I've noticed a common bias that shows up in some founders: they believe that their competitors are stupid or uncreative. They'll look at other businesses and identify inefficiencies or bad systems, and decide that those conditions exist because of dumb decisions on the part of founders or employees.



This is a bad belief to hold. In truth, competitors in the market are usually founded and run by intelligent people making smart and logical decisions. That doesn't mean that all the decisions they make are necessarily the right ones, but they're rarely a function of outright stupidity.

Where companies do things that diverge from what seems smart from the outside, it's a much better idea to ask why those companies are doing things from the presumption of intelligence and logic rather than the presumption of stupidity. If you don't ask these questions, you might find yourself making the same decisions, or ending up in the same place with your own set of rationalizations. I see this all the time.

In fact, we made this mistake when we started Tutorspree. We looked at all the local agencies and the way that they acquired customers and charged for packages of lessons. We assumed they asked for so much money up front because they were greedy and not smart enough to figure out a better system. It turned out that packages of lessons were a logical outgrowth of high upfront acquisition costs and the long term dynamic of tutor/student relationships. A large enough subset of customers appreciated the breaks on pricing and commitment created by booking multiple lessons up front that it made sense to model the business that way. It took longer than it should have to realize this because of our bias.

If, instead, you presume intelligence and analyze the reasons a business looks the way it does, you will often see the challenges you might face ahead of time and, as a result, design a solution that is actually better, as opposed to simply looking new. It is a lot harder to think this way because it means that you can't just dismiss the things other people do and assume you'll be better. You actually have to prove that you know how to be better. That can be really scary because, much of the time, you might not be able to figure out how to be better. Everything you think of might lead you to the same place you see your competitors.

That, though, is no reason to stop working on your company. I think it's actually a reason to keep going, and to keep gathering information and generating new ideas. This is part of what's so cool about starting a company, you get to make up new rules as you go along, and you can toss out old ones as you go along. Two founders looking at the same problem can easily come up with multiple solutions. Each solution might look similar from far away, but the small differences add up. Importantly, if you know that other smart people started in a similar place and ended up with the wrong answer, you'll think a lot more critically about each of your decisions and never get lazy about challenging your own assumptions.

Of course, just because you presume intelligence doesn't mean that every decision made was smart. People and organizations make bad decisions for all kinds of reasons. The thing is, you don't learn much by understanding that a call was bad, you learn by understanding the inputs and the organization that enabled the bad decisions.

Even with this framework, there's no guarantee that you'll end up in the right place, no matter how much you analyze those whose decisions have left you with an opportunity. At the end of the day, there's only so much you can learn from looking at competitors. Truly great businesses aren't built as counterpoints to existing companies. They become great because they meet a deep need that isn't being satisfied. That usually requires the kinds of creative and cognitive leaps that no amount of market analysis could possibly give you.