Your real competitor isn’t in your category. It’s the workaround
Earlier this year I worked with a startup building a revenue analytics tool for accounting firms. The founder is a domain expert who spent years at one of the biggest accounting software companies, and he built the product from what he knew about the problem.
His research was thorough. He talked to his own team, to people in his network and to possible prospects. Then he looked at what was already out there for financial forecasting. His buyers are
small firms of 10 to 25 accountants, already running their clients on Sage or QuickBooks, mostly mid-sized businesses in financial services. He saw that the built-in AI in those products
wasn’t doing this job well. In his words, it seemed “bolted on after the fact.”
So he built his competitor slide from what he found: the accounting software and the other forecasting tools.
The Person Who Wasn’t On It
What he missed was the human being doing the work at the end of every month, every quarter, and every year end. His product forecasts net revenue retention and renewals across a firm’s whole client ledger, using billing volumes, and client interactions. Those firms already had a way to get that done. A junior accountant did it by hand, every month, quarter, and year end, for the firm’s own P&L, cash flow, and balance sheet. Twenty hours at the end of every month, two weeks at the end of every quarter, a full month at year end.
That was the workaround, and it was paying a junior’s salary. Nobody called it a problem. Nobody was shopping for a tool, because the work was getting done. It was non-consumption.
Why The Research Couldn’t Find It
His research was brilliant. He had gone through every feature of every product on the market, down to the last bolt. He had done nothing wrong. But research that starts from the category
can only ever put competitors on the page. He started from the category, not from the actual ICP, their circumstances and their triggers.
This is the Invisible Market. When your ICP is built around the category, you can’t see the firms that aren’t using any product at all. They aren’t comparing you to a competitor. They’re
comparing you to the pain of doing nothing. For most early-stage tech companies, that is a bigger opportunity than displacing an incumbent, and the buyer is almost invisible if your ICP is
built around a category.
It also explains why a cautious buyer stays put. These firms handle sensitive client data and rely on the AI tools inside their accounting software. A junior accountant they know and trust, working in systems they already approve, feels safer than a new tool. That is hard to see from a competitor grid.
The Moment The Workaround Breaks
If he had dug into the workaround, he would have found the triggers. Workarounds become expensive. Non-consumption has limits: as the firm takes on clients, the workload gets heavier
and the systems more complicated, and the workaround gets more burdensome.
What happens when the junior accountant goes on holiday, gets sick or has to travel in the last week of the quarter? What happens when the firm adds ten more clients? That is a circumstance, not a category or a job title. Triggers explain why now, and why now is the moment the workaround becomes too expensive or too burdensome to keep carrying.
Finding Your Own
If you want to find your own workaround, you need a much more outward look than the market map. Start from the category and the competitors and you wear blinders: some of your prospects won’t even consider what you solve a problem. The workaround might be a junior accountant pulling reports at every month, quarter, and year end. It might be an intern doing it at
9am every Monday morning. Name the status quo, not only the competitors in your rear-view mirror, and you can see non-consumption.
From what I’ve seen, it is almost always circumstance over category. It is also a far less crowded place to start, with prospects who have a routine that works and no reason yet to look for
anything else.
Try It Tomorrow Morning
Take your competitor slide and run these four questions against your last three prospect conversations:
1. Who does this work today, and how many hours does it take?
2. What happens when that person is off in the last week of the quarter?
3. What circumstance would make the workaround stop being good enough?
4. Write the buyer’s description of the task with no product words, then compare it to your
homepage.
The New Row
After our conversations I asked the founder to go back to his competitor slide. Under the big, shiny brands he now has a new row. It says “a junior accountant.” What is your blue ocean? What workaround isn’t on your competitor slide?
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