No bullshit - you don’t need to beat the competition to succeed.
On a recent short business trip, I listened to No Bullsh*t Strategy* by Alex Smith. It’s a concise audiobook—about three hours—and currently available on Spotify (other platforms are available ;-).
One of the book’s core messages echoed something I first studied over 20 years ago in a strategy module during my MBA at Imperial College*: as an innovator, you don’t need to “beat” the competition to succeed. Instead, you can create a compelling offering and capture significant market share by redefining the terms of competition altogether.
At first, this may feel counterintuitive. But one of the clearest examples comes from the rise of low-cost airlines. In the U.S., Southwest Airlines pioneered the model by stripping out frills and focusing on efficiency. In Europe, EasyJet and Ryanair pushed it further, building a whole new travel category.
With hindsight, it seems obvious: many travelers were happy to trade in free sandwiches, business lounges, checked baggage, pre-allocated seating, or central airports in exchange for dramatically cheaper fares. Today we take this for granted, but at the time it was far from proven. Traditional airlines all competed on similar features, chasing marginal differences in crowded markets, delivering poor returns, and offering limited real value to customers. It took a bold strategy—changing the playing field entirely—to disrupt the industry.
Two essential principles of this kind of strategy are:
Identify trade-offs. What can you stop offering—features that don’t actually create value for your target customers—in order to deliver much greater value elsewhere?
Redefine your competition. Who are you really competing against, and which attributes of your offering deliver value that your new “competitors” simply can’t match?
For Southwest, the real competition wasn’t United or American Airlines—it was buses and trains. As long as fares were broadly comparable, they bet that travelers would choose the speed and convenience of air travel, even with fewer perks. The bet paid off. In Europe, the same playbook opened up international travel to millions who had never flown abroad before. (The long-term effects of mass tourism are another matter; here we’re talking purely about business strategy.)
This idea makes intuitive sense in air travel, we have all experienced this personally, but most tech startups still default to the old-airline mindset: trying to be “better” than incumbents. Think of every single pitch deck feature-comparison chart, where the startup ticks more boxes than the established players. The problem? Unless your innovation genuinely kicks the competition out of the park, customers usually stick with mature, reliable alternatives. From the buyers perspective, validating your competitors offering by claiming you do it ‘better’, you and your startup proposition probably just look too risky.
This observation seems especially true in deep tech where founders are generally not also strategy experts. They’re scientists and engineers who may never have had to think this way before. Many such founders assume their breakthrough innovation is enough, and that strategy can wait. After all, that’s what the investors are backing, right? However the real deep-tech winners are those who leverage their technical innovation to open up entirely new markets—spaces incumbents simply cannot access. In these new markets, customers see massive potential value that easily offset the risks of working with the startup.
I’ve seen firsthand how effective this “sidestep the competition” approach can be. It’s far easier to win attention—and customers are far more patient with your early-stage challenges—when you offer something different, not just something “better.”
As Alex Smith emphasizes: competition isn’t something to beat, but something to maneuver around—or even to complement. Sometimes, that means walking away from parts of the market and telling customers you’re not for them, which can be deeply uncomfortable for technical founders. Alex’s point is that successful businesses don’t just sell a product or service (and certainly don’t just sell “technology”); they sell a unique form of value that customers want and cannot get anywhere else.
When considered like this, Michael Porter’s famous line “The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.” makes complete sense.
Drop me a DM or comment below if you would like some help to apply this kind of strategic approach to your startup.
Credits: Sandra Vandermerwe, Alex M H Smith.
