Venture capitalists as clowns, industry titans as dinosaurs and self-funded entrepreneurs as lunatics. That means you're the lunatic.

While these masks are amusing and quite good caricatures of the weaknesses of various companies (in my own opinion), don't dismiss this competition lightly. Your competition has weaknesses but that doesn't mean that they are weak. Don't use my caricatures of these competitors and feel that it's a slam-dunk and you don't have to do anything: "Those dumb VCs can never compete with me because they always blow themselves up!"

You've got to compete. Remember: the caricature of a self-funded entrepreneur is as a lunatic. Your self-funded company needs to build its strengths and minimize its weaknesses, not delude itself and sink into arrogance and inaction because "the competition is so pathetic". Winning is about you doing well what your competitor does less well, not merely counting the other guy's misses and errors.

So, let's sum up the types of companies competing against you again.

There are three categories of competitors:

• somewhat small companies with venture capital
• big companies who might benefit from building competitive products
• other tiny self-funded companies

For companies with venture capital, the primary strength is image. They will try to beat you by using their money to temporarily throw more developers, more public relations, more customer visits, more ads, more everything against the market than you can. Simultaneously, they will try to beat big companies by using their smaller size to temporarily do everything faster than a big company's politics and culture will allow it. Using their venture capital, they will try to construct a façade that gives them all the advantages temporarily. Their weakness is the mirror of their strength: illusion. Despite their outward appearance of impenetrable strength, they must win the market quickly. Otherwise, they will be destroyed from the inside-out as their makeshift advantages deteriorate. To beat them, you have to outlast them. You have to build a product quickly, get a foot-hold in the market and then, if and when they stumble, you've got to exploit their mis-steps and take the lead.

For big companies, the primary strength is numbers. They will try to beat you by using their money and market power to throw more developers, more public relations, more product tie-ins, more ads, more code and more credibility against the market than you can. They have two primary weaknesses, though: politics and culture. If they fail to recognize the market or get a slow start, their in-house efforts won't be competitive and they'll have to compete against other big companies to buy the leaders in the market. To beat them, you create a great product, build an early lead in the market and then become a big company or be bought by one.

For self-funded companies, the primary strength is talent. They try to beat all competitors, even other self-funded companies, by using all their limited managerial, marketing and technical resources to the fullest advantage. Like companies with venture capital, their primary weaknesses are the mirror of their strength: incompetence and impotence. They are heavily reliant on individuals, even a single person, to run the entire show and those individuals' weaknesses become the company's weaknesses. To beat them, you fill in your weaknesses, expand your capability and run them over. Simply put, you out-perform them.

Image, numbers, talent. That's how software companies succeed or fail.

By reading this five-part series, hopefully, you've gained perspective on the entire industry: seen all the actors, marvelled at their abilities but also seen where and how they can flub their lines, spotted ways that you can upstage them. I hope that this series has given you enough to spur your own insights into the industry at large. Perspective is powerful: the more insights that you have into strengths and weaknesses, either your own or competitors', the easier it is to play to them and use them to win.