Everybody in your industry sounds identical and you’ve been trying to sound slightly better than them.
Wrong game.
Look at your competitors’ websites for ten minutes. Same stock photos of people shaking hands. Same phrases about being passionate and committed to excellence. Same three service tiers. Same tone, which is to say no tone at all, because every sharp edge got sanded off by somebody worried about offending a customer who was never going to buy anyway.
You’ve been studying that and trying to do a marginally cleaner version of it.
Meanwhile the entire field is standing in one spot and the space beside them is completely empty.
What Crowded Actually Means
When a market looks crowded, most men read it as bad news. Too many players. Hard to break in. Better find something else.
Read it again.
A crowded market means demand is proven. People are spending money there. That’s the hardest thing to find in business and it’s already solved for you.
And if everybody in a proven market is doing the same thing, you’re not looking at saturation. You’re looking at an unguarded position.
Rob Bailey saw this in fitness apparel. Every big brand mass-producing gear that looked like every other brand’s gear. No small independent players the way there were in other markets. He built the indie version and it worked, not despite the crowding, because of it.
I saw the same thing in a different form. There were a thousand t-shirt companies. Not one of them was willing to say anything that could get them in trouble. Every design was safe enough to sell to everybody, which meant it didn’t mean anything to anybody, which meant nobody was going to wear it like it said something about them.
So I built the one that said something. One shirt. That’s how Lions Not Sheep started, and the reason it worked is not that I’m a genius designer. It’s that I was willing to be disagreeable in a category where disagreeable wasn’t on the menu.
Conviction Is The Asset
Here’s what most men get wrong about differentiation. They think it’s a marketing exercise. Find a clever angle. Come up with a tagline nobody else has.
It’s not a marketing exercise. It’s a courage problem.
The reason everybody sounds the same is not that nobody has original thoughts. It’s that having a position costs you people, and most men would rather be acceptable to everyone than essential to someone.
So they hedge. They soften. They add a qualifier to every strong sentence until the whole thing means nothing, and then they wonder why their business is a commodity that competes on price.
You already have the position. You have opinions about your industry you don’t say out loud. You have a way of doing the work that you’ve quietly decided is better and you’ve never made it public because somebody might disagree.
Somebody will disagree. That’s the mechanism. The disagreement is what makes the agreement worth anything.
Read that again.
3 Tactical Ways To Find Your Opening
- Do the sameness audit. Pull up five competitors. Write down every phrase, claim, image, and structure that all five share. That list is the consensus. Every item on it is a place where you could go the other direction and be instantly visible. You won’t like all of them. You only need one.
- Say the thing you’ve been holding. There’s an opinion about your work that you believe and don’t publish because it might cost you. Write it down. Put it out this month, in public, with your name on it. The people it repels were never buying. The people it attracts have been looking for someone to say it.
- Refuse one customer on purpose. Define who you are specifically not for and put it in writing on your own site. Most men can’t do this. It feels like leaving money on the table. It’s the opposite. The moment you’re clearly not for everybody, the people you are for can finally recognize you.
Final Thought
You don’t need a better version of what everyone else is doing. You need to be standing somewhere they aren’t.
That space exists in every industry, in every town, right now. It’s not hidden. It’s just uncomfortable, and discomfort is the only reason it’s still open.
Everybody is looking at the same crowd and seeing competition. Look at the same crowd and find the gap.
Here’s the challenge: Do the sameness audit this week. Five competitors, one list of everything they have in common. Then pick one item on that list and go the opposite direction, publicly, before the month is out.
– Sean Whalen
