HOW TO SPEND IT — PART 7

How Not to Be Discouraged as a Startup Founder in the Face of Competition

Different strategies for different markets

Uwe Weinreich
4 min readJul 17, 2023

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Photo by Louis Hansel on Unsplash

Recently, I coached a young and highly motivated startup founder. He had identified a problem that many business people have: information overload. He had come up with some ideas on how to better prepare and share information in a business context.

On that very day, when we had our last conversation, he discovered that there was already a productivity startup on the market. And it seemed like they had such a broad range of high-level services that it would be hard to beat them. “Should I give up?” he asked me.

That was actually the wrong question, or maybe the right question for the wrong market.

Winner-take-all markets

I have primarily started companies with a platform business model. These models tend to turn into a “winner take all” market or a “some take all” market. Customers flock to the platforms where they find the widest choice of providers. Providers focus on the platforms where the most customers are. This is a self-reinforcing process that results in only one or very few platforms remaining in the end.

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Uwe Weinreich
Uwe Weinreich

Written by Uwe Weinreich

Uwe works as coach, author and consultant focusing on agile innovation and digital transformation. What he does is simple: he solves problems.

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