OnStartups.com recently wrote 13 Ways to Think About and Crush Your Competition. Here are a few thoughts we wanted to re-share with you:

You are your biggest competitor

You are often your biggest competitor. You should not completely ignore your competition, but the biggest battle happens inside of the four walls of your startup’s office. Startups come down to pure execution of a strategy on a daily basis and maintaining the faith for the long haul. Most startups don’t lose to competition, but because they lose the will to fight.

Copycats don’t have the roadmap

Before someone like Google comes along to compete with you, a slew of copycats will spring up. We recently had this happen with Onswipe as an unoriginal 100% ripoff popped up using our name to gain press with a shoddy product. Along the way, a copycat will constantly try to play fast follower by copying your latest and greatest feature. The problem is the fact that, copycats are always one step behind and often stay that way. They never started out creating the company as a problem they wanted to solve, but as a way to capitalize on the great opportunity that you shed light upon. The copycats will create confusion in the marketplace, which should be your greatest worry. Potential customers may ask how you are different than them. The way to combat this is to sell more than just the current snapshot in time, but the longer-term vision. Since the copycat does not have your startup’s longer-term vision, you can out sell them.

Focus on the normals

Pinterest has become a huge success and has grown tremendously over the past year. The largest part of Pinterest’s success story has not been its adoption by the inner circle of Silicon Valley or sex crazed college students, but those of women from Middle America. Most competitors will come into the market and try to create buzz amongst the early adopters of the tech community. Instead of falling into this trap, try to attract the normal users of the world ie- women in the Midwest or a teenager that wants to find new music. It’s hard to reach this audience and once you have a grasp on it, it will be hard for a competitor to come in and compete against you.

Avoiding the build versus buy problem

Many startups will not be competing with other startups, but with the internal development teams of their larger customers. Moveable Type lost the blogging wars to WordPress by not moving themselves towards being a fully flexible platform. Instead of having conversations that are a build versus buy scenario where it’s either your startup or your customer’s internal development team, you should be positioning yourself into a build OR buy scenario. In order to do this, your product needs to become a platform that others can build upon to meet their needs. This will let you grow overtime to meet the needs of any customer without sacrificing your own roadmap. This will often require you to sacrifice some short-term gains for long-term sustainability. Any and all changes you make to your software have to be applicable to the greater good of the platform. That means no custom development and no bending to the wills of customers’ crazy demands.

Eight Ways to Go Viral

What do Facebook, LinkedIn, Youtube, Dropbox and Skype have in common? Except for being ridiculously successful, they all enjoyed a strong viral effect that helped accelerate their growth.

How did they do that? Here’s the thing; most people assume that these companies grew by pure word of mouth. Well, that’s only half of the story. The other half is that they deliberately built viral features into their products that helped spread the word.

How to Manage Your Company’s Online Reputation (Infographic) Many of us are intimately familiar with the rigmarole of personal online-reputation control, especially as the 2011 holiday party season comes to a close. We know to delete any tipsy tweets and comb through Facebook to un-tag ourselves in embarrassing party photos.

What Startup to Build? If you’re asking which startup to build, not whether to build, you probably have several half-baked ideas and don’t know which one to devote yourself to. Or you have no idea at all.

When An Entrepreneur Fails From Lack of Nerve Watching an entrepreneur fail is sad, but watching them fail from a lack of nerve is tragic.

Others suggest that the 2012 date marks the end of the world or a similar catastrophe. Scenarios suggested for the end of the world include the arrival of the next solar maximum, or Earth’s collision with a black hole, passing asteroid or a planet called “Nibiru”.

Everyone around the web will be posting images and discussing their thoughts on this phenomenon, so make sure that your 2012 images are alt text labeled correctly for better in-image ad targeting.

Kmart

Curves

Hyatt

The night started with a great speech from Ophir Tanz, CEO & founder on all our growth and successes this year. We received $7M in funding, broke new records as the Top 10 Quantcast network, grew our team 70% and moved into a new office. There’s no doubt that 2011 has been an amazing year for GumGum. We thanked Ophir for a great year with his framed cover from Entrepreneur Magazine earlier this year.

As a thank you for all the hardwork this year, Ophir gave everyone Beats by Dre headphones, in addition to a personalized gift ranging from a massage to golf to cooking supplies. Everyone was ecstatic to say the least!

We had a blast and can’t wait to see what 2012 has in-store for in-image advertising and GumGum! Here’s Ken Weiner, CTO and his wife.

Ophir Tanz, CEO and his girlfriend.

Sarah Wallace, Relationship Manager and her guest for the night.

Scott Dahlgren, Senior Account Director of Sales and his wife.

Tiffany Leslie, Communications Manager and Carmel Tanaka, Office Manager.

Brennan Beyer, VP of Sales and his wife.

Keith Rives, Web Engineer and Ryan Rosario, Data Scientist.

Phil Schraeder, VP of Finance and his partner.

Patricio Mondet, Account Executive and his fiance (congrats!).

Greg Pritchard, Director of Network Development and his fiance (congrats to you too!).

Carmel Tanaka, Office Manager and her husband.

Snow White and The Huntsman

Axe Bodyspray

Bruno

Where our wonderful office assistant Carmel will greet you.

“The Pit” is the main area where we all work, surrounded by private offices and conference rooms.

The War Room where amazing thinking happens.

How can we work next to the beach and not have a surf board in the office?

We can’t wait to fuel ourselves in this awesome kitchen.

The team is busy unpacking and getting down to business. Plus we had 2 new people start today!

Peaceful patio to enjoy lunch and outdoor meetings.

On the corner of 4th St/Wilshire Blvd, 4 blocks from Santa Monica beach.

With photos like these, how couldn’t users be engaged with relevant in-image ads?

We’re sold. These will be made at the company potluck!