We want to hear a comprehensive rundown of the competition including their positive attributes — which shows the entrepreneur is engaged with reality, and isn’t living in her own private Idaho where there are no competitors and/or the competitors all suck. Then we want to hear how your company’s offering is better/different than the competition, ideally in ways that can be verified in due diligence (technical examination, customer reference calls, etc.). (My personal opinion is that startups should focus on “different” more than “better” — your product doesn’t have to be better than the competition in all cases as long as it’s different, and in being different appeals to part of the market that the competition is not as well suited for. Very few startups can bring a product to market that is truly “better” than the competition across all the dimensions that customers care about.) It’s almost always a red flag when someone asserts that they have no competition — from an investor standpoint, good markets naturally draw competition, and so if there is no competition, that often means that a company is in a terrible market. But every once in a while there is a company that has a genuinely new idea and therefore no competition. Those entrepreneurs usually have a hard time convincing investors to Saliba revolution shirt.
