Defining Your Competitive Advantage

I sat in a talk yesterday with Melissa Bradley of 1863 Ventures and she was talking about fundraising strategies for startups.

In one section, she broke down the seven strategies startups can use define their competitive advantage.

These strategies are:

• Cost leadership: You can create something of value while increasingly reducing the cost to do it as you scale.
• Differentiation: You are unique in the market in how you are approaching the problem or providing the solution.
• Innovation: What you offer is novel and hard to replicate in a short period of time. Innovation is usually a combination of different competitive advantage strategies being used in sync.
• Operational effectiveness: You are good at running the business and getting product out to customers at scale efficiently and reliably.
• Technology: You developed something in house that allows you to operate and scale efficiently.
• Adaptability: You are able to shift the company focus and output quickly with changing circumstances.
• Information: You have access to key information that is hard to attain. You may also be able to aggregate information in ways that give you novel insights.

To me, what applies to startups also applies to the individual. As you think about your competitive advantage in life, it will probably fall into one of these categories.

This framework made me reconsider how I want to think about how I describe my value-add as individual in the marketplace. Hopefully, this will help get the wheels turning for you also.