Steven Morley: How to Do Competitor Analysis for Your Startup

Good afternoon, good evening, whatever it is in your time zone. I'm personally in San Diego, California, and so it's almost 11 o'clock in the morning here. But thank you for everyone coming on today, and I'm going to make this next half hour really worth your time and hope it'll generate some ideas and also generate some thoughts that will make you want to take next steps. This topic we're going to talk about today is how to do competitor analysis for your startup. And I realized when I put together these slides, I had not really talked about, well, who are you, Mr. Morley? Why should we listen to you? So I just injected a slide. I hope you don't mind. Who are you listening to? And why should you listen to me? So my name is Steve Morley. I've been a serial entrepreneur for probably much longer than most of you have been alive. Also been an intrapreneur, developing businesses within another company. But I've also been an angel investor in about half a dozen deals. So I've been in the shoes of your audience that you would be presenting to. I've also been part of 3 different venture capital groups as a limited partner. But for the last 17 years, I've been a startup business advisor, mentor, and director for over 200 companies that have raised tens of millions of dollars in investment. So I've been on all sides. So you can ask me questions from any perspective. As a starving entrepreneur, as one of those arrogant investors who says, "Why should I give you my money?" Okay. As experience, my background is I'm an electrical engineer. I have an undergraduate from the University of California, Irvine, and a graduate degree with business as a minor from Stanford University. My most successful startup was a company called Qualcomm. You've probably heard of that. I was employee number 10 there. And spent about 20 years there as a serial entrepreneur. I designed their first integrated circuit in the '80s and launched a business with that, which is now like a $27 billion business for the company. So the founders say thank you. But as I said, since leaving Qualcomm in 2006, I've been helping advise, mentor, or direct more than 200 companies and along the way started 2 or 3 of my own. So I've been on all sides. So hopefully the battle scars of experience will come through in this and it's not just book learning. All right, let's get to what you're here for. Let's talk about the goal of this presentation. Well, the goal probably should have been to teach you how to analyze your competitors, right? But I'm going to say no, that is not our goal today. Because you know what? Who cares about your competitors if you don't have a good company. So my goal here is to help you know how to launch and grow a very successful business, meaning your definition of success, not someone else's. Okay, so what's your goal of spending the next few minutes of your life on this webinar? Is it to learn how to compete against competition? No, sorry to disappoint you again, but your goal is to launch and grow a successful business, again, that meets your definition of success. So this whole presentation is going to talk about competition, but competition is only one small part of developing a successful company. So in fact, we're gonna not really use the word competition a whole lot. We're gonna use the word alternatives. Why? Because your market, the people you're trying to sell your product or service to, they have a problem. If they don't have a problem, go find another business. But if they have a problem, excuse me, you want to be their chosen solution. You want to be the place they go to to solve that problem. But they're solving that problem now in some other way. Maybe it is a direct competitor, but one way or another, they have some solution that they're finding adequate or at least best possible to solve the solution. So your challenge as your company is to create a better alternative. Your challenge is to be better enough. That's a technical term. Better enough that your customers in your targeted market will choose your alternative versus all the other ones out there. And we're talking about both current and future alternatives. Alright, so let's talk about the types of competition. We all know about direct competition, and I would imagine that most people that joined today thought we're going to sit here and talk about how to analyze the heck out of direct competition. Direct competition are companies that do something like what you do, and but they're already out there. They have an established market, they have a brand, they have a service, a product. They have a whole persona that you're hoping to disrupt. I'll tell you that's important and you should, we'll talk about what you should know and what you should learn from your direct competition. But I would be more, far more concerned with indirect competition. Indirect competition are other ways that your market solves their problem that you would like them to choose you instead of some other way. All right. But we're going to go on and talk about future competition. The world isn't stagnant. It's not stable. You right now, wherever you are in the development of your business, you are trying to create a future competition to the established players out there. But so are other people, including the established players, the direct competition, and in some cases, the indirect competition. So you have to plan not only how to compete against what you're facing today, today, but what you can anticipate facing a few years from now. Let me give you another kind of competition. This is called vaporware. I call it vaporware competition. This one's kind of nebulous, but it's very, very important. I'll give you an example. When Qualcomm started, one of our first commercial products was a mobile satellite network where people in trucks— it was for trucking companies. As they drove around the country, this is the early, or sorry, the late '80s. Okay. Cell phones were not very ubiquitous and cell phone coverage was very spotty if once you got outside major cities. So we provided a way to communicate to a truck directly using a satellite, a little antenna on the top of the truck. We called it OmniTrax. When we went out and talked to these trucking companies about this wonderful thing that we were coming out with that we could sell to them and ship to them. But we had a competitive, competing company that was a joint venture from well-known large Japanese and American companies that had a similar product. It wasn't as good as ours. And by the way, it didn't exist yet. It was at least a year to 2 years away from being real. But we had a problem. Our vice presidents would go out and meet with these CEOs of these customer companies and tell them how wonderful our product was and how they could buy it today. 2 weeks later, this other group of companies would come in and say, oh, don't buy from that little company Qualcomm. Who are they? You've never heard of them. We're— and I don't want to say the names of the company, but we're well-known companies. You should wait another year because we'll have a much better product to sell you. And we had a hard time building business because of this vaporware competition. By the way, they never came out with their product. It never hit the market. So I like the way that one of our VPs described it. He says, we call that the $2 pork chop. So I'll just tell you this little anecdote. Here's the story. A guy goes into the butcher shop and says, uh, how much are your pork chops? And the butcher says, they're $3 a pound. Again, we're doing American pounds and dollars. Hope you can translate if you're not in that system. Um, $3 a pound. And the guy says, what? The butcher down the street has pork chops for $2 a pound. And the butcher says, well, why don't you go buy from them? He says, well, they're out of them. And the butcher says, well, if I was out of them, they'd be $2 a pound too. So you see what I'm saying? Is that if it doesn't exist, it can be anything you want it to be. That's vaporware competition, but you will probably run into it at some point in the development of your business. All right. So you have to ask yourself, why are these other alternatives, whether direct or indirect, why are they currently the preferred choice of your market? Probably is because they have strong brand awareness and reputation. Okay, the old adage used to be back in the '70s and '80s that nobody loses their job for buying IBM. Okay, IBM was the place you got computers. And if you— because they had a strong brand, a great reputation, and it was a safe way to solve your problem for computing needs. But then came along companies like Apple and Compaq and de— DEC. And digital equipment and a bunch of these other companies. And they had to carve away at that strong brand awareness and reputation of IBM. Okay, so you got to ask, what did they do to get there? What did they do? And we'll come back to why you care about that in a minute. All right, maybe they have entrenched market penetration. They are just the dominant one. You know, when you go to the store and you buy cola, you're going to buy a Coke or Pepsi because those are the dominant ones. They own the market. And if you want to come in with a new soda, a new cola, it could be a little bit difficult because they're so entrenched. Maybe they have a strong monopoly. I'll give you an example, or a strong intellectual property position. Qualcomm, when we started making cell phones back in the late '80s, early '90s, actually early '90s, we had lots of patents. Let's just admit it. Qualcomm has tens of thousands of patents now. And they were exclusive. I mean, if you wanted to build our technology, you had to license our patents. And this made the company a lot of money, and it gave us an exclusive position in the cellular market. We won't go in that too deeply, but that's an issue. Or maybe, you know what, maybe your competition really is a better solution. And there's only 3 ways you can be better. You can be better, faster, or cheaper. There's only 3 unique value propositions you can have. Maybe they are. And maybe your clever idea that you came up with on sitting outside one day, you thought, oh, I'm going to use ML and AI with virtual reality to create this cool new thing. Well, maybe that cool new thing isn't better, faster, or cheaper. And it's really good to know that now before you spend the next couple of years of your life developing something that quite honestly nobody's going to be excited about. All right. If they are better, faster, cheaper, learn from them. Learn what they're doing. Why, you know, and here's a way to think about it. There are benefits they are missing. When Qualcomm came out with a cellular phone alternative, we were going against the juggernauts. Back then, two companies, Motorola and Ericsson, owned the market. This is 20 years before Apple ever thought about creating a phone. Nokia, nobody heard of them. They were, no, it was Motorola and Ericsson and they owned the market. But there were certain things their system didn't do well. There were certain benefits that were missing in their solution. Qualcomm created a technology that filled the gap for those benefits. And now they are what they are. So you can find a way to find benefits, not features, We'll talk about the difference. Benefits that are missing from the current alternatives and go out and take advantage of those. Okay, so how do you compete? Here you are, you're a novice entrepreneur and you have this market you're trying to succeed. You're trying to climb this hill. You want to get the flag. Okay, and you're busy plotting a path, plotting a business path to get you to win that market, to win that flag. Pay no attention to my clock chiming, sorry. But there's a little bit of a problem. There's an ogre in your way. This is the competition. The ogre wants to stop you. They want to munch on you. They want to eat you alive. And you could be living in fear of that ogre. So how do you compete against an ogre when you're just trying to climb the mountain? Well, there's different ways. One way is you may look at the market and go, you know what? It's going to be really hard for us to take that flag at the top of the mountain. But maybe there's another market that's adjacent to it that you could serve. Maybe it's a different region or a different value proposition or a different phase of the market, which we're going to come to in a bit. And you could then build a path that goes after this alternative market that's still very lucrative and a very good market for you to pursue. Or maybe you have a way that makes you better enough that if people knew about you, they would choose your, your solution versus the ogre's solution. Everyone knows the ogre. Everyone knows what the ogre provides. Everybody kind of accepts that the ogre is the best way to go. But you can create something that's better enough that they will look at your solution. Or you could be written in. You could be locked into an exclusive market. Again, Going back to Qualcomm, we got written in by the standards committee to be the standard for what's called spread spectrum cellular communications. And we got certain providers around the world to use our standard. Now we're golden. We have a standardized exclusive market that the ogre, Motorola and Ericsson, could not keep up with. So there's different ways. Don't worry about the fact there's an ogre. You can run between their legs. And still go forward. But you need to understand the ogre. But more importantly, you need to know what your market's needs, hopes, and fears are. Let me just divert for just a couple of minutes about what I mean by that. This is critically important. If you're going to spend time doing research, and I don't mean sitting and typing on a computer like this lady's doing in the picture, but you're going to get out and talk to people. All right. The alternative that best meets the needs, hopes, and fears of your market wins. Now you gotta get it, the word out there, you gotta market it right. But if you have the best alternative, you have a good chance to win your market. So how do you find out? You have to know what these are. Let me talk about what I mean by that. You need to know, number 1, what problem does your market have? Given the current alternatives. How do they solve it? And how much pain does that cause? If you have a clever idea that doesn't solve a problem and doesn't alleviate some pain, it doesn't matter. You might get a few people to try it. You might get a few innovators who just want to play with everything. But at the end of the day, you will not be able to penetrate very far into your market. So you want to know what is your market's needs, hopes, and fears. And what I mean by that, Your market has what's called structural tension. This is the difference between where they are in reality and where they want to be. So it's the difference between the reality of today's situation and the vision of where they want to be. This is called structural tension. And the further apart that they are, it's like stretching a rubber band. The further apart they are, the more tension, the more the more pain, the more need for a new solution. And you want to be that bridge that bridges vision to reality. So, when you know your audience's needs, hopes, and fears, it's like this. Okay, so a need. Let me give an example. Need is, oh, let's not spend too much time. Sorry. But your market has a need, something they need to have done. But they don't have a good solution for it. And they have hopes that go beyond needs. So a lot of times the best way to market a product is hope. I will give you an example of this. When you see a commercial for beer, at least in the United States, they don't spend a lot of time telling you how beer is healthy for you, it's good, you know, it's organic, it's clean. They don't do that. They show a guy with a bunch of beer bottles with the right logo on it walking out to the beach with a bunch of bikini-clad girls who are out dancing. Okay, that's not meeting need. It's inspiring hopes. The idea is if you drink my beer, you can be dancing on the beach with a bunch of girls. Or maybe you could be the most interesting man in the world. You've seen that commercial maybe. So those are how you inspire hope in your audience. But if your ability to only meet needs and inspire hope is slight, and doesn't alleviate the fears of your audience, you're doomed. Forget it. You can give away your product or service. Nobody's going to use it. Now, what I mean by fear is not, I'm afraid of falling out of airplanes or being bitten by spiders. Okay, not that kind of fear. Use the word sales resistance. Why will people not buy your product? And you need to know this. Why will they? I don't think it'll work. I don't trust this company. I think it costs too much. I think it causes side effects. I mean, whatever it might be, your market has fears as to why they don't use your solution. And you want to do all you can to alleviate those fears. Because if you have the balance scale where how you meet needs and inspire hopes much outweighs the fears of your market and you alleviate them, then you're golden and you are, you, sorry, you are the winner. So really focus on knowing what these are and how you can both meet them in reality for your market, but also message through your marketing efforts, your advertising efforts, the way you build your brand, how much you meet needs, inspire hopes, and alleviate fears. All right. What's that got to do with your competition? They're trying to do the same thing. So you can look at how they do it. So let's talk about some of this. Let's talk about some commonly known brands. What about Uber versus taxis? Uber came out in 2008. By the way, hehe, oh, one of my startup companies in 2006 here in San Diego was called RideGrid. RideGrid was essentially what Uber has become. However, RideGrid failed. It was founded in 2006. Uber was founded in 2008. What happened that made RideGrid a failure and Uber a success? Something happened in 2007. Maybe some of you know what it is. I won't waste your time with trying to guess, but the bottom line is this company called Apple came out with their first cell phone called the iPhone. IPhones changed the way people use cell phones. So, RideGrid used phone calls to connect riders with drivers. Uber, it's all an app. Completely changed the success of the business. But Uber had to come against an entrenched competitor called taxi services. They did it. How about Tesla going up against the big players, Toyota, Ford, GM, you know, pick your favorite You know, Mercedes, whoever you like. Tesla did it by coming up with serving the innovator and the early adopter market originally, and then transitioning to now where at least the United States, they're like, they sell more cars than any other provider, I believe. How about Airbnb? Fighting against the entrenched competition of Expedia and Travelocity. But again, they found a unique way to solve a special need of the traveling market. People want to share things. They want to share their back bedroom or their condo they don't use all the time. So they found an underserved market and they went around the entrenched ogre competition. How about iPhone en versus iPhone en minus one? Apple constantly has to find a way to get you to part with that $1,000 phone you just bought 18 months ago so you'll use the new version. They have to compete against themselves. They're their own ogre, but they do it, they do it fairly successfully. All right. When it comes to understanding your competitor, you can go do a bunch of research and you can get, you know, SEC filings if you're in the United States, your security exchange filings. You can look at their annual report. You can look at review sites. You can do all of this. But that will tell you the big picture. And if you're a marketing research firm, maybe that's what you get paid to tell others about. But you know what? You could go out and buy $5,000 marketing research reports. And they'll tell you about, you know, this company owns 17% of the market, this company— you don't care. What you care about, excuse me, what you care about is how your market sees the competition. Like if you are a McDonald's fan in the United States or anywhere in the world, do you really care that McDonald's moved their headquarters from Oak Brook, Illinois to Chicago recently? Probably not. What you care about is they serve consistent food that's easy, fast, wasn't expensive until recently. You know, whatever draws you to go to McDonald's, they serve a solution to your problem. With the benefits that they provide. So how does the market see your competition? The first thing you wanna do is ask them, not your competition, ask the market. There are ways to do this. And actually, just so you all know, this is an introductory webinar that's going to lead to a workshop bootcamp next month where we're gonna help companies that join the bootcamp go through this process on their own for their particular industry and their particular company. We'll be going through things like Lean Startup, Lean Canvas methods. You may have heard of these, or SWOT, you know, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, where you can look at the value or the unique position of your company as it compares to what you perceive as the major competition from the market's point of view, not your point of view, because the market is the one who cares, cares about what they think of your competition, not what anybody else thinks. All right. Another thing you do is you become, you take on the persona of your typical targeted customer. And how would you find a solution to a problem? Take McDonald's. You know, I'm hungry, I want something fast, quick, maybe something for the kids. And I want to, I don't want to take a lot of time. I don't want to spend a lot of money. I want something I don't have to worry, is it going to be any good? All right, we'll talk about later if McDonald's is any good. But There are certain things you're trying to feel. You have a problem, you have a pain. So take on— what would you do to find the solution? What keywords would you use when you go out and search for a solution? Think about those things. What, what, where would you find a solution? Let's say somebody comes out with a new fast food, uh, chain. How would you find out about it? Driving down the street, seeing a sign? Would you look in the newspaper if you still read a newspaper? I do. You still read a newspaper? Would you see a YouTube ad, a Google AdWord? I mean, where would you find out about competition? And how do they highlight themselves? What benefits do they highlight about their own value proposition? We're fast. We're convenient. We're cheap. We are better quality, we're cooler. Whatever benefit they want to highlight, you need to learn from because you probably do need to do the same. And then ask yourself this question. If you can take off your hat as a founding entrepreneur who wants to go out with a cool solution you came up with one day to your market, take off that hat. Just set it aside for a bit and ask the question, if you were your customer, your target customer, why would you buy the competition solution? If you're Uber and you're starting out in 2008 or 2009, how do you get people to choose this very— like, for instance, we started RideGrid. The number one concern we had back then that we thought would be market pushback was that people didn't want to get in cars with strangers. Well, prior to the development of what's called the share economy, that's true. People trusted taxi drivers more than they trusted some guy with a Toyota and he's offering to drive you to the airport. They didn't trust it. So, Uber had to overcome that. Okay, let's think about Tesla. Why would you spend a couple, 3 times more than instead of a Camry or a Taurus or something, why would you go buy this expensive battery-operated thing that breaks a lot. They found ways to provide a beneficial statement that got people to move away from what they would normally do and move towards this alternative solution. But you need to understand why would you, if you were your market, buy your competitor's solution and how do you compete against it. All right. So understanding, okay, Okay, you've probably seen this somewhere in the books you've read, the seminars you've gone to. Markets go through phases. So the standard model is shown here where there's like 5 phases of a market. And you can see this same kind of story told with different names. But the bottom line is people who first buy new products, the innovators, the people that bought Teslas 10 years ago, Okay, or more than that, maybe. That's not mainstream. But back then, the motor vehicle market was here in the laggard stage. Everybody had a car. You know, even if you're afraid of technology, you had a car. So Tesla said, we're not worried about the late majority and the laggards stage, which is a big market. But the Toyotas and the Mercedes and the Fords of the world, have that pretty well entrenched. We're going to focus on the early-stage market and really build up a brand reputation with the innovators, the early adopters. And they did that. And then they made it cool. And then they got to early majority. And you could argue now they may be near the peak of their penetration into the majority market. And then going from there. So you want to think as you position yourself against competitor, Where are they? What market phase do they serve well versus what market phase does your company serve well? All right. All right. Moving on quickly. We're almost done. You remember your goal is to become the ogre. Don't forget that. You're not always going to be the little guy the ogre wants to step on. Okay. When Qualcomm started doing cell phones, we were like 200 people. Nobody heard of us. You know, we did a focus group where we asked people, who would you buy a cell phone from? And we had things like Motorola, Nokia, and Intel, and Cisco, and Qualcomm. And more people said they would buy a cell phone from Intel and Cisco than they would buy from Qualcomm. There's only one problem with that. Cisco and Intel never made cell phones. So our brand knowledge and our brand awareness, brand reputation, was almost nonexistent. But we had to change that. And now Qualcomm is now the ogre. Everybody wants to compete. We don't make cell phones anymore. We sold off that business about 22 years ago. But everybody wants to compete with Qualcomm. And it's tough because Qualcomm is now the ogre. I want to see your company become the ogre in your industry. You're the one everyone wants to compete against. Okay. How do you become that? There's several ways. One way, commonly now, is to have a strong IP portfolio—patents, copyrights, trademarks. This can put a roadblock behind you. You're slamming the door behind you on competition. In almost every case, someone will find a way around these kinds of legal protections, but they do slow people down. So it will help you become the ogre. You get strong market entrenchment. Get out there, get out there fast, own your market. You know, Jack Welch, who was a former president of GE, long time ago, famous entrepreneur. Well, he was a big corporate lead. But he used to say, you know, there's room for number 1 and number 2, but we don't care about number 3 or beyond. You got to get out and get entrenched. That doesn't mean you dominate the worldwide market for mobile apps. You're not going to do that overnight, but maybe you have a certain segment or a certain region or a certain something where you can own your market. Get out there and then leverage that to more markets. Maybe you build strong market awareness. This is difficult. It's slow and expensive to build market awareness, reputation, and social preference. This is where you spend your advertising dollars and you try to get close to all the social influencers on TikTok or whatever. You try to build reputation. It takes a long time and it takes a lot of money. But as you balance your budget and how you spend your money, doing this can really help you establish yourself as the ogre in the room that everybody has to chase against. All right. Maybe you get exclusive Exclusive business deal or monopoly. I talked about Qualcomm did that for cell phones. I'll give you another example. When we were a small company, maybe 50 people, the first chip the company designed— actually, I designed it, pat myself on the back— but the first chip we had turned out to be very, very valuable to a satellite network called Intelsat. You probably haven't heard of them. They just recently got sold. But Intelsat was like the dominant satellite provider back in the '80s and '90s. International group. Well, they were coming up with a new high-speed technology for satellites, and they needed a certain functionality. We went to them and presented they use our chip because our chip provided that functionality better than anything else out there. They wrote us into their specs. So if you wanted to build equipment that was used on this new communication service they had, this new satellite service they had, you had to buy Qualcomm's chip. And I went off and sold about $1 million worth of chips that year at about an 85% gross markup. So we said thank you. So you could do this and you could— you don't have to be the big juggernaut to do this. You can be a small company, but think strategically. How you become the ogre by being the exclusive provider. All right. But no matter what, your competition is doing this and you need to do it. You still need to think about how to provide a good enough solution so that nobody is better enough to take away your market share. Again, a lot of this is pretty standard. You're like, so yeah, I got that. Well, okay, a little bit of plug. In our final statement, our final words is don't focus so much on beating competition. Just focus on winning your market. When you do that, you will be beating the competition. Don't be looking at how to fight against an entrenched player. Look at how to win a market. It will really, really help you. And in the workshop we're doing next month, we're going to help you peel the onion on that for your particular business, your particular industry, so you can get a strategy that will get you beyond the yogur so you become the ogre. Anyway, thank you. Sorry. Thank you for your time on that. I hope it's been useful. And I'm really looking forward to answering questions you might have. I'll stop sharing now. Am I in the— can you hear me?

Thanks so much, that was great. You're getting a lot of— I don't know if you can see all the emojis popping up left, right, and center, but people definitely did enjoy your presentation. All right folks, we're going to jump into some Q&A. I see some of the Q&As coming in. Let's kind of dive into this. Steve, I'm going to pop these on the screen. Can you see this? So Ryan from Toronto is asking, What if you're not solving a problem but adding value to a service or experience? For him specifically, it's in tourism.

Well, Ryan, I'm just going to say you are solving a problem or you don't have a business. Okay? This added value that you're adding is solving a problem. In other words, if the market you're going into, the tourism market you said, it has a solution for something it's doing that you want to make better, but there's still a problem. In other words, the thing you want to provide is not being provided. And so it's an enhancement, okay, but it is solving a problem. So I would say you are solving a problem. And the better you can define, again, the needs, hopes, and fears of the market to have that problem or that enhancement added, the better, more successful you'll be. So, yeah, you don't have to open a whole new market. You don't have to like create the next generation or the, a new generation of something. You don't have to create a smartphone out of nowhere. Okay, by the way, Apple didn't create the smartphone. What Apple did in their classic way is they built it into an ecosystem that solved the problem. Because the problem that happened in smartphones prior to iPhones in 2007 was that you bought a phone from this company, you bought this service, then you had to get these apps, and it was all very disparate and, and And Apple didn't come up with the idea. What they did is they made it easy. They did an enhancement to what already was out there. So that's even your industry. I'm going to say that's where you are.

Awesome. That was a great response. Let's kind of burn through these, Steve, and then we'll kind of talk a little bit more about the boot camp. But Nathan from Fair Oaks in the US is asking, How do you think about blue ocean?

I guess in your context, you bring up a good point. You may not be able to solve the big problem, you may be adding a component to it. But chances are the big solution couldn't happen unless your component is added. All right? If you, if your problem is I have to get to the moon, maybe you don't build rocket ships because that's complicated, but you build the fairing that connects the first stage to the second stage or something. It's one component, but it's still solving a problem. And if you don't, somebody else will. That's my point is that if there's an underserved market where they need a new solution or just need enhancement or they need a new component, or it's going to take several people coming together to solve this problem, they still need what you add. Now, you bring up a point. If your success in the market is contingent on someone else providing more parts of the problem, yeah, you got to work together. You got to get there at the same time. You have a different— you're not independent. You're more dependent on others if that's what the concern is. I don't know if that's all answered the question, but you're still solving a problem.

That's all I'm saying. I guess Tim from Afghanistan is asking, how did Qualcomm prioritize technology and patent development in its early days? I don't know what you're—

okay, well, sure, a lot of time on this, but the bottom line is we did everything wrong at Qualcomm. You know, today it's known as a, as a, as a provider of like 85% of the chips that are in every cell phone you know, in the world. But the truth is that was never part of a business plan. It was an accident. And we can talk about that another time, but it was never part of our strategic plan. But the history of how we got involved was we had done some work for another company back at our previous company in the early '80s called Linkabit, and I was the lead engineer on that project. It was a digital— wasn't cellular, but it was a wireless telephony system. And the customer who wanted that system came to us a few years later at Qualcomm because we'd all left Linkabit. We were now at this new little startup called Qualcomm. And they said, we want you to take what you developed for us back then and make it mobile to serve this new industry called cellular. And we never ended up doing business with them, but through that, trying to answer theirs and make a proposal to them, came up with some pretty clever technology and we decided to take it out and see if we get the industry interested. We did. It wasn't easy and the rest is history. So it was. But again, not going too lengthy on it, but we knew that intellectual property protection was going to be vital because we knew that our competitors would take— would steal our technology if we didn't get as much legal protection to it as we could. We weren't big enough to go slay the ogre. We couldn't sue Motorola or Ericsson, these giant juggernauts. We couldn't do that. But we had to have enough of what we call a patent minefield where we could slow them down. And that's what happened. Turns out we got sued. Wow. Well, one of the technologies that was created back at our previous company. Okay. Again, I was the lead engineer on it. I had a patent and for, I mean, our customer had the patent and they turned around 5 years later and sued our current company Qualcomm for the patented technology we had created for them back 5 years earlier. And it was kind of weird because I had to be a witness. In defense of their patent against my own new company. It was a tough thing. Fortunately, we settled. I never had to go actually sit in front of the— give testimony in the courthouse, but it was kind of an awkward situation that we got sued against our own invention because we gave the rights to our customer. So be careful of that.

Yeah, that's an interesting learning. I think you're one of the few people who've gotten to experience that. I don't know if that's good or bad.

Good or bad.

Let's, uh, let's kind of do a couple more of these. Um, uh, Elena is asking, um, the following, like, how do you kind of narrow the list of alternatives so you're really focusing on the offers that matter the most rather than trying to be, um, rather trying to market yourself to everyone and everything? Very good question, Alana.

Good to see you, by the way. I know Alana. So, um, And that was not a trick question. I didn't tell her to ask that question. I used to tell when I ran marketing groups at Qualcomm, I one time when my kids were young, I brought in a big bag of Nerf balls. You know what Nerf balls are? You know, those spongy little balls. And I came into the conference room, one of our marketing meetings where we were creating a business strategy. And I took the Nerf balls and I threw them in the air and they bounced on the table and some of them fell on and some of them fell in the laps of some of my marketing people. And I said, that's one way to go about marketing. And then I gathered them all up and I took one and I threw one to that person and one to that person and one to that person. I said, that's another way to do marketing. One is shotgun and one is targeted. I said, our goal is to know who we're targeting and know how to get that Nerf ball to them specifically. So how to do it depends on the industry. There's no one general answer, but the more you know about your market and the more you know their pain, You know, what is it they just can't get that's good enough? Okay, is it, is the, are the options too expensive? Are they too hard to use? Is there too much learning curve? Do they not work well? I mean, what isn't good enough? Do they destroy the environment? It depends on what industry you're in. But that's, that's what you have to do is really just keep knowing your market. Again, you can learn from your competitors. But in every market, as an ogre grows up to be the dominant competitor, there's always room to run between their legs and get beyond them. Because ogres have what are called inertia. They have certain things that are slow to move. They are not light on their feet like you are as an early-stage entrepreneur. You can change and pivot. So your challenge is to know your market. I tell people, and they don't like me saying this, I tell people, I care far more about how much you know your market than how much you know your product. Well, I'm a data scientist that has a PhD in BL and VR and AI and ML. And I'm like, I don't care. I mean, that's nice. But how much do you know your market? Spend time knowing your market. And again, in our workshop, we're going to talk more about practical ways to do that. But at the end of the day, you got to go out and ask them. And that takes a lot of work. And a lot of entrepreneurs don't want to do that. They want to sit in their office and type on a computer and Google things or look at, you know, YouTubes or TikToks or something to learn what their market wants. That'll only give you the tip of the iceberg. You have to go out and feel what the real pain is. Sure. Yeah, I love that.

At FYI, we advocate for that heavily, like go and talk to as many people as possible and get that qualitative information. All right, let's do maybe one or two more. I saw a good one in here. I'm trying to give you a hard one here, Steve.

Take your best shot, show me what you got.

Yeah, there's one here on pricing which I think we didn't really talk about it. I think it would be good. Steve from Montreal is asking, like, you know, once you've identified a problem, developed a solution, like, how do you actually figure out, like, what your customers are willing to pay. And I think this is where competitive research could be beneficial, but love to get your thoughts.

Well, okay, so competition will tell you what people are paying now. Maybe people will pay more than competition. I, anytime I see a business opportunity or a business, um, presentation, a pitch or whatever, and they say we're going to be the low price leader, I tune out. Price is like the worst way to compete. Against competition because they have a lot deeper pockets than you probably do and they can chase you all the way down the pipe. So I live part of the year on Maui in Hawaii. And right now, this little company called Southwest Airlines in the last few years has come in and competed with the dominant player of Hawaiian air travel called Hawaiian Airlines. And it's a brutal price war. For those of us that like to go to the islands, we take the benefit. We're getting $200 round trip nonstop flights from the mainland. Didn't have that for many, many years. So we get the benefit, but it's brutal for both companies and it's a game of attrition. One of them is going to have to call uncle at some point, say, I can't compete anymore, I'll go out of business. In 2008, when the worldwide economy was starting to fall off, there was an airline called Aloha Airlines I love to fly with. They went out of business. They just could not compete any further in the price war. So pricing should be like the last thing that you consider. But I will tell you this, this is a little tip. Never, ever, ever base pricing on cost, ever. You base pricing on what the market will bear. The nice thing is with most products now, if you're selling cars, well, even with cars, if you're selling big-ticket hard good products, it's kind of hard to do this. But most businesses today you can change pricing and do all sorts of segmented testing so easily. If you're selling a mobile app, if you're selling a service, you can do price sensitivity testing in extremely flexible ways very quickly, the ways you never could do until this e-commerce industries that we have now. So pricing is something you can definitely test and you definitely should. I saw, because it's very specific, so I won't put more detail.

No, no, that's great. I think it was— I wanted to bring that up because it comes up a lot in market research and sizing and stuff. All right, Steve, let's switch gears here. Like folks, thanks so much for the questions. There's a lot coming in. I did want to take some time to talk a little bit about the bootcamp, if that's all right with everyone. So Steve obviously is running it. I just threw the link into the chat. I pinned it as well. He's running it in a couple of weeks, I guess early next month as well. It's all about market research, sizing, and understanding that. I guess like, Steve, what do people need to know about your boot camp? Like, what is like, what are some of the key things that you'd be covering? And like, maybe just give like a very high-level overview. And then we can wrap up and then go into networking. Sure, just real quick for everybody.

And it's going along the same line that we've been talking about throughout this meeting, is that my focus is on the success of your company, not about competing against competitors. Competing against competitors can seem like I gotta be, I gotta get past this ogre without getting stomped on. But the truth is competitors are a leverage for you to utilize, not a juggernaut that you need to be fearful of. You can learn what they do, what they do wrong, what they do right, what they do wrong. You can leverage what they are missing by asking the people that they're blocking, asking your market. And we're going to teach you some very practical step-by-step methods to learn what your market needs and how well or not well those needs are being met. You're going to learn why is your market afraid to buy something new? You know, what are their fears? And what can you do in your specific company in order to get around those fears so that before the fear even comes up in their thoughts, you've already solved it. And, and you can do these things. And the nice thing about it is this doesn't take a lot of money or a lot of effort. This isn't something that takes months and millions of dollars, but it does take strategic thinking. You have to have the mindset before you take your product to market, and actually before you even design your product, you need the mindset of, this is how I'm going to serve my market. And I, I'll be honest, in the 200-plus companies I've worked with Very few of them start there. They start with, I've got this great idea of how to use SaaS to create, you know, better coffee. Okay. Do we need better coffee? I mean, yes, we do. But you know what I'm saying is we're going to help you shift your perspective away from just having a good concept. We're going to shift it into how do you become the preferred solution provider to a market that needs a problem solved? When you do that, you win no matter what. So we're going to do it very practically. This seminar here was kind of high level and didn't get down in the dirt very much. We're going to get down there and you're going to be working on it. I'm going to help you shift your brain to think in this perspective because those kind of businesses win.

Yeah. Okay. Perfect, Steve. I think that was a great overview, folks. I threw the link in there. I'd ask some more information. You know, Steve, if you're able to stick around for the networking portion. You have your own dedicated table. And then, you know, if anybody has any specific questions, feel free to jump onto his table. I'll also have my table. I'm happy to answer questions about F5, upcoming boot camps, anything around market research, you know, and then we'll kind of go from there. But folks, if you enjoyed this presentation, like, can you just showcase the feedback? Use the emojis. You can press 1, 2, or 3 to kind of like Showcase hearts to argue. Okay, so Steve, you're still getting quite some positive reactions.

Well, I just sent my email. I know people ask, I realized I didn't put my contact, did I? Maybe I did. But I just put my email in there. Very easy to remember, steve@execs.com. I created that website or that email just to make it easy to remember. Feel free to ask any questions you want to know about the boot camp. I see lots of questions we just didn't have time for. I'm very happy to help you if I can. Perfect.

Thanks so much, Steve. Yeah, we shared your LinkedIn and we'll share the details in the follow-up email. Folks, you will get a recording of this, but like I said in the start of the presentation, within 24, maximum 48 hours, and then you can review this content. Steve covered a lot of core concepts, and hopefully that was valuable for you at your given stage. All right, we're gonna wrap things up. We'll see you in the networking session shortly, but if that's it, take care and enjoy the rest of your evening or afternoon, wherever you're joining in from. And thanks everyone.