Part One: Strategy · Where demand comes from
It is natural to measure yourself against the product most like yours. The person choosing is comparing you with the spreadsheet, the assistant, the workaround, or doing nothing.
Makers know their rivals by name. They keep a comparison table, watch each other's release notes, and feel every missing checkbox. Customers, mostly, have never heard of any of them.
What the customer knows is what they do now. A shared spreadsheet with a tab nobody dares touch. A colleague who "just knows" how the rota works. A folder of email. Or nothing at all: the problem is simply lived with. These are the real alternatives, and they have advantages no rival has. They cost nothing extra. Everyone already knows how to use them. Nobody has to be persuaded.
A product built to beat its look-alike rivals ends up with the same features in a slightly different order. A product built to beat the spreadsheet has to answer a harder and more useful question: what does the spreadsheet do badly enough that someone would give it up?
It also has to respect what the old way does well. The spreadsheet is flexible. The assistant understands exceptions. If the product is worse at those, people will notice on the first day.
Scott Cook, who co-founded Intuit, has often said that the toughest competitor for its first product, Quicken, was the pencil. People balanced their checkbooks by hand, and it worked. Quicken had to be faster and easier than a pencil and a paper register, so it was designed to look like one.
The same is true of software sold to companies. The rival in the buyer's mind is often the process they already have, run by a person they like.
Therefore:
Find out what people do today when the problem comes up, including when they do nothing. Treat that as your competition, and learn what it does well before you try to beat it.
In practice. Ask five recent customers what they used the week before they found you. Write the answers at the top of your comparison table, above the rivals.
Goes with. Comfort with the old way is one of the FORCES FOR AND AGAINST (4). The real alternative shows where to be DIFFERENT WHERE IT COUNTS (8). You see it best when you WATCH WHAT THEY DO (20).