I used to think the way you did ~10 years ago. Little did I know... Back then I was running a very comfortable business. My main competitor, if there was any,

I used to think the way you did ~10 years ago. Little did I know... Back then I was running a very comfortable business. My main competitor, if there was any, opened shop with over $10M in the bank. It took a few years for things to play out but I never stood a chance. A half dozen years later I was working on a product that I figured was original at the time. A year in or so, I learned I had two competitors that had raised over $100M to throw around. I stopped on the spot. Measuring your company on the number of customers it has is meaningless if your possible competitor is raising 100x more than you'll earn in the next year or two. Focus on profit and quality; yes. But then, unless you're onto something so supremely complex that essentially no one can reproduce it, rush to get money so you can focus on growing your market before someone goes after it while figuring out the former along the way.