I recently met an early-stage startup in a meetup for entrepreneurs in Dublin. They were working on an e-commerce solution for SMEs, and they already had a quite impressive working prototype. I am not going to question whether this is or is not lean . When I asked the founder about their competitors, I got the worst possible answer: " We have no competitors " - with a big smile. Every time I hear that I think about four different possibilities: 1) They didn't even bother to do a proper search on Google, which is bad because they didn't do their homework. Anything or anyone between their startup and the money is a competitor. 2) They don't know what market are they in , which is even worse because they are building a solution without a problem or potential customers. The " this product is for everyone " simply doesn't work. 3) They don't have any competitors because it is not an attractive market at all, which is catastrophic ...