Boris Cherny built Claude Code. He said something on The Peterman Podcast that stuck:
"It's easy to get sidetracked looking at competitors. You see what you could build by copying. It's harder to come up with novel ideas that solve the user need better."
He's right. When you study competitors, you inherit their assumptions.
For months, I built Peek by comparing it to Mint and Copilot. Charts. Categories. Budgets. The usual expense app toolkit.
Those apps were built on a lie: that you need to be an accountant to manage your money well. That if you don't categorize every transaction, you're failing at adulting.
Most people don't think like accountants. They don't want to reconcile ledgers. They want to understand their behavior without the guilt trip.
But I couldn't see that. I was trapped in someone else's paradigm.
We shipped wrong features because we borrowed the wrong lens. Even user interviews didn't break through. The insight was always there. We just couldn't see it because no competitor had solved it this way.
That's the cost of watching competitors. You lose the ability to see what's in front of you.
The way out: ignore them. Go back to first principles. Ask what problem you're solving. Ask if standard solutions make sense.
Most of the time, they don't.