The positioning heuristic is to never sell a "drop-in replacement", there are myriad reasons that goes poorly. In addition to the problem of feature parity, you

The positioning heuristic is to never sell a "drop-in replacement", there are myriad reasons that goes poorly. In addition to the problem of feature parity, you also have the extremely painful and expensive implied migration which companies are loathe to do if at all avoidable, you will show up as a threat to the companies you are replacing, possibly with much larger marketing budgets for pushing you out of their market, and you have people whose job is tied to the thing you are replacing quietly sabotaging the deal inside the customer. 10x performance usually won't cover the cost of these issues, in my experience it requires more like 100x performance before the customer calculus starts to swing in your favor. Often you want to position your product to augment their existing systems by addressing a clear gap and nothing more, solving a single serious pain point without actually replacing anything of note. This is simpler and meets less resistance in enterprises, and once inside it becomes much easier to attrit tasks handled by other systems. Land and expand. The challenge for startup founders that want to avoid being a "drop-in replacement" is finding true gaps in the market that are also scalable. Obvious gaps almost always have a reason they are left unfilled.