Adopt a Brachistochrone Strategy to Beat the Competition

You're walking back to your car mulling over some problem after a long day at work and it hits you! Not another car… but an idea. “This idea will change everything” you tell yourself, “why has no one thought of this before?!”

You pull out your phone, check online and sure enough… someone HAS thought of it. Despondent you saunter back to your dreary un-inventive life.

That’s where you fail.

The world is replete with examples of entrepreneurs who were chasing after an idea that someone had seemingly already invented but went ahead and built it anyway and built it better. They just knew the secret of how beat their competition to the finish line.

Some would say Apple makes its living with that approach. In Walter Isacson's biography we’re told of the time that Jobs gave up a part of Apple in exchange he got unfettered access to Xerox PARC labs where he discovered the mouse, the GUI, and a dozen other ideas sitting dormant. The arbitrators of those holy grails were non-plussed and pretty pissed that Jobs gained such access and their fears were well-founded. Steve actually built something useful with that knowledge. Again and again Apple has proved itself worthy to finish the race ahead of folks who were the first adopters.

The title of this piece alludes to a mathematical algebraic technique used to answer this question: what is the fastest path between two points. Your intuition says a straight line but you’d be wrong. A straight line is the shortest route between two points but it is not the fastest. Kinetic energy, speed, mass, and gravity all combine to give us the "Brachistochrone Curve". A ball running down a straight line between two points will not beat a ball falling down a curve, giving it momentum and pushing to the finish line ahead of anyone else. There’s some really cool math behind this but let’s skip ahead to the analogy I’m putting out there.

(here's a really good and in-depth video on the Brachistochrone)

Your competition is out there. They may have more money and more manpower and more customers but if you adjust your trajectory using the Brachistochrone Curve you can beat them to the finish line.

Consider the recent fall from grace of Zenefits. Once the darling unicorn of the HR cloud world it seemed like no one could catch it. Namely, a fledgling competitor late to the game, was hounded endlessly for not being Zenefits. Last week, Zenefits announced that it is laying off hundreds of staff. They grew too fast for their britches. Namely looks pretty good now.

Another example is the crazy scene in the social media management sector. Hootsuite, Buffer, Percolate... the list goes on. It seemed for a time that Hootsuite would outright dominate but then convergence of markets began with software companies and even CRM behemoths fixing to roll out their out social media management platforms. Buffer App appeared on the scene recently giving Hootsuite a run for it’s money. That scene will change hands again, I'm certain of it.

If you’re a start-up with serious competition look for opportunities to burst upon the scene with a momentum that will take you past competitors. Or perhaps the best strategy is to play it safe and just keep going at a pace. Note also that the ball on the Brachistochrone curve beats the ball that tries to go even steeper up front.

Here are three things you can do:

• Competition is always validation of your space. It means you’re onto something. (Take Peter Thiel’s advice to heart though.)
• Gauge the speed of your competitors. Are they looking for a big splash? What red flags you see?
• Craft your marketing to meet and beat the competition. Fast or slow, with the right burst of momentum and natural kinetic energy you can still win.
• Develop your products and services to beat the competition where they are the weakest. Exploit those options.
• Play for the long game. Consider the tale of the tortoise and Achilles as told by Lewis Carol. If you think in quantum ways there is no way that the hare ever even reaches the finish line. You can always catch him.

In a later article I'll share some real world ideas on how to make this a reality.