The Messy Middle: Finding Your Way Through the Hardest and Most Crucial Part of Any Bold Venture

by Scott Belsky

Be curious about competitors’ moves, but don’t emulate them. Instead, look at what your competitors do, and ask yourself a series of questions: “Are their strategy and goals the same as mine?” If their strategy and beliefs are different, and you still have conviction in your own, then you shouldn’t be distracted. Stay the course. Google launched in 1998 as the twenty-first search engine after other search engines like Alta Vista and Yahoo, but they took very few pages from others’ books because their strategy was unique and required entirely different tactics. Rather than simply index the web, Google was organizing the web in a way that improved the quality of search results over time. Google wanted to give you one great result first rather than a list of all the results. This alternative approach made all the difference. But if your competitor’s strategy and goals are the same as your own, then you need to ask yourself another question: “Is their tactic better?” If so, you should consider taking the same tactic yourself. In 2016 and 2017, Instagram infamously copied Snapchat’s tactics over and over again. Both apps were playing in the same field, and Instagram used what Snapchat learned to get ahead of it in its own game. Instagram implemented Snapchat’s “stories” and augmented-reality features, like facial overlays, because these tactics were directly aligned with its strategy: to host the media friends share with one another. Instagram was getting ideas from Snapchat, b...