How To Compete With A Well-Funded Startup

By pointing to the following fantastic case study, I recently answered this question on Quora: "I have an idea for a startup, but there's already a well-funded startup with a related idea, what should I do?"

Hotelplanner is a bootstrapped company that is now doing $25M/year and is the market leader in the group travel and hotel booking sector.

When they started, they had numerous heavily funded competitors who were spending money like there was no tomorrow.

But they were not focused on fundamentals.

When the market crashed, they could not keep raising money, and one after another, they all went out of business.

Hotelplanner was slow and steady, executing with a fundamentals-oriented approach.

In the end, they emerged the winner.

You can read the case study here: Bootstrapping to $20 Million with Intelligent Financial Engineering: Tim Hentschel, CEO of Hotelplanner.

You can also listen to my conversation with the CEO:

Now, run your idea through the 1M/1M Self-Assessment. See if you can find a good positioning with which to compete.

Looking For Some Hands-On Advice?

I receive many emails from entrepreneurs who want to discuss their specific businesses. I’m very happy to discuss your situation during my free online 1M/1M Roundtables, held almost every Thursday. During each roundtable, up to five entrepreneurs can pitch their businesses and receive my immediate and straightforward feedback.

To give entrepreneurs all over the world access to Silicon Valley’s knowledge, methodology, and network, I founded the One Million by One Million (1M/1M) global virtual incubator. 1M/1M aims to nurture a million entrepreneurs to reach a million dollars each in annual revenue and beyond, thereby creating a trillion dollars in global GDP and ten million jobs.

For those still testing the waters of entrepreneurship, I’ve written my Entrepreneur Journeys book series to inform and inspire. My newest book, Billion Dollar Unicorns, is now available from Amazon.

If you are interested in entrepreneurship topics and my writings, you can follow me here. I hope to publish articles on LinkedIn every week.

Photo credit: b k /Flickr.com.