Competitors don't matter when you have a real core

Let’s talk about competition.

Every now and then someone takes it too seriously. They act like even acknowledging another player in the same space is a threat. Some people avoid my content completely because they see me as competition. Others copy everything I do and think that’s the way to win. I’ve seen this before. Many times. I don’t care about any of it.

When Freska started to take off, everyone tried to copy everything. The SEO structure, the Instagram content, the tone, even the exact format of posts. It was constant. Back then, people thought that was how you compete. They believed copying would somehow transfer the results. But one by one, all those competitors disappeared. They didn’t survive because they didn’t have the core.

What made Freska work wasn’t a secret strategy. It was a cleaning service with some modern processes, not rocket science. The real difference was the culture. From the very beginning, the first office team genuinely wanted to build the best company for cleaners. That belief was authentic, and you can’t copy authenticity. You can copy the surface like marketing, wording, visuals, but you can’t copy the culture. That’s what made Freska unstoppable.

When a company has that kind of internal drive, it’s impossible to break it from the outside. The culture becomes self-reinforcing. People show up because they believe in what they’re building, not just because they’re paid to be there. And that belief shows through everything like customer experience, brand tone, retention, and growth. You can’t fake it.

Back then, competitors accidentally made our work easier. They created more market awareness for what we were doing. It helped the whole category grow. And that’s another important point: competition isn’t always bad. It can help validate the space you’re in. The only other company that had even a slightly similar cultural foundation back then was Koti Puhtaaksi. Eventually, we acquired it. They had grown partly because our VC-backed marketing expanded the market for everyone. Their company had a compatible culture, so it made sense. Buying anything else would have been useless, as you can’t acquire culture.

Now with Herizon, it’s exactly the same. There are plenty of organizations doing something similar. People ask me what I think about them, and I don’t really think about them at all. I don’t follow what they do, I don’t compare, and I don’t waste energy reacting. We just keep building. If others achieve the same results, that’s a win for everyone: more immigrants get employed. If someone does it better, that’s also fine. Then we just have to improve. It pushes us forward.

The obsession with competition often hides insecurity. If you’re focused on watching others, you’re not focused on your own work. The only sustainable advantage comes from understanding what makes your thing genuinely valuable and leaning into it.

That’s why at Herizon, I don’t care what others do. We know why we exist, we know who we serve, and we know what works. Copying others or worrying about them doesn’t create progress. Real progress happens when you build something people care about - something with a core that can’t be replicated.

Competition only matters when it forces you to raise your standards. Beyond that, it’s just noise. Focus on your own product, your own community, your own people. If that’s right, everything else follows.