The reality is the market leader takes 76% of the share - awesomer product or not. All that promise is really just a big giant red herring - a blackhole that lures you in because, hey, it could be a wormhole to unlimited success, but in reality is going to rip you atom from atom into a disintegrated hulk of just another company that made better stuff, once.
The mechanics of all this are far less mysterious than a blackhole. The market leaders have built in cognitive bias advantages, built-in financial advantages and built in structural advantages. They are made to extract every ounce of value out of the existing market, and this all makes competition a losing game.
Even for companies that realize the existing market is the problem, the trap sucks them back in. Escape seems impossible because everything they’ve been taught up to this point reinforces a mindset of COMPETE or die.
We wrote a book about it last year, with founders lamenting:
“Why doesn’t anyone see it but me?”
“How come investors won’t fund this amazing idea?”
“Why do our customers keep trying to compare us to the wrong companies?”
The existing market trap is powerful. And if you try to fight it, you end up wasting a lot of energy (time and resources) with incremental upside at best.
BUT, when you change the game, change the rules and identify the fundamentally different problem you solve, with real costs for real people who have real money - you force the existing market, and its dusty-old-optimized-for-the-way-things-are-now leader to react to you.
And while those leaders are highly skilled at extracting value, they struggle — often severely — to adapt to new rules and emerging markets.
That is how you fight the existing market trap. Not by taking on the market leaders, but by taking on the very premise of that market in the first place.