Our competitor added themselves to a food delivery app… then posted the traffic like a win 😅

A lot of startup growth content is theater.

I wanted to write this because I think it can genuinely hurt early-stage founders.

When you are in the early stage, you already doubt yourself enough. You are building, fixing, testing, trying to get users, trying to stay alive. Then you open LinkedIn, X, or founder communities and see competitors posting MRR screenshots, traffic spikes, and “growth wins” nonstop.

And if you do not have built-in credibility, it hits even harder.

You are not ex-Google.
You are not YC-backed.
You do not already have a huge audience.

So you start thinking:

Why are they growing and we are not?
Is my product the problem?
Are we missing something obvious?

And sometimes the answer is… no.

Sometimes your product is actually better.
Sometimes your users are happier.
Sometimes your direction is stronger.

But the other company is just better at turning random things into a growth story.

We saw a competitor add themselves to an Indian food delivery app, get traffic from it, and then post it like it was a real startup growth milestone 😅

That is exactly why I am writing this.

From the outside, it looks like momentum.
It looks clever.
It looks like they cracked something.

But when you look closer, it is just random traffic wrapped in a better narrative.

I am not saying founders should ignore competitors. I actually think it is good to check them carefully.

A few things we try to look at:

• where their traffic is really coming from

• whether they can do for themselves what they sell to others

• whether it is real traction or just a well-packaged screenshot

That matters for one simple reason:

it helps you not lose confidence for the wrong reason.

You stop comparing your real company to someone else’s edited version of reality.

And you also stop copying the wrong playbook.

That is the main point of this post.

Sometimes startup growth content is useful.

Sometimes it is just noise.

And sometimes it quietly makes founders doubt themselves when they should actually keep building.

So I guess my founder takeaway is:

trust yourself more, and trust screenshots less.

Curious if others here have had similar the same experience?