MEPX
Chapter 4 of 10All chapters
  1. 1The business model
  2. 2Customers
  3. 3The money side
  4. 4Competition and advantage
  5. 5Operations
  6. 6Legal structure
  7. 7People
  8. 8Getting customers
  9. 9Risk and resilience
  10. 10Growing

Chapter 4 of 10

Competition and advantage

Why anyone keeps buying from you.

Durable advantages

Anything easily copied is not an advantage for long. Scale, network effects, switching costs, brand and accumulated data are the ones that persist.

  • Being first matters less than being hard to displace.
  • Competing only on price invites a race nobody wins.

Knowing the field

Competitors include the alternatives customers currently use, including doing nothing. That last one is usually the biggest and least studied.