alternatives closely. You don’t find it by pretending they aren’t there.
How to do a competitive analysis when you’re a startup
You don’t need a research budget or a 40-tab spreadsheet. You need a clear head and a few honest conversations.
1. Start with the problem, not your product
Write down the problem you solve in plain language, the way a customer would describe it on a bad day. Then list every way someone could deal with that problem today, whether or not it involves software. That list is your real competitive landscape.
2. Ask customers what they do now
This is where most competitive research goes sideways. Founders search the web for lookalike companies instead of asking the people who have the problem. Try asking, “Walk me through the last time this came up. What did you do?” Then stay quiet and listen. Pay attention to the exact words they use, because that phrasing will make its way into your messaging later.
3. Sort what you find into four buckets
- Direct competitors: products that solve the same problem in a similar way
- Indirect competitors: tools that solve part of the problem, or solve it for someone else
- Workarounds: spreadsheets, homegrown systems, manual processes, pen and paper
- Doing nothing: living with it, because changing feels harder than the pain
For a lot of startups, the last two buckets are where most of the competition lives.
4. Figure out why the alternative wins today
Every workaround survives for a reason. Maybe it’s free. Maybe someone senior built it and is attached to it. Maybe it gives people a sense of control, or switching just feels risky. Get specific about what keeps it in place, because that’s exactly what your marketing has to overcome.
5. Name what you do that the alternatives can’t
Now compare. What can you do that the spreadsheet, the intern, and the sticky notes can’t? Why does that matter to the person you’re trying to reach? The answer is the foundation of your positioning. If you want to go deeper on that step, read positioning vs. messaging and which one you need first.
A quick gut check
Run through these with your team before your next pitch, launch, or website refresh.
- Can you name the top three things customers do today instead of buying from you?
- Do you know why each of those alternatives is still hanging on?
- Have you asked at least five customers what they did before they found you?
- Does your website explain why you’re better than the workaround, not just better than other products?
- Could your sales team answer “why not just keep using our spreadsheet?” without hesitating?
If any of those gave you pause, that’s not a failure. It’s the most useful competitive research you can do, and it costs you a few conversations.
You were never competing with no one. You’re competing with whatever your customer did yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that. Beat that, and you have a business.
Keep reading: Your Website Says What You Do. It Should Say Why It Matters.