Competition is a strange concept.

We can spin it to be all inclusive or all exclusive.

If Google is in the search business,

they have only a handful of “search” competitors.

If they are in the advertising business,

they have hundreds.

If Facebook is in the social networking business,

they too only have a handful of “social networking” competitors.

But if they are in the consumer attention business,

again there are hundreds of things that compete for our time.

If Apple is in the phone and tablet business…

A much simpler concept is thinking in terms of jobs.

As a consumer, I hire Google everyday to find things on the Internet.

I hire Facebook to discover what my friends are doing and stay connected.

These jobs compete for my time,

but they don’t directly compete with each other,

because I get to choose where I spend my time.

Forget describing what you do in terms of categories.

The next time someone asks: What your company does?

Answer in terms of what your target customers hire you to do for them.

For instance:

I am not in the software business, the consulting business,

the business modeling business, or the lean startup business.

I can similarly go broad or narrow depending on who’s asking.

This however doesn’t change:

My customers hire us to help them build successful products and businesses.

Therefore, what do we do:

We build better entrepreneurs.

People want to know what you do before how you do it.

The next best question is why do you do what you do:

We build better entrepreneurs because…

That’s a topic for another time.