Startup City: Healthy competition leads to better outcomes

As I sit down to write this article in my home in St. Pete, I smile and pinch myself. It is another beautiful day in the Sunshine City, mild and sunny in April. My windows are wide open and a gentle breeze carries the sounds of music from the Tampa Bay Blues Festival in Vinoy Park alongside the reverberation of cheering fans at a competitive swim meet at the North Shore Aquatics Complex.

It reminds me how fortunate I am to live and work here after finding my way back to the Tampa Bay Area last year. My husband, who grew up in St. Pete and attended Lakewood High School, is also excited to be back in a region that has evolved into the city we see and love today. He’s always been a big sports guy, so the region’s latest reputation as Champa Bay only adds to the appeal.

The competitive spirit is alive and well here. We are fortunate to have multiple sports teams including football, hockey, baseball and soccer reaching (or nearly reaching) the highest levels of their competitions in the last couple of years.

I believe that healthy competition is not only important in the sports world, but also in business. According to a paper presented by the Brookings Institution, “Competition is the basis of a market economy. It forces businesses to innovate to stay ahead of other firms, to keep prices as low as they can to attract customers, and to pay sufficient wages to avoid losing workers to other firms.”

An ecosystem that supports healthy competition is good for the startup world as well.

Competition is Good for Startups

As a marketing professional in the startup world, one of my all time favorite books is Play Bigger – How Pirates, Dreamers and Innovators Create New Markets. The book introduces the idea and discipline of category design. Category design is a business strategy and discipline that helps companies create, develop and dominate new categories of products and services. It promotes the idea of creating and building something different, not just better.

But different doesn’t mean that you don’t have competition – whether that be direct or indirect. Christopher Lochhead, one of the authors of Play Bigger, just recently wrote a blog post on this very subject. According to Lochhead, “… competition isn’t a bad thing. It’s actually a good (no, a necessary) development – for yourself, your company, and your industry.”

I have witnessed firsthand that one of the biggest challenges facing a startup in its early stages is “shiny object syndrome.” There is a constant friction between knowing when to focus and when to pivot. Competition helps to inform that decision point. In addition to validating that a market exists to solve a problem, it also forces a company to innovate with different and better solutions. Fulfilling customer needs and truly solving those problems become the focus for survival.

A Local Story Leveraging Competition

In recent years companies have also figured out the value of competition through a concept called gamification. According to the Smithsonian Science Education Center, surprisingly, gamification has been around since the 19th century. The scientist who first published the periodic table of elements is credited with first using gamification. In 2011, Al Gore famously said, “Games are the new normal.”

St. Pete-based Jonathan Gibbons, CEO of digital trading intelligence startup vig.io, recently discovered the value of gamification for his own company. In less than six months, his team has increased its user base from 6,000 to 65,000 since deploying a gamification strategy.

Gibbons, who studied economics in college, has always been both mathematically inclined and competitive in sports. He put himself through college on both an academic and sports scholarship, playing basketball for two years at Holy Cross before coming back to Florida and graduating from the University of South Florida. After building and selling a successful business in 2018, he began thinking about his next company.

Inspired by the changes in the trading space with mobile and the next generation of investors who were using the free-to-trade apps like Robinhood, the idea became clear. “The free-to-trade thing was already done. We wanted to do the ‘what to trade’ to address the analytics side of it, explains Gibbons. “It is called decision support. Decision intelligence.”

After launching in 2019, vig.io found traction with this generation of traders seeking information as they jumped with two feet into the trading space. But the team wanted to capture more than just the two or three out of 10 retail investors who were seeking information to help them improve their trading. Gibbons and the team began to ask themselves, “How do you make this stuff applicable to 10 out of 10?” and expand their market opportunity.

The team wanted to increase their community of users and encourage them to use the tools they had developed to become better traders. In early 2021, they began seeing the trends with millennials and Gen Z playing hyper lightweight games. “If you look at the scale of users playing these hyper lightweight games,” says Gibbons, “it is a much larger population.”

So, they began integrating simple, accessible, virtual play-to-earn stock games into their solution. They started testing and analyzing the impact of the games on their user base. In late 2021 and early 2022, account creation on vig.io spiked and continues to grow beyond 65,000 users.

“Humans play games to learn,” explains Gibbons. “The cross app utilization on our analytics tool also spiked. What they wouldn’t look for before, they absolutely are using the app for all day now.” In order to be successful with the games, the users began seeking the information that vig.io had always set out to provide.

The vig.io team has learned how to leverage the competitive spirit of human nature. And, in the end, they have been able to reach and educate more people with decision intelligence for trading stocks, ETF and crypto.

I guess games truly are the “new normal.”

Startup City will continue to explore topics on what it takes to have a thriving startup ecosystem, on a bi-weekly basis, through stories and thoughts of local residents.

Michelle Waite is the VP of Marketing at Florida Funders, a locally-based venture capital firm and angel investor network who enables tech startups to thrive through monetary and business-intellectual capital. She has invested in, co-founded and worked for tech startups for the last 10 years. She counts herself lucky everyday to work for and alongside some pretty amazing entrepreneurs. You can follow her on Twitter or LinkedIn.