I am always surprised by how many small business owner’s decisions are driven by fear. Mostly, it’s fear that some other clever person, somewhere on the Internet, is going to steal their idea and capture 1% of the exploding gizmo market before they do.

These kinds of fears are completely unfounded.

First of all, you are never, ever going to capture 1% of any developed market unless you happen to be sitting on $3 Billion and you are a brand manager for Coke. Second, since neither of the previous two things are true, the last thing you should be worrying about is your competition.

Why?

The reason you got into business in the first place was because you thought that you had something unique to offer to the world. If you wanted to turn out the same gizmo as the next guy, there are plenty of other much less soul crushing ways you could have gone about doing that. The fact that there are dozens if not hundreds of other people doing something similar to you only means that you need to be absolutely sure that you establish what it is that you actually do, what makes you “special” and why you got into the space to begin with.

People see competitors for one of two reasons, either because they lose track of what it is that they are actually selling or because they start comparing themselves to huge brands and assume that small business works the same way.

Huge brands have to compete because the markets they are playing inside are already saturated. The only place they can get new customers is from each other. For a small business, especially on the web, you are building into a niche and as long as you haven’t chosen one that is completly filled (a bad idea) there should be plenty of customers floating around for everyone. The question isn’t how you are going to steal them from your “competition” but how you should capture the ones that are still out there, waiting for you and your offering.

Putting too much effort into competing is also an extraordinarily destructive force for a small business owner. Not only are you wasting energy and resources trying to make yourself look better by making someone else look worse, you are also closing yourself off to the opportunity to collaborate. Resources are scarce, even if you combine every small company that you call your competition into one, you would all still only represent a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction of the larger market. With so much going against everyone, you should not waste time sniping at each other, you should be spending your time looking for places where your business and your closest neighbors complement each other, and trying to find ways to use that to grow the industry at large.

Competition is a necessary evil and if you are really lucky you may one day grow a business that is sufficiently massive that you need to start worrying about it. Until then, understand that every second you spend competing is a second that could have been used doing something productive.

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