ReWork

always stands out. People get stoked by conflict. They take sides. Passions are ignited. And that’s a good way to get people to take notice.

Underdo your competition
    Conventional wisdom says that to beat your competitors, you need to one-up them. If they have four features, you need five (or fifteen, or twenty-five). If they’re spending $20,000, you need to spend $30,000. If they have fifty employees, you need a hundred.
    This sort of one-upping, Cold War mentality is a dead end. When you get suckered into an arms race, you wind up in a never-ending battle that costs you massive amounts of money, time, and drive. And it forces you to constantly be on the defensive, too. Defensive companies can’t think ahead; they can only think behind. They don’t lead; they follow.
    So what do you do instead? Do less than your competitors to beat them. Solve the simple problems and leave the hairy, difficult, nasty problems to the competition. Instead of one-upping, try one-downing. Instead of outdoing, try underdoing.
    The bicycle world provides a great example. For years, major bicycle brands focused on the latest in hightech equipment: mountain bikes with suspension and ultrastrong disc brakes, or lightweight titanium road bikes with carbon-fiber everything. And it was assumed that bikes should have multiple gears: three, ten, or twenty-one.
    But recently, fixed-gear bicycles have boomed in popularity, despite being as low-tech as you can get. These bikes have just one gear. Some models don’t have brakes. The advantage: They’re simpler, lighter, cheaper, and don’t require as much maintenance.
    Another great example of a product that is succeeding by underdoing the competition: the Flip—an ultrasimple, point-and-shoot, compact camcorder that’s taken a significant percentage of the market in a short time. Look at all the things the Flip does
not
deliver:
No big screen (and the tiny screen doesn’t swing out for self-portraits either)
No photo-taking ability
No tapes or discs (you have to offload the videos to a computer)
No menus
No settings
No video light
No viewfinder
No special effects
No headphone jack
No lens cap
No memory card
No optical zoom
    The Flip wins fans because it only does a few simple things and it does them well. It’s easy and fun to use. It goes places a bigger camera would never go and gets used by people who would never use a fancier camera.
    Don’t shy away from the fact that your product or service does less. Highlight it. Be proud of it. Sell it as aggressively as competitors sell their extensive feature lists.

     
Who cares what they’re doing?
    In the end, it’s not worth paying much attention to the competition anyway. Why not? Because worrying about the competition quickly turns into an obsession. What are they doing right now? Where are they going next? How should we react?
    Every little move becomes something to be analyzed. And that’s a terrible mind-set. It leads to overwhelming stress and anxiety. That state of mind is bad soil for growing anything.
    It’s a pointless exercise anyway. The competitive landscape changes all the time. Your competitor tomorrow may be completely different from your competitor today. It’s out of your control. What’s the point of worrying about things you can’t control?
    Focus on yourself instead. What’s going on in here is way more important than what’s going on out there. When you spend time worrying about someone else, you can’t spend that time improving yourself.
    Focus on competitors too much and you wind up diluting your own vision. Your chances of coming up with something fresh go way down when you keep feeding your brain other people’s ideas. You become reactionary instead of visionary. You wind up offering your competitor’s products with a different coat of paint.
    If you’re planning to build “the iPod killer” or “the next Pokemon,” you’re already dead. You’re allowing the competition to set the parameters. You’re not going to out-Apple Apple. They’re defining the rules of the game. And you can’t beat someone who’s making the rules. You need to redefine the rules, not just build something slightly better.
    Don’t ask yourself whether you’re “beating” Apple (or whoever the big boy is in your industry). That’s the wrong question to ask. It’s not a win-or-lose battle. Their profits and costs are theirs. Yours are yours.
    If you’re just going to be like everyone else, why are you even