Definitely show, don’t tell. Martin Zwilling, an Angel Investor stated in a recent article that “Every investor hates those large competitive analysis tables filled with check marks and red dots.” So do I – it makes my eyes bleed. You want to have a visual that explains it at first glance. Here are 2 good options:
- The “Magic Quadrant” – a graph attributed to Gartner shows how you measure up to competition based on 2 main differentiators.
- The “Petal Diagram” – Steve Blank, a Lecturer at UC Berkeley looks at a different approach: Where your startup is at the center of several markets that each touch on a specific aspect of your solution, but you actually encompass all of them all. There should be only about 3 top competitor in each petal – this is a good representation without over-crowding. You don’t have to have 5 petals – even 3 is enough – it’s a great way to solve the conundrum of having more than 2 metrics to measure your uniqueness by.