C for Competitors: You're not losing to them. You're losing to indifference.
The competitor you should be worried about isn't another company.
I once spent months rebuilding the same product over and over and kept pushing the launch date. Not because users asked. Because I kept finding competitors and panicking.
Each time, I would find a competitor with more features, more partners, or a glossier landing page. I would convince myself they would win unless I matched them. So I would stop talking to customers and focus on building. New dashboards, new flows, new differentiators that nobody had asked for. The result was always the same: launch timelines dragged, money burned, no new customers, and a product that became harder to explain with every rebuild.
Competitors Are Your Allies
Here is what I wish someone had told me. Competitors at the early stage are not a threat, they are a validation signal. If a second team has independently decided this problem is worth a company, that is information. The question is not how do I beat them. The question is which slice of this market can I own.
Your job at this stage is to find a hundred people and solve their biggest problem perfectly. The pie, the TAM, the other players are not your concern. The unserved slice is. Picking that slice feels less heroic than building for a multi-billion-dollar market, but it is the decision that determines whether you have a company in eighteen months.
How Granola Won In A Saturated Market?
When Chris Pedregal and Sam Stephenson started building Granola in early 2023, the AI note-taking space was already saturated. Otter, Fireflies, Fathom, tl;dv, and close to a million more. Walking into a YC pitch with another note-taking app would have gotten you laughed out of the room.
So Pedregal did not try to build a better note-taker. He picked one specific kind of user, and built a product only that user could love.
Specifically: VCs.
The reasoning was structural. VCs do many calls, share notes constantly, and reference those notes weeks later. They love trying new AI tools, have high willingness to pay, and sit on influential networks.
And critically, they did not want a meeting bot showing up in confidential pitches.
That last bit became the wedge. Every other note-taker required a bot to join the call. Granola ran locally on the laptop, transcribed in the background, and never announced itself to the other side. For a VC taking a sensitive call with a founder, that was the difference between a tool they could use and a tool that made their founders uneasy.
The product also reflected a philosophy: if your judgment is valuable, you should not outsource it. You take notes, AI enhances them after, you stay in control. Other tools were trying to replace the human. Granola was augmenting one.
Two decisions: the right ICP, and a clear philosophical wedge. Those two decisions got them their first thousand users, which got them VC adoption, which got them founder adoption, which got them to a $1.5B valuation in three years.
Reframe, Don’t Panic
When I was panicking about competitors at my last company, Shezaar, the answer was not in their product. It was in the twenty-something brand discovery calls I had already done and not yet listened to closely enough. Mid-market activewear brands kept describing the same problem in the same words. Their pain was specific, structural, and not being served by anyone, including the competitor I was busy panicking about. That was the slice. I found it a month later than I should have because I spent those weeks differentiating on features instead of returning to the calls.
So if you are panicking about your product being inferior to your competitors, do not open their landing page again. Open your last ten customer conversations. Read them looking for the shape of a person, not a feature gap. What does this person say in their own words? What do they hate about their current options? Why would your competitor’s product fail them specifically? The wedge is somewhere in those transcripts.
Notice that none of these questions is about your competitor’s product. The product is downstream of their ICP and their wedge. Copying features means copying the output of decisions you do not understand. Picking a different ICP and a different wedge means you are not competing with them at all.
Granola did not beat the competition. It refused to play their game.
What game are you refusing to play?