How to Start a Business in a Competitive Market

Editor’s note: This guest post was written by Jonathan George, founder and former CEO of Boxcar.io — the first push-notifications-as-a-service platform for iOS - which he recently sold to Kwaga

You're starting late.

A few years too late or maybe just a few months. Either way, you're already running behind someone else. They've learned a few things that work and some things that don't.

Your natural reaction is to look at what they've built and start to build it yourself, too. All of it. Every little feature, you think you need to match.

You don't.

Stop worrying about playing catch-up with the other people in your market. Forget all of the extra bells and whistles that they each have. You have limited resources and you'll just spend forever chasing instead of pushing the entire market forward.

Focus on the core problem, release and expand outward from there. The rest of the functionality will define itself as you become more intimately familiar with the problem domain you're working in.

When he's not peppering fellow startup founders with inspiring sentiments, Jonathan is mentoring startups and building great teams to fearlessly attack big ideas. He blogs at jdg.net