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What Should You Do if Another Startup Is Doing The Exact Thing As Your Company?

brett fox
3 min readJun 1, 2019

I’m working with a startup right now that has 50, that’s right 50, direct competitors. 48 of the 50 competitors are startups, and the two other competitors are well known public companies.

Picture: Depositphotos

That’s a lot of competition to say the least.

The company just raised $26M. The fundraising went reasonably well. In fact I was somewhat envious of how easy it went. Scratch that, I was REALLY envious of how easy the fundraising went.

Despite how easy it was, “Ray”, the CEO, had a fundamental decision to make. Some of the potential investors would only give Ray money if he agreed to focus on Market A.

Market A was growing like crazy. It was going to be a multi-billion dollar opportunity in a few years.

But therein lies the problem: the other 48 startups were all focused on Market A.

Ray believed that the technology that his company developed was better than the other 48 competitors. The question was how much better?

And would whatever advantage he believed his company had would be enough to sway customers? Ray realized after doing some soul searching that he didn’t know whether he would win.

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brett fox
brett fox

Written by brett fox

I work with startup CEOs to help them grow their businesses . I built several businesses from $0 to >$100M. Learn more at https://www.brettjfox.com

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