Choose the right competition...

If I were to write a book on how Unacademy reached where it reached, this post would be in the book. Let’s face it - how much ever we talk about ignoring the competition - we will still not ignore and we will in our heads have our competitors mapped who we will track either sometimes or a lot of times.

But we can do one thing.

We can choose the right competition.

I believe that the most profound truth is still “Which game do you play?” and not “How do you play the game?”.

Though latter is important but getting the former right is orbit shifting.

I still remember when Roman and I went to pitch to many investors in 2015 - I think it was around 50 investors across Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore - and when we were asked “Who is your biggest competition?” - we always replied “YouTube”.

And we truly believed according to first principles that YouTube is the largest learning platform. Even though it’s unstructured, it is the largest.

And we wanted to change that in Education like Twitch did for Gaming.

It might not seem so that way then but today just this mindset, just this way of thinking would be one of the top few reasons Unacademy reached where it reached. We still have a long way to go and we are just getting started.

When you pick the right competition from first principles it does the following things:

• You don’t get trapped in the small game

• You always think big and you always think of disruptive stuff

• You innovate instead of copy pasting analogy based solutions

• You are running a different race, very very different that what others are doing

• You look at the world very differently / completely different lens to look at your Product and who you are competing with

• You think of building something big and creating a dent instead of just creating a product and a business: Wrote more on that in 2019 here: https://blog.unacademy.com/successful-and-create-a-dent-687bd9ff574f

The ones who become successful end up creating a lot of jobs, end up creating a lot of value for the team members and shareholders and most importantly customers. But the ones who create a dent also have a burning desire to push the industry forward. They shatter all existing beliefs and create their own beliefs. They don’t just create great products. They recreate the industry as we know of. Customers love them and competitors fear them for their innovation.

And creating a dent begins with picking the right game.

Just today one of my Board members messaged me that we now have more Subscribers in Test Prep than any other online or offline institute. That’s one way to look at it and that’s not a bad way to look at it.

But here’s another way:

Who I would really love to compete with is Netflix - they have 193M Subscribers. Now can we compete with Netflix and build Iconic Products for Learning and Education that have more Subscribers than them?

We certainly can and we certainly will. And we will play to win.