If You Say You Don’t Have Competition, You’re Not Thinking Hard Enough

One of the fastest ways to lose an investor’s interest is to say, “We don’t have any competition.”

It happens more often than you'd think — especially in early-stage pitches. Founders will claim they’re uniquely positioned, no one is doing what they’re doing, or they’ve created a whole new category. Sometimes they'll put together a 2x2 matrix where they magically end up in the top-right corner, all alone.

And while I get the intent — to show differentiation — what it really signals is a lack of depth in how the team thinks about the market.

Competition isn’t just about who looks like you.

Startups often define competitors too narrowly. They’ll focus on other startups with similar-looking technology, or those that use the same buzzwords, and ignore everything else.

But competition isn’t about who does what you do. It’s about how your customers are solving the problem today.

If you're building a new diagnostic tool, your competition might not be another diagnostics startup — it might be status quo lab tests, or even “wait and see.” If you're building a B2B SaaS platform, your competition might be Excel, email, or an intern manually doing the job.

The right question is: what service or product are you replacing?

A better way to think about competition is to start with the customer’s perspective:

• What is the actual problem they’re trying to solve?

• What tools, services, or workarounds are they using now?

• Who else is going after that same customer budget or behavior?

• What would they do if your product didn’t exist?

In other words: what service or product are you replacing, and what does the replacement look like today? That’s your competition.

Why this matters to investors

When I hear a founder say they don’t have any competitors, a few things come to mind:

• You haven’t done enough customer discovery. Because if you had, you'd know how your customers are currently solving the problem — even if it's imperfect.

• You might not understand the market dynamics. Even “new” categories pull budget or attention from something else. What are you displacing?

• You’re not thinking ahead. If your idea really is valuable, competition will come — so how will you defend against it?

Good founders anticipate these questions. Great founders already have the answers.

What I want to hear instead

You don’t have to downplay what makes your company unique — but show that you’ve done your homework. A better framing might be:

“Today, our customers are using [X] to solve this problem. It’s not ideal because of [Y]. That creates the opening for us to do [Z], which we believe is meaningfully better because…”

This tells me you understand the landscape, you’re grounded in real customer behavior, and you’ve thought critically about your wedge into the market.

That’s way more compelling than claiming no one else exists.