Software products don’t exist in isolation. More products enter the market every day, and existing products need to rapidly learn, adapt, and anticipate the needs of their users to survive.



If you obsessively fixate on what other people have built, you end up with a “me-too” product that doesn’t solve the problem better than what’s already out there. If you ignore the competition to focus on your “great idea,” you end up blind to how people are currently solving the problem. You reinvent the wheel, and build what you think is cool rather than what your users need.



Competitor analysis helps you build software more intelligently. It allows you to rapidly test and validate product ideas by analyzing what other people are doing in your space. The key to this is approaching competitor analysis from a mindset of “non-competition.”

How to run “non-competitive” competitor analysis

Don’t do this.

Lean Startup pioneer Steve Blank recounts an episode where a startup CEO brought him a competitor analysis table with a blow-by-blow teardown of every feature that every other product in the market had. As Blank points out, the problem with this type of thinking is it leads to the conclusion: “Our competitors have these features so our startup needs them too. Get to work and add all of these for first customer ship.”



Competitor analysis doesn’t work when looking at the competition becomes a proxy for digging into real users’ problems. Feature comparisons don’t make for good product specs. Having an overtly competitive mindset is likely to blind you to where you could actually help users to solve the problem better.

Whether you’re building a new product from scratch, or researching ways you can improve an existing product, you want to approach your analysis from a mindset of “non-competition.” That means you’re trying to root out your own internal biases and knee-jerk competitiveness to get a birds-eye view of the landscape — so you can find opportunities where the competition falls short.



We’ll walk through a three-step process of how you can run competitor analysis by identifying the competition, defining evaluation criteria, and drawing insights from analysis over time. By doing each of these things non-competitively, you’re better equipped to delve into customer needs, and figure out what’s working, what’s not, and what to do instead.

Identify the competition