CONTROVERSIAL TAKE:
It's not bad to look identical to your competitors.

I want you to think back to the late 90s and early 2,000s.

There was no marketing-leading search engine.

Would it be Google?
Or Yahoo?
AltaVista?

With an emerging market, there likely will be one winner.

But it won't come from Google running attack ads against Yahoo.

In fact you'd be hard pressed to find Google saying anything about any other early search engine vendors.

They became the market leader because they won on distribution.

They were able to reach the largest amount of greenfield market before their competitors did.

We are seeing the same phenomenon right now with vibecoding tools.

Players like Bolt and Lovable are competing to be THE VIBECODING TOOL.

They have the identical positioning strategy...
because they are both trying to win the same identical position in the market.

The market is emerging, so it is a war of distribution.

A "land-grab" per say.

This is the game VCs are playing when they fund these companies. Can we outspend our competitors to become the market leader of this market once it solidifies.

Ben Horowitz recently said on a podcast that it's not a given that OpenAI will be the winner of AI chatbot market, because the market is still forming and changing by the day (and he's saying this while they approach 1 billion users!)

When you compare the ChatGPT homepage and the Claude homepage, they are functionally identical.

And again... that actually isn't a bad thing, because they are competing to be THE CHATBOT FOR THE WORLD.

For them, they cannot waste ANY resources fighting a vendor that is the same size as them in an emerging market.

Every single dollar needs to go toward gaining NEW greenfield customers from the massive market that is appearing.

The advice to "ignore your competitors" makes a lot of sense — in this one very specific circumstance.

HOWEVER!!!!!!!!!!
MASSIVE CAVEAT!!!!!!!!!!

If you are a startup entering a MATURE MARKET CATEGORY,
then differentiation and uniqueness compared to the MARKET LEADERS
needs to be your biggest priority.

If you make a CRM in 2025, you need to immediately answer "why us over Salesforce or HubSpot."

But that is because the CRM market is mature and solidified, and has market leading incumbents with deep enterprise adoption.

In many ways, the maturity of your market category determines your positioning strategy.

If you're in a new an emerging market, truly ignore the other YC companies. Pretend they don't exist.
Spend your money on reaching the greenfield before they do.