“Competition means no one making a profit, no meaningful differentiation, and a struggle for survival. So why do people believe that competition is healthy? The answer is that competition is not just an economic concept or a simple inconvenience that individuals and companies have to deal with in the marketplace. More than anything, competition is an ideology—the ideology—that permeates our society and distorts our thinking. We preach competition, internalize its necessity, and enforce its dictates. As a result, we become prisoners of it—yet the more we compete, the less we actually win.” Peter Thiel and Blaker Masters, From Zero to One, Chapter 4.
At the age of 16, I enrolled in my first course: Logistics. In a subject about marketing (my favorite), we discussed BI and competition . Ah, competition: a trendsetter and terror of many CEOs and in marketing.
My teachers always said: "We need to base crypto email list ourselves on the competition. On what the big players are doing, and what has already been done in the market and worked. We need to take that, improve it and replicate it". Let's summarize this idea as "competition ideology"!
For many years, this idea was hammered into my head as the only correct one, until I came across the book “From Zero to One” — which helped me deconstruct this fixed way of thinking, and gave space for a new one to be built. “ What if everyone is delivering the wrong solution to the market? What if there is something that is 10x better than this, and no one has thought of it yet? ”
Case study
Let's use Netflix as an example. Why did it take so long for entertainment companies to offer us a movie rental service, from an open catalog, without having to leave our homes, and, better yet, for a fixed price? Let's be honest, rental stores never had a chance again after Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph, founders of Netflix, came up with this idea in 2007.
But what if they had insisted on the initial model of their business, which was just a rental company with the difference of being a delivery service, and a subscription service? Would they have become this worldwide sensation, with huge amounts of their own productions and the ability to set trends? I can't say for sure, but if I had to bet, I would say no.
What this example shows is that there are countless problems in our daily lives and, although we are used to dealing with them in the available way, it is not always the best way .