From Panic Attack to Growth Hack

The thing about start-ups is that though they may be irresistably cute and cuddly, their immune systems naturally are quite immature. So the diseases that merely irritate and disfigure established enterprises often prove fatal at the launch stage, none more so than that signature corporate wasting syndrome of our day, FOMO.

The fear of missing out: it's never been so easy to succumb to it than in this era of social media when the 24 hour news cycle is constantly pinging the phones in our pockets and the watches on our wrists. Not only will Siri unfailingly roust you when it's time to pick up more baby wipes on your way home, but likewise dispassionately alert you whenever Elon Musk has gone into a fugue state -- and most distracting of all, announce the exact moment when your nearest competitor has outraised you on the capital markets and/or secured an enterprise deal with your fondest prospect.

Whenever this welter of competitive intel blows up your internal Slack channels or otherwise pulls you off-task or into a slough of despond, you need to take heed because that's FOMO trying to infect you, and bad news, prior exposure may not have been enough to innoculate you. Indeed, there is no FOMO vaccine, but don't worry, this is not the part where I badger you to turn off your devices for a certain number of hours a day, because I'm not going to be doing that either.

All I can offer you this is this simple incantation: when the competition's moves -- or rather, the fear of their moves -- begin to preoccuppy you, think long and hard instead about your customers. Of course, as an early-stage start-up, you may not have any actual customers to consider, so think instead about the prospective customers you identified and profiled in the Account-Based Marketing planning exercise you were previously advised to undertake at launch. Oh, you forgot to do that too? Okay, do it now, here's how.

The question to consider is, will this latest new flash going to make any significant difference to your customers or would-be customers business lives? Think about the unique operational or competitive value that your product or service can provide to them, and how it is different from that touted by your newly funded competitor with its newly expanded market share. Now, having adopted the customer perspective, if you can't honestly differentiate the value your product provides, then, FOMO aside, you have an actual product development and marketing problem to address, and you need to get on it right away.

So perhaps there is a positive benefit to FOMO after all: to the extent that it refocuses you on your customer mission and pressure tests your product development and go-to-market strategies, then the FOMO that doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

I've seen quite a few founders come to be crippled by chronic competitive anxiety and it no cases did it contribute positively to the success of the enterprise. It doesn't have to happen to you. Just keep this in mind: for all the talk of competitive disruption that's out there, most of it amounts to no disruption whatsoever. It's just competitive distraction. Don't let it take your eyes off your customers.