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Every serious investor will ask: who else is doing this? Most founders have an answer ready. Very few have thought through that answer carefully enough to make it useful. A competitive map is not a list of logos. It is a diagnostic tool that reveals why your position exists — and whether it is strong enough to defend.
There are two common failure modes in competitive analysis.
The first is denying competition exists. 'There is nothing else like this on the market.' This answer is almost always wrong, and it signals inexperience to everyone who hears it. If no one else is addressing a problem, there are three possible explanations: you have found a genuine gap, the market is too small to interest others, or the problem is not as painful as you believe. Two of these three are bad news for your venture.
The second failure mode is listing only direct competitors — companies that look like yours — and concluding that because yours is better, you will win. This misses the much more important question: what is the customer doing today instead of using your product? That is your real competition.
The Competitive Reality Map is designed to avoid both traps.
A competitive map plots companies and alternatives on two axes that you define. The axes represent the two attributes that matter most to your target customer when deciding between options.
Choosing the right axes is the most important decision in building the map — and the most often rushed. Generic axes like 'quality vs. price' tell you almost nothing useful. The best axes are the two specific dimensions where your solution occupies a position that others do not.
To find your axes, go back to your JTBD research. What did customers say they were most frustrated by in current solutions? What would make a solution genuinely better for them, in their specific situation? The two most important dimensions in those answers are your axes.
Examples:
Once you have your axes, the next question is who goes on the map — and most founders only include one of three types of competition they should be plotting.
A complete competitive map includes three types of competition, not one.
Companies or products that address the same functional job, serving the same customer segment, through a similar mechanism. These are the obvious competitors — the ones your potential customers will mention when you ask what else they have tried.
Products or services that address the same underlying job through a different mechanism. If you are building a productivity tool for remote teams, your indirect competitors include physical whiteboards, video calls, email, and project management software that was not specifically designed for remote work. These are easy to underestimate because they do not look like you — but they are often the more powerful incumbents.
The option of doing nothing, or the workaround customers have built for themselves. This is often the most powerful competitor of all, because it requires the least activation energy. The customer already knows how to do the workaround. Switching to a new product requires learning, trust-building, and change management. Your product has to be demonstrably better than the workaround — not just incrementally different.
In Thailand and many ASEAN markets, non-consumption is a particularly important competitor to map because the workaround is often a human relationship: a trusted broker, a family member who handles things, a vendor who is slow but reliable. Replacing a trusted human relationship with a product requires a much stronger value proposition than replacing a generic incumbent.
Your strongest competitor is often the workaround your customer has already built and knows how to use.
The process has four steps:
If there is a gap on your map — a position that no current competitor occupies — the natural follow-up question is: why? If the gap is valuable and obvious, why hasn't a well-resourced competitor filled it?
There are legitimate answers to this question. The market may be too small for large players but viable for you. The solution may require deep local knowledge that international players do not have. A regulatory shift may have opened a new space recently. The technology needed to address it may have only recently become affordable.
There are also bad answers: 'no one has thought of it yet' (unlikely in any market that has been active for years), or 'existing players are too big and slow to move' (sometimes true, often wishful thinking). If you cannot explain why the gap exists, your map is incomplete.
A competitive map that is accurate today will not be accurate in six months. Markets move. New entrants appear. Established players acquire or pivot. What you are building is a hypothesis about where the gap is now — not a permanent claim about market structure.
Build the habit of updating your map quarterly. Each time you do, ask: has anyone moved into the gap? Has the gap itself shifted because customer priorities changed? Has non-consumption decreased because of something that made the workaround easier?
The founders who get surprised by competition are usually the ones who built their map once, put it in their pitch deck, and never looked at it again.
✎ A Note for GVP Students
Kasper-Tanakrit Sermsuksan is the Founder of SEA Bridge, Dean of SEA Bridge Institute of Entrepreneurship, and a Visiting Lecturer at Chulalongkorn University, Faculty of Engineering (Computer Engineering). Learn more →
