Thinking on markets,
competition, and strategy.

Most founders draw their competitive map using product similarity. A project management tool competes with other project management tools. A B2B data platform competes with other B2B data platforms. This framing feels intuitive, but it produces the wrong analysis.

That definition includes far more than the obvious names. It includes:

• The incumbent solution they already use — Salesforce, Excel, or their existing workflow
• Internal headcount ("we'll just hire someone to handle this")
• Doing nothing at all — inertia is your most common competitor in most B2B markets
• Adjacent products solving the same underlying need differently

Why does this matter in practice? Your positioning is only as strong as your understanding of the real alternatives. If you're positioning against Notion but you're actually losing deals to "the ops team will manage it in a spreadsheet," your entire competitive narrative misses the mark. You're arguing against the wrong thing.

The diagnostic question. When you lose a deal, most sales teams ask: "Who did they go with?" That's the wrong question. The right question is: "What are they doing instead?" Those questions often produce different answers, and the second one is the one that matters for strategy.

Run this exercise: pull your last ten lost deals and categorise what the customer actually did next. If more than three of them went to "status quo" or "internal solution," you don't have a competitive positioning problem — you have a category definition problem. You're competing against inertia, not companies.

Market crowding isn't an event — it's a process. And like most processes, it generates signals long before it produces consequences. The problem is that those signals are easy to misread, or to miss entirely when you're focused on execution.

Five signals worth tracking:

• Job postings shift. VC-backed companies hiring aggressively for AEs at your price point is an early indicator of upcoming competition. Job boards are a leading signal — hiring precedes revenue by 6–9 months.
• Incumbents start discounting. Unprompted discounting from established players is a sign they're seeing competitive pressure they aren't publicly acknowledging. This shows up in customer conversations before it shows up in earnings calls.
• Niche players emerge. Specialists targeting specific verticals or geographies signal that the market is maturing. Niching is what happens when the broad category gets too competitive.
• Category language converges. When multiple vendors start using the same words to describe what they do — even words you invented — the category is being commoditised. Shared language means shared positioning, which means commoditisation.
• Sales cycles lengthen. If buyers are doing more evaluation before purchasing, it's often because they have more options. Longer cycles at similar deal sizes suggest more alternatives, not more complex needs.

The strategic implication isn't necessarily to panic. It's to make an active decision: double down on differentiation before the window closes, identify the sub-segment that will escape commoditisation, or accelerate toward an exit while multiples still reflect the early-market premium. Each is a valid response. Ignoring the signals isn't.

The market landscape slide has become one of the most formulaic pieces of any pitch deck. The positioning matrix with you in the top right corner. The TAM calculation that multiplies every company on earth by a dollar amount. The competitor grid with checkmarks you've conveniently won.

Experienced investors have seen this hundreds of times, and they've learned to discount it accordingly. What they're actually evaluating when they look at your market landscape isn't the content — it's the judgment behind it.

What earns credibility:

• Naming the non-obvious competitive threat — the status quo, the adjacent player, the internal solution
• Explaining what's changing in the market that creates your window now rather than three years ago
• Being honest about where incumbents are genuinely strong, and making a specific case for why that's survivable
• Showing you understand the buying process, not just the product landscape

What loses credibility:

• Positioning maps where you occupy the "fast + high quality" quadrant and all competitors are "slow + low quality"
• TAM slides that don't specify the serviceable segment you're actually targeting
• "We have no real competitors" — which signals either delusion or a lack of genuine market understanding

The format matters less than the thinking. A well-constructed paragraph explaining who you're competing with and why you win can outperform a beautifully designed matrix that doesn't say anything specific. Show your reasoning, not just your conclusions.

The standard competitive analysis process works like this: identify named competitors, document their features, compare them to yours, produce a grid. This process is thorough in a narrow sense. It's also structurally biased toward missing what matters most.

Feature comparison answers the question "what do these companies do?" But strategy requires a different question: "what makes them hard to displace?" Those are not the same question, and they don't produce the same analysis.

The threats that traditional analysis systematically misses:

• The customer's existing workflow. In most B2B markets, the most powerful competitor is whatever the customer is already doing. This is almost never named in a competitor analysis, and it's often the actual reason you lose deals.
• Platform consolidation. A larger vendor adding your capability as a feature — not to beat you, but because it rounds out their platform — is a structural threat that doesn't show up in a feature matrix until it's too late.
• Category redefinition. A new entrant that frames the problem differently can make your positioning obsolete without competing with you directly. They're not taking your customers — they're changing what customers think they need.
• Shifts in buyer behaviour. Changes in how organisations purchase — consolidating vendors, shifting budget ownership, changing the buying committee composition — affect your competitive position without any competitor doing anything.

This is harder than documenting features. It requires primary research, pattern recognition from adjacent markets, and a willingness to sit with strategic uncertainty. But it produces analysis that's actually useful for making decisions — which is the point.

A description-oriented report starts by asking "who are the competitors?" An intelligence-oriented report starts by asking "what decisions does this research need to support?" The framing determines everything that follows.

A report built around decisions will include things a description-oriented report won't even think to include.

What a useful competitive intelligence report actually covers:

• Competitive landscape with positioning context — not just who exists, but how they're positioned relative to each other and to your offering. Where the white space is, and whether that white space is real or overlooked for a reason.
• Win/loss pattern analysis — what the available evidence suggests about which players are gaining or losing ground, and why. Job postings, pricing signals, product direction, and customer reviews are all sources here.
• Customer evaluation criteria — how buyers actually make decisions in this category, what they prioritise, and where your positioning lands in their mental model. This is different from what buyers say they care about.
• Emerging threats — adjacents, platform players, and structural changes. Who isn't in the market today but has both the capability and incentive to enter within the next 18 months.
• Strategic implications — specific, directional observations about what this means for positioning, pricing, product investment, and timing. Not "here are some options" — a point of view.
• Limitations and confidence levels — what the analysis couldn't determine, and how confident you should be in each major finding. A report without this is not being honest about what research can and can't do.

The value of competitive intelligence is not in the information itself. It's in the interpretation — someone with enough context and judgment to say what the information means for this company, in this market, making this decision. That's what separates analysis from research.