There are two ways to look at competitors.
The first way: Rivals fighting for the same resources.
That’s how most people do it.
But there’s another way.
Competitors as free labour.
They’ve already done the expensive bit for you—they’ve identified a market.
They’ve poured time, effort, and money into proving demand.
They’ve built the blueprint.
But here’s the thing about blueprints.
Most competitors stop building halfway.
They find oil, but they dig shallow wells.
Just deep enough to make a profit, just good enough to claim success.
Then they leave.
And that leaves an opportunity.
Because beneath every shallow well, there’s usually more oil.
That’s your first move: Digging deeper.
Competitors made a CRM for sales teams?
You go deeper—make a CRM specifically for outbound B2B sales teams managing contracts worth $10k or more.
Competitors built automation software for accountants?
You dig deeper—build software for freelance accountants juggling irregular client billing.
Now, you don’t just have customers—you have loyalists.
Because you solved their exact pain, not just something vaguely similar.
But sometimes, digging deeper isn’t enough.
Sometimes the oil runs dry.
That’s when you shift sideways.
Your competitor built an AI assistant for HR?
Great.
You use the same AI blueprint and build it for concierge.
Competitor’s AI chatbot serves e-commerce?
Take that blueprint and move it laterally
Create one for enterprise banking compliance.
Suddenly you’re not even competing.
You’re owning a different market entirely, yet you paid nothing for the research.
You see, competition is never the enemy.
They’re your outsourced market research department.
They’re your risk management team, your R&D lab, your expensive market experiment.
They pay millions to validate demand, and you pay nothing to exploit it better.
They’re not rivals to defeat.
They’re resources to leverage.
Most startups make the mistake of fighting competitors directly.
But direct competition is expensive.
It wastes energy and resources, and usually the bigger player wins.
Instead, look at competitors the way oil barons looked at prospectors:
They find the land.
You drill the richest reserves.
They map the market.
You master the territory.
They stop halfway.
You push all the way through.
When they go low, you go lower.
Or you step sideways and capture something they completely missed.
That’s not competing—that’s compe-mimicry.
It’s letting them play the costly first half, while you win the profitable second half.
Competitors aren’t rivals—they’re your greatest asset.
And assets, by definition, exist to make you money.
If you don’t have a business idea, it just means you haven’t studied enough competitors.
You haven’t seen enough shallow wells to know where to dig deeper.
Every sector is full of half-done work.
Bad ICPs. Generic features. Broad messaging.
Study more markets.
Borrow their blueprints.
Drill where they didn’t.
You don’t need to invent.
You just need to see where others stopped.
That’s where you begin.