The rival is probably guessing

A woman in Dubai sells children's lunch boxes online, and lately she has been losing sleep over a competitor.

The competitor's prices change every few days. New colours appear and vanish. A sale starts on a Tuesday for no reason she can see, an influencer she has never heard of posts about them, and then the influencer is gone. She has begun to assume there is a plan behind it all, a long and careful game she is too small to follow, in which every move sets up the next.

There almost certainly is not.

From outside, a busy competitor looks like strategy. Up close, most of them are doing what she is doing: trying something on Monday, seeing what happened by Thursday, and trying something else. The movement that reads as cunning is usually improvisation by people who are as unsure as she is.

That is worth knowing for two reasons.

The first is that it frees her from a game that does not exist. Once she stops reading each of their moves as a message, she can spend that attention on her own customers.

The second matters more. Improvising is not a fault in the early days. It is how a small business learns what the market will respond to, and she should be doing plenty of it herself. The danger comes later, when a run of guesses that happened to work gets mistaken for a plan, by the seller or by the people watching her. Guessing holds up while the stakes are small and the business can change direction in an afternoon. It does not hold up once there are staff to pay, stock in a warehouse and promises to keep.

So try things now, freely, and call them what they are. When something works, find out why, and build the reason into something sturdier.

A business that grows on luck and calls it strategy is always the last to learn which one it had.