Product vs Status Quo

When we often think of competition, we think of startups or companies vying for the same group of customers as it’s easy to compare them to our own product. The pressure to keep up and get ahead can be unrelenting as we plan to get ahead of our opposition on a feature-by-feature basis.

Our biggest competitor is no one but the status quo. One Forrester analysis found that 43% of lost IT deals went not to another vendor, but to ‘no decision.’

The basic human instinct is to avoid new solutions whenever possible.

Also, Status Quo largely depends on the market participants & the industry. For example, while purchasing a car, for most of us the question is not whether to buy a car; it’s which car to buy. On the other hand, certain tech companies are trying to convince people to buy something new.

For example: Trello’s actual competitors can be planning in MS Word, roadmapping in Excel, Daily scrum to assign tasks etc.

By discovering our product’s non-obvious alternatives, we can leverage technology to target, comprehend their needs & help them explicitly to try & explore the untapped opportunity.