Discussion area for competitors

Discussions
#1

I am on speaking terms with a number of competitors in my space and ‘sort of’ know a few more.

Some of us are very direct competitors - others just in same industry niche and not really competitors.

Been thinking of setting up some sort of forum where we may be able to help each other out with some of the challenges facing this niche.

  • Is this worth doing via a private forum or is it better just via Email (e.g. Joe might be fine telling me something, but wouldn’t want to tell Bob the same who is a direct competitors - though guess can do via private/direct messages).

  • Any tips on forum to use (easiest way would be Linked In but the forums are a bit sh1t)

  • Any tips on guiding agendas / discussion points to help get off ground (obviously a lot are specific to niche but many general).

Also - in another lifetime a company I worked for did a ‘benchmarking’ thing where a 3rd party ran some surveys and collected together all sorts of KPI’s and would report back the anonymous average/min/max and where you stood against group to give you ideas about where you were doing well and where you could improve. It was ran by a big consulting company though and cost a fortune so anyone seen a modern cheap alternative?

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#2

Hey Rhino. Why not use Slack? The DMs would handle anything that needs to be selectively shared.

What field are you in?

#3

Here in Ukraine we have a lot of service companies (=outsourcers). Potentially, we all are competitor to each-ther, but we have a chat=group in the Skype where we can share our experience and ask questions. The same with Slack channel.
The situation looks similar to yours, so you can act in the similar way. Skype group or Slack channel is much easier to implement. If there will be interesting discussions, people, then you may start think about forum.

#4

I would be wary if any of my direct competitors approached me.

Also I would wonder that you might open yourself up to accusations of price fixing/monopolies etc. Probably not an issue at our scale, but still…

Anyway I prefer to “crush my enemies, drive them before me and hear der lamentation of de vimen”. ;0)

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#5

Interesting idea. I caught this Tony Robbins podcast episode with Jay Abraham (https://www.tonyrobbins.com/podcast/vault-tony-robbins-jay-abraham-part-1/) and one of the ideas that Jay talked about as a way to improve sales/marketing was to contact one person per day ( or week or something) that is in your same business but in a different market, and share tips with them.

In the example he gave, I think he had like a very regional business in mind (think: an insurance agent that only works with clients in their own city), so there would be no possibility for competition with other insurance agents in other cities and therefore it would be easy to share tips.

In your case, I don’t remember the type of biz that you run but I’m assuming it’s an online biz that wouldn’t fit into that same structure - but there are probably still certain types of business that are adjacent or indirectly competitive that you could share tips with.