3. Research your Competition
The last thing anyone starting a business for the first time wants to do is to research those who have been in the game for so long and getting discouraged at the thought of having to compete with all that. More often than not, people come up with amazing business ideas only to look it up and find someone else doing it just the way they had planned to do it. Few things are as discouraging as that.
However, it doesn’t have to be (just) discouraging. There’s a good side to knowing what your competitors are doing. It could work as a blueprint of what you expect your business to be, it can also help to point out what you do not want your business to be. That is, by looking at the things your competition is not doing (which you believe they should be) or the things they are doing that are bringing down their business.
Also, no matter how much it seems your competition has it all together, there’s often something they are not doing; probably not meeting the needs of a particular demographic, lacking social media presence or using the wrong social media tools, among others. Knowing these can give you an edge against them. Remember, competition is often a good thing because it forces us to do our best.
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