Outthink Later: Why Good Competitive Intelligence Ignores Better Judgment
Weekly Winning Strategies
Outthink Later: Why Good Competitive Intelligence Ignores Better Judgment: Weekly Winning Strategies
Ask People to Work Against Their Better Judgment That’s the play. That’s how winners think in markets they weren’t invited into.
Forget playing it safe. Safe is where your competitors want you. They want you to be cautious. They want you to calculate risk like it’s your religion. And they want you stuck in spreadsheets while they move fast with instinct.
Better judgment is usually fear with a marketing budget.
In competitive intelligence, “better judgment” often appears wrapped in polite analysis. You’ll hear stuff like:
“The timing’s not right.”
“Let’s wait for more data.”
“The incumbents have too much market share.”
“They raised $20M, we can’t touch that.”
All of that sounds smart. Feels responsible. It’s also how you get left behind.
Markets don’t reward the rational. They reward the relentless.
You don’t need to out-think the competition. You need to out-decide them. Let’s look at what happens when people don’t follow “better judgment.”
Case Study: Lalo Baby products
This team entered a market owned by legacy giants like Graco and Baby Björn. “Better judgment” would’ve said:
Brand loyalty is too strong.
Pricing pressure is too tight.
Retail partnerships are locked up.
But they didn’t listen. They built a cleaner design. Stripped the branding. Spoke directly to new parents, not with smiles and rainbows, but real-world parenting grit. They didn’t wait for shelf space. They launched DTC, ran ads that looked more like memes than catalogue spreads, and let the community dictate the product roadmap.
The result was that they carved out a category inside a category. Not by being “better.” By being faster, scrappier, and less rational.
Competitor analysis should make you dangerous, not cautious.
Many run competitive intelligence like they’re writing a term paper. They present threat matrices. They colour-code risk. And they rank players on outdated dimensions.
Here’s what they should be doing:
Hunting for the weakest conviction in a competitor’s bet.
Ask what their competitors believe might be wrong.
Testing the edge cases—where the model breaks, not where it holds.
Pressuring their assumptions, not their competitor’s marketing deck.
You don’t beat the competition with clean charts. You beat them by getting dirty first.
Competitor analysis gets lazy because people want permission.
They want the data to say “Go.” They want the graphs to show green arrows. And they want the customer quotes to align in a tidy row. They want the data to make them look good. But markets don’t move on permission. They move on momentum.
Ask any early-stage founder who broke in from nowhere. They weren’t smarter. They weren’t safer. Plus they ignored their “better judgment” and asked:
“What if this market doesn’t care about what everyone else believes?”
Example: Reprise
Enterprise SaaS demo platforms are filled with red tape. Security reviews. Integrations. Endless sales cycles. Reprise didn’t wait for anyone to hand them access. They made live sales demos editable. That’s it. No backend changes. No code. Just let sales teams mock up product flows.
The pitch didn’t sound safe. It sounded sketchy to big companies at first. But guess what? A few fast-growing SaaS companies didn’t care. They wanted speed. They ran with it. That gave Reprise proof fast enough to make everyone else take notice. They could’ve waited for product-market fit surveys. They didn’t. And they went straight for product-market friction—found the sticking points, and used them as launch fuel.
Ask yourself: what would the smartest competitor never do?
Then build a test for it. If you’re in coffee? Open a location with no menu. If you’re in SaaS? Strip your pricing page down to one-tier. If you’re in fitness? Cancel contracts and let people quit anytime. Every market has rules that feel like the law. They’re not. They’re just leftovers from someone else’s success.
The real analysis challenges those rules. It doesn’t preserve them.
The maths will always say no. You’ll run models. The CAC won’t work. The payback will stretch too long. The LTV won’t make sense yet. And still, some founders will launch anyway. Some scrappy teams will put up a simple site, call 50 people manually, and build a business that makes no sense on paper but dominates in practice.
Why? Because while you’re respecting the math, they’re testing the margin. They’re working against better judgment.
Here’s the part no one says out loud:
The best competitor analysts? They lie to themselves just long enough to test what others are afraid of.
They act like they know something everyone else doesn’t. Not because they’re arrogant but because confidence gets you in the room long enough to see what’s real.
The market doesn’t care about your perfect logic.
It cares about motion.
It cares about timing.
It cares about who showed up ready to bleed.
Better judgment waits. Real players go.
Take this mindset into your next CI session:
Stop looking for safe gaps. Look for vulnerable myths.
Stop ranking features. Start breaking mental models.
Stop analysing to predict. Start analysing to provoke.
Ask:
Where are our competitors too rational?
Where are they playing the same tape from 5 years ago?
What assumptions are they clinging to because they used to work?
Then, go break those assumptions. That’s where the opportunity sits.
Working against your better judgment isn’t reckless. It’s how new players get into old games. No one’s waiting for your permission. No one cares about your due diligence. Markets reward guts. Especially when everyone else is still “waiting for signals.” So next time your gut says, “This feels risky,”
Better judgment kills momentum. CI should start fights, not settle debates
Ask yourself, who’s it risky for? If it’s risky for the competition, too, you may be on the right track.