Don’t Watch the Competition
The Story
When asked about competitors like Codex and OpenAI, Boris’s answer surprised the interviewer: “I don’t personally use the other products.”
He tells his team the same thing: “It’s so easy to get sidetracked by competitors. Because there’s so many competitors and it’s so easy to see the thing you could build by just copying it. It’s a little bit harder to come up with novel ideas and things that solve the user need better.”
His framing: more competitors is a bigger sign of success, not a threat. The thing to stay focused on is “solving our problems, solving Anthropic researchers’ problems, and solving our users’ problems.”
Boris has seen big companies fall into the competitor-watching failure mode repeatedly. The energy spent tracking competitors is energy not spent understanding users.
Lesson for Creators
Stop studying what other creators in your niche are posting. Study your audience’s problems instead. Copying competitors feels productive but leads to commodity content. Original insights come from proximity to users, not proximity to competitors. The more people enter your space, the more it validates your market. Stay focused on serving your audience better than anyone else.
Related
- Building in Public - The Competitor Betrayal That Backfired — competition creating bigger markets
- Rick Rubin’s Lesson - Create Without the Audience in Mind — create from curiosity, not market analysis
- Only Build What Passes Three Filters — internal compass over external benchmarks