Your Real Competitor Is Doing Nothing
When I ask entrepreneurs about their competition, they usually start with a list. Other coaches. Other software tools. Other consultants doing similar work.
But here’s what I’ve noticed after years of these conversations: the companies they name are rarely the ones they’re actually competing against.
I learned this the hard way.
In the early days of building ASGedge, we created a platform for retail real estate teams to plan and negotiate deals for new store locations. It was genuinely useful. Teams could compare deals more easily, create polished packages for meetings, and stop scrambling to update documents at the last minute before a presentation.
When we showed it to real estate groups, they saw the value immediately. They could feel how much time it would save. They understood the benefit.
And still, it was a hard sell.
The pushback wasn’t about features or price. It was simpler than that: why should they pay for something they didn’t technically need? They already had a way of doing things. It was messy, sure. Cobbled together from Excel files and PowerPoint decks that got edited at the last minute. But it worked. It had always worked.
Meanwhile, teams handling lease management and store construction were used to paying for systems. It was expected. In those categories, you didn’t have to convince anyone that software was worth buying. You just had to prove yours was the best option.
That difference taught me something I still think about: the hardest competition isn’t usually another company. It’s the scrappy workaround someone already has in place. The spreadsheet they’ve been using for years. The manual process that’s become invisible because it’s just how things are done.
And sometimes the competition is even quieter than that.
It’s a YouTube tutorial someone watched once and figured was good enough. A conversation with ChatGPT that got them 80% of the way there. Or the most formidable competitor of all: deciding that the problem isn’t worth solving right now.
When someone chooses to do nothing, it’s not because your solution is bad. It’s because the pain isn’t urgent enough, or the path forward isn’t clear enough, or the investment feels too big for a problem they’ve learned to live with.
This is especially true when you’re solving something people haven’t paid for before.
There’s a threshold that exists in the buyer’s mind, and it has nothing to do with your product. It’s about whether they’ve ever imagined this problem as something worth spending money on. If they haven’t, you’re not just selling a solution. You’re asking them to reclassify the problem itself.
That’s a much bigger ask than most founders realize.
It explains why some products feel like they’re pushing uphill even when the value is obvious. The value can be real and the resistance can still be high. Not because people don’t see what you’re offering, but because they’ve never thought of this category as something you pay for.
The question that changed how I think about all of this is simple: What are people doing instead of solving their problem the way I propose?
That question gets you closer to reality than any competitive analysis ever will.
Because it forces you to see what’s actually happening in someone’s day. Not the ideal scenario you’ve imagined for them, but the messy, good-enough alternative they’ve already built. The one they’re comfortable with. The one that doesn’t require them to change.
When you understand that, you stop trying to convince people your product is better than a competitor’s. You start understanding the real gap you’re asking them to cross: from a free, familiar, “fine for now” workaround to something that costs money and requires trust.
That’s the real sale. And it’s often harder than it looks.
But it’s also clarifying. Because once you see the true alternative, you can start to understand what would actually make someone move. Not features. Not polish. But a moment of pain sharp enough to make the old way feel unacceptable.
Your job isn’t to manufacture that moment. It’s to be ready when it arrives.