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Do Not Let Competitors and Major Customers Dictate Your Direction

Originally published 2021-09-11Management notes followed by Robin’s commentary; the opening does not identify a separate source

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Collected in Robin Shen’s Field Notes · Content type and attribution are shown above

English translation of the Chinese post originally published 2021-09-11. Translated 2026-11-05 with AI assistance. Historical figures and claims have not been updated or independently verified. 中文原文

Reading guide

Robin cautions product teams against merely copying competitors or letting one large customer turn a reusable product into bespoke project work. Preserve your own industry understanding and make products easy to adopt and scale. The note allows an exception for specialized products with long implementations: fewer customers paying higher prices can be a viable model, rather than rejecting such products outright.

Key points

Competitive intelligence cannot replace your own industry judgment.
Distinguish general product needs from customization for one customer.
Consider implementation complexity alongside customers, pricing, and the scaling model.

One clear path continues into the distance among several branching routes, suggesting choice and focus. — Entrepreneurship & strategyThematic illustration · AI generated

Full text — English translation

Do Not Let Competitors and Customers Lead You Around 1. Do not focus only on what competitors do and forget what you should do. 2. Do not simply copy and paste their approaches, losing your own deep industry understanding and becoming a perpetual second-rate follower. 3. Do not accommodate customers excessively, especially large ones. Building everything around one customer becomes customization, turning you into a project contractor unable to create a product meeting most people’s needs. 4. Do not make the product too complicated or difficult to market. Make it easy for everyone to start using; that is the potential for sustained growth. Robin: ‘If implementation takes over half a year and only specialists understand the product, it is certainly too complicated. That does not make it impossible, but you need to charge a few customers very high prices.’ Robin: ‘Make it as simple as possible and as quickly repeatable at scale as possible. That is the winning approach of this era.’

These articles are personal notes, book excerpts, and collected reprints. Figures and events reflect the time of the original publication, are not current information, and do not constitute investment advice.

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