4 Reason Why I Don't Benchmark

You know this time when you start a business, and you have this great big idea to change the world, and you start talking to other people, and a lot of them start giving you advice.

Well, I am sure you've heard this one before: "look at your competitors", "Make sure to do your competitor analysis".

Yes? I knew it, turns out, me too. This advice seemed to me to be very repetitive, after some recent reflection, I just realised I have never followed this advice what so ever.

I have started multiple startups around the world, and I’ve noticed a pattern of behaviours that I applied for every company I was involved in, unconsciously.

And that is: I have almost never benchmarked products or services with my competitor and here is some of the reason why.

It’s all fake ??

In reality, when you look at your competitor, what you are doing is looking at an external view of another business, what this means is that you only see the shiny side of it. In reality, internally, it is chaos and they probably don’t know what they’re doing.

It’s the same scenario when you watch a great movie trailer and when you watch the actual movie you’re disappointed.

You are wasting your time ?

Honestly, ask yourself the question "why do I look at my competitors" there is no real correct answer to this. Your competitors will not tell you how your product or service is performing; your customers will.

So in theory, when you spend time looking at your competitor, you’re wasting your time because by doing this, you’re not listening to your customer.

You will never learn ??

This one is important: if for some reason, your decision of adding or changing something in your business is based on your competitor, and this decision makes you fail, you will never learn from it.

Why did you even make the decision in the first place? Answer: “they did it so I thought it would be good”, nothing can be learned from those mistakes apart from "don’t do it again".

Investigate when needed ??

Of course, at some point, you will have to investigate your competitor and check them out. But the reasons are more for investor and in-depth markets analyses purposes.

When I start something, my main goal is to scale and grow as fast as possible, listening to my customer and not my competitors is what matters for me at the start.