Your Worst Enemy Is Yourself

So true. Although, I prefer pg's version:<p>The only "competitor" you should worry about is the Back Button.*<p>*<a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/startuplessons.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.paulgraham.com/startuplessons.html</a>, <a href="http://mixergy.com/paul-graham-design/" rel="nofollow">http://mixergy.com/paul-graham-design/</a>

This is fairly obvious but easy to overlook advice from Fred.<p>The concept of flow is often mentioned here on HN and letting competitors destroy flow is an easy trap to fall into. As others have mentioned, the question remains how much time one should allocate toward observing and reacting to competitors. While it is undoubtedly above 0, one has to take into account the opportunity cost involved as well as the energy wasted on switching gears, which can be quite significant and is often overlooked.

Agree with everything said there. The question left unanswered is where to draw the fine line between focusing on a predefined strategy and react to what your competitors are doing. Example: today Facebook announced Deals, should Foursquare just keep doing what it is doing or do something different to counter Facebook's invasion?<p>(I personally believe Foursquare should just keep doing what they are doing but let's discuss this anyway)

As with most thing balance is required, spend to long looking at competition and you will probably lose cohesion in your app as you struggle to find ways to keep up on the feature curve, don't spend enough time and you risk being late to the game on something big thats changed in your space.

If you say that to someone successful, it's very rarely true. It's only really applicable to those who aren't successful.

Speaking as someone who's been sucked into that hole: It's very cozy in there and very difficult to get out.<p>Just remember, you can spend a lifetime finding the optimal path, but you can only make a step <i>now</i>.

The same applies to academic research groups too.

The scariest thing is the truth.