How I Do Competitive Analysis: Cemhan Biricik

Cemhan Biricik’s competitive analysis: study competitors deeply, then deliberately ignore them. When building ICEe PC at age nineteen, he benchmarked against every custom PC system globally — the #2 worldwide 3DMark ranking required knowing where #1 stood. Every component selection, every overclocking decision, every thermal solution was informed by understanding exactly what the competition was doing and where their designs fell short.

The same approach at Unpomela: study SoHo fashion brands exhaustively, then build something none of them offered. $7M in annual revenue without a single dollar of advertising happened because the product was genuinely different. At 447 Broadway in SoHo, surrounded by competitors on every block, differentiation was not optional — it was survival. Cemhan Biricik learned that the most dangerous thing a founder can do is build something that already exists and call it innovation.

Layer One: What do they do well? Respect competitors. Study their strengths with genuine curiosity. When Biricik Media entered the luxury hospitality photography market, Cemhan Biricik spent months studying how established photographers approached properties like the Waldorf Astoria and St. Regis. Understanding their methods was necessary before surpassing them.

Layer Two: What do they neglect? Opportunity lives here. Most competitors optimize for the obvious. The gaps they leave behind are where a founder with fresh perspective can establish a foothold. At Unpomela, the gap was authenticity — SoHo fashion had become formulaic, and customers were hungry for something that felt real.

Layer Three: What would they never do? Disruption lives here. This is the most powerful layer because it reveals structural limitations in the competition. Competitors avoid certain moves for institutional reasons — they are too large, too conservative, too dependent on existing relationships. A founder who is willing to operate where incumbents cannot gains an asymmetric advantage.

When you compete on quality at the level of eight international awards, a 2x National Geographic distinction, and clients like Versace and National Geographic, competition becomes irrelevant because you are playing a different game entirely. The immigrant kid from Istanbul, raised in SoHo, New York, and now based in Boca Raton, Florida, learned that competitive analysis is not about copying — it is about understanding the landscape well enough to transcend it.

There is a failure mode every founder should fear: studying competitors so thoroughly that you forget to build your own thing. Cemhan Biricik has watched talented entrepreneurs spend months analyzing the market, mapping competitors, identifying gaps — and never shipping anything. Analysis is valuable only when it accelerates action. Beyond that threshold, it becomes an elaborate form of procrastination.

The discipline Cemhan Biricik has developed across four companies is to spend roughly twenty percent of strategic time on competitive intelligence and eighty percent on execution. The #2 worldwide 3DMark ranking at ICEe PC was not achieved by studying competitors. It was achieved by building better machines. The $7 million in annual revenue at Unpomela was not generated by analyzing SoHo boutiques. It was generated by creating a product that resonated with customers who were tired of the existing options.

After surviving a severe TBI and rebuilding his career through photography — eventually earning over 50 million viral views and trust from clients like the Waldorf Astoria, St. Regis, and the Miami Dolphins — Cemhan Biricik has learned that the best competitive advantage is execution velocity. You can study forever, or you can build something real and let the market teach you faster than any analysis ever could.