Two weeks into building Shezaar, I was scrolling Instagram on my couch when an account stopped me cold. And I just sat there… panicking for almost an hour!
Someone in my own city was building the exact same product, the exact same idea, for the exact same customer.
I had a competitor and I was sure this was the thing that would end Shezaar!!
Their product seemed it was almost built.
So how would I compete with the exact same idea? I had no differentiation left. Would I have to change my product?
The Competitors You Never See
I am happy I didn’t act on it. Because the year that followed proved just how WRONG I had it!!
Bob Moesta and Chris Spiek, who’ve spent years studying why people switch products, map every purchase as a fight between four forces. Two of them push your customer toward you. The other two hold her exactly where she is.
If you have less than 100 customers (in B2C) and less than 10 (in B2B), these forces are the only competitors that you should care about.
And I will bet you anything that one of them is beating you right now.
How Bad Is The Current Situation?
I started Shezaar because I was obsessed with reducing the waste fashion created. I had seen first hand what it did to communities in Chile and Peru, and I wanted to do my part to fix it.
Fashion brands don’t discard just a few racks of unsold clothing. They bury entire warehouses every single month.
So the problem was clearly real and clearly very enormous.
And for years, nobody cared where any of it ended up. But the upcoming, stricter regulations around end producer responsibility were about to change that. And I thought this presented a perfect opportunity.
My hypothesis was simple. If a brand was going to be held accountable for its product ending up in a landfill, the current supply chain was too convoluted to trust.
So I started to build on this hypothesis.
Every founder of a fashion brand I spoke to, agreed that this was a huge problem. Coincidentally in 2025 the fashion market was moving towards supporting circular business models.
So, in my head, this was like my entire market saying yes to Shezaar before I had even asked.
The reality was far from it.
A survey revealed that only 7% of fashion executives planned to put money behind circular business models and less than a third called resale a priority for 2026.
Which is why it took me a while to realize that the problem I found was real and expensive and getting increasingly regulated. But it wasn’t a priority for this quarter, or even this year.
When you stumble upon a problem and think you want to build a solution for it, you need to prove that this problem is urgent enough for your customer that they’ll pay you right now to solve it.
But I have seen customers do often say things we want to hear, just to be polite.
So these two questions have been my way to sift through my customer’s words and get to their actions.
Ask if they’re already spending money or time on the thing you’re solving.
If they are, look at what they’re doing. A hacky spreadsheet. An intern doing it by hand. A process everybody complains about. Annoyance means the problem is live and somebody would pay to fix it. A system nobody has ever complained about is already working well enough.
Now go back to your last customer call. Did they give you a definitive sign that they’re working on your problem? Or were they being polite?
I had brands agree the problem was real, agree the regulation was coming, and still do nothing at all. It took me a long time to work out what I was actually being measured against. Not the other platforms. The version of a solution they were already doing badly, for cheap.
How Good Is The New Thing?
Let’s say the problem is urgent. The next thing you need to figure out is whether your solution is actually better than what this person is already doing without you?
My offer was that the brand gives me its unsold inventory and never sees it again. I sell what I can through the app, hand the rest to donation partners who actually move product, and send whatever’s left to a recycler. At every step the brand can log in and see where its own clothes ended up.
This offer was a better product for maybe half the people I pitched it to. But it wasn’t a better product for the brands I actually wanted.
If a brand already had a warehouse and a logistics team, I was replacing something that already worked. And the regulation that would’ve made this their problem was three years away.
The version of Shezaar that would have won those big brands needed data I hadn’t collected yet. So what I was really asking them to buy was a bet, that I’d be enough better by the time they actually needed me. That was a hard sell.
If your thing is only a little better than what someone already does, the hassle of switching isn’t worth it. And from your side of the table that gap always looks bigger than it is. Founders overvalue the thing they just built.
So run this test on your own idea:
We are better at {features you have} for {for the specific audience}, and I am deliberately worse at {features you don’t care about}.
If you can answer that cleanly, you’re on the right track.
Now lets say your product is dramatically better and your customer’s problem is urgent. Somebody still has to take an action they might not have taken before.
What Habits The Customer Has To Break?
This is the one I never accounted for.
Every brand that agreed with me still had to break a habit that nobody on their team had budgeted a single hour for.
Adopting Shezaar meant an ops person logging SKUs, photos, and condition notes into a system nobody on the team had used before, on top of a job that was already full. A liquidator just showed up and hauled the product away.
So I took the work off their hands entirely. All a brand had to do was put the inventory on a truck. I photographed every piece, wrote the condition notes, loaded all of it into the system, and they could still log in and see exactly what had arrived and what was happening with their inventory.
The products you say yes to without thinking twice are the ones that fit into the day you already have.
And if using your product means breaking a habit, it stops mattering how much better the product is. Adoption gets hard.
So what does your customer have to stop doing in order to start using your solution?
But let’s say that change in behavior is unavoidable. Then there are two ways to get better adoption.
Go after people who don’t have the old habit yet.
Find the handful of true believers, the “early adopters”, who will switch on conviction alone.
But sometimes a customer can agree the problem is urgent, agree you’re dramatically better, agree you’ve made the switch almost free, and still do nothing.
What Happens If The Customer Gets It Wrong?
Matt Dixon and Ted McKenna studied more than 2.5 million recorded sales calls for a book called The JOLT Effect, and found that 40 to 60% of deals die from no decision at all.
The thing beating founders most often is nobody. Not another company. Not a better offer.
Just the customer’s fear of being wrong.
“Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM” is the oldest line in enterprise sales. Because it means that the safe option is the one that, when it goes wrong, can’t be traced back to one person.
And that fear is strongest at the top. The person who has the authority to say yes to you is also the person with the most to lose if that yes doesn’t work out.
Who is that person for you? And do they know your name yet?
You can manufacture urgency. You can build something dramatically better. You can absorb every hour of the work so nobody on their side has to change what they do all day. But there is no feature you can ship that fixes somebody’s fear of looking stupid in front of their boss.
The only thing that fixes it is trust. And you’re not building trust in a thirty minute call.
Which is why I stopped treating the cold email as the first touch. Before I sent one, I’d spend three or four days literally stalking that brand’s Instagram, actually reading and commenting. If I could find the founder and their profile was open, I followed them and engaged there too, always from my personal account. If they wrote on Substack I would read it. If they were on LinkedIn I was there.
By the time my email landed, I wasn’t a stranger asking for their unsold inventory. I was the girl who’d been hanging around for a few days leaving thoughtful comments I could reference.
It’s tedious, it’s slow, and there were weeks I hated it. But I don’t think a single brand would have said yes to me without it.
Before You Panic
Not every product has to solve something urgent. Plenty of the apps on my phone were built on something nobody was losing sleep over, and how we build for that is a whole other piece.
So the next time a competitor turns up in your feed, you don’t have to panic the way I did.
If you’re still looking for product market fit, there are four other things standing between you and your next customer. And none of them are ever going to show up on Instagram.
Tell me which one of the four is beating you right now. That’s the one worth your hour.
If you're a solo founder building something, tell me. And let me know how I can help!
You make a great point about people telling you what they think you want to hear. I've flagged a couple customers in our CRM to avoid asking for feedback for the same reason: that feedback does way more harm than good.