Embrace the competition

Use inspiring ideas to scale, focus on long-lasting differentiation

This week was full of PMF guide releases and AI workshops – the announcements signal that we are back to category creation and company building mode. Most companies are looking for cheat codes to PMF from the best in the business, while others are looking for ways to creatively build towards the inevitable shift to “AI-driven businesses.” 

TLDR; 

• Embrace the guides to learn skills you need to acquire as a Founder, not as checklists for “I’ve learned sales, time for me to do product.” First Round killed it this week with their “Levels of PMF” release and I, of course, have a soft spot for Unusual’s Field Guide. 

• Everyone is trying to put a creative spin on LLMs, RAG, etc., etc., leading to limited differentiation, but use of them are required. People are doing new clever things every week, but most are just advancements of making technology better, not true differentiation. Just embrace it and follow the gold standard. Use the best ideas and keep shipping cool shit. The ideas are just table stakes. 

• The true PMF and this decades winners will build *truly* differentiated products and take the really scary big bets. It’s the only “first principles thinking” you should focus on. All the other stuff everyone else is going to do, so just let that happen and keep on keepin’ on. 

The beauty of this next frontier is that no one really knows yet how or what to build that will allow for long-lasting success. With the abundant number of guides on PMF and GTM topics, Founders need to learn these topics faster than ever so they can focus as much time as possible on finding a hard problem their competitors can’t solve, won’t pursue because it’s too hard, or something they outlast others on over a very long period of time (while doing everything else right). 

In this new arms-race to AI-PMF, we should all be embracing our inner Sam Walton (yes, the Walmart founder). One thing Sam was known for was constantly visiting the stores of competitors and adopting everything they were doing right. Often, Founders and startups look at the worst in their competition and highlight those differences —  “well, we’re better than X for the following reasons, and btw we are in the top right in the competitor slide we created.”  But what Founders should be doing is looking at the things their competitors do best and use them as inspiration. From there, what will truly make you great is seeking differentiation on the major bets you’re making to win in the current and future decades. It’s the hard stuff that will out maneuver your competitors, not the feature they shipped a few weeks faster than you.