how to stand out in a saturated market

Summary

two listener questions in the same bucket today. how do I stand out, and what if my market is saturated. they’re the same question. the answer is shorter than you think.

1. the market is loud right now. the pandemic taught everyone that working from home is possible. a younger generation wants the laptop life without ever having a boss. fine. but the way most are pursuing it, fake it till you make it, doesn’t build anything that lasts.

2. if you want to stand out, get results for people. that’s it. it doesn’t matter if your first results are free or steep discount. get results. that’s what your business is about. every result is experience that nobody else who just stepped in has.

3. that’s why I’m not scared of the next twenty year old with a TikTok account. I’ve been doing this for a decade. I have a track record. people thinking about the room I’m in for the first time can regurgitate things they’ve heard, but they can’t replicate experience. there’s a scene in Good Will Hunting where Robin Williams realizes Matt Damon has read everything and lived nothing. that’s the entire competitive landscape right there.

4. ask yourself how many customers you actually need. you’re not Amazon vs Walmart. you’re not Google vs Microsoft. you can lose two customers to a competitor and your life doesn’t blow up. count the customers required to live the life you want at your price point. that number is way smaller than you think.

5. play your game. focus on results like your life depends on it. stop scrolling other people’s accounts and calling it market research, that’s just feeling crappy about yourself. those people usually aren’t that successful under the brand anyway. make better humans. results stand out. try harder.

Transcript

the post pandemic flood of online businesses

What is the result you get for them? What is the life-changing result? Remember, these are better human businesses I’m talking about. How are we making them better? And by making them better, their business gets better, and when their business gets better, other humans get better. If that doesn’t motivate you, maybe you’re listening to the wrong podcast.

The most impactful business is the business that genuinely improves another human, a better human business. And to grow a business like this, you have to continually improve yourself. This podcast is a documentation of that thesis, scaling businesses and also personal growth. My goal is for you to shortcut this journey.

So if you’re ready to try hard, subscribe. If you like what you’re hearing, please share and enjoy. All right, answering some listener questions today, and I do appreciate you submitting those. I’m kind of combining two that I got recently. To me, they’re in the same vein. So the question is, how do you market yourself amidst all the noise of other online businesses, and how do you gain influence?

And another one was, what do you do if you feel the market you’re trying to enter is saturated? And I feel like these are similar because it’s, how do you stand out? What do you do? There’s so many people doing what I’m doing. What are my options? And I’m not gonna lie, I think the market right now in general is insane.

Especially if you’re starting a business online. I mean, that’s what everybody wants right now. I mean, everybody. And I think the pandemic made it a little bit worse, to be honest. Everyone got a taste of working from home, and then they’re like, oh, this is amazing. And then it’s like, well, what if I just didn’t have a boss?

And there was a lot of that, right? And now what you’re seeing is also a younger generation coming in that doesn’t ever want a boss, and they just want to do their thing. They just wanna have an Instagram account and make enough money to live. And I think there’s nothing wrong with that. But there is something wrong with how people are going about business most of the time in that regard or that capacity.

fake it till you make it doesn’t work

This fake it till you make it idea. I think if you wanna stand out, the best thing that you can do is get results for people. 100% get results for people, and it doesn’t matter what you do. It doesn’t matter if those first couple of results that you have to get for people are free, low cost, discounted, you need to get results for people.

And then that needs to be what your business is about, getting results for people. Because the more results that you get, the more experience you’re gonna have. And that’s why I don’t actually worry too much about trying to stand out or a younger generation stepping in who loves TikTok and shorts and like all these things that I hate, right?

I mean, I don’t care about these things. But what I do have is over a decade’s worth of experience in running businesses and getting results for people. So I’m a little more confident in what I can do because I’ve done it. And when someone is just stepping to do it for the first time, I’m not really that scared of them.

They haven’t done it, they don’t have the experience. All they have is they can regurgitate something else that they’ve heard, but they don’t have the life experience to do it. And it reminds me of a scene from Good Will Hunting where you have Robin Williams and Matt Damon. They have their first interaction and it just kind of wrecks Robin Williams.

He really, you know, Matt Damon’s this super smart dude and he kind of gets inside his head and then Robin Williams meets with him the next day or the next week or whatever. And he was like, you know what? I thought of something and then I really haven’t thought about you since. And he realized the fact that Matt Damon in the movie had basically zero life experience.

He hadn’t done anything with his life. All he had done is read books and could tell you about things and understood psychology and all this stuff, but he had no experience in life. And so that’s why I think that you shouldn’t worry too much about other businesses and what they’re doing and how to stand out because all you need to do is go focus on the results.

get results for people

And the reason I think that should be your focus is because that is what’s gonna build your business. It’s gonna build a referral pipeline and it’s gonna help you get more business. And then the second question that comes up is that I need to ask you if you’re asking this question is how many people do you need to succeed?

Because I really don’t feel like there is business competition in the sense that people feel like there is. Like Google going head to head with Microsoft, this is like a monopoly battle, right? Or if you have Amazon and Walmart, right? These companies can actually go at it and ruin one another because margins are thin.

We’re talking billions of dollars, one wrong move and one of them could collapse. That’s not your business. That’s not my business. We can take a loss. We can take two customers going to the competitor. It’s not that big of a deal. So you really need to answer the question, how many people do I actually need?

Given my price points, do I think that’s sustainable? Now we can get into scaling later, but the chances are you’re not going to be the market leader and I’m not trying to discourage you, but you’re right, there are so many people. How are you going to ever be number one if that’s the goal? But two, do you need to be number one to achieve all that you want?

What if you’re number seven and you’re still making all the money you could possibly want and have all the financial freedom and time freedom that you could ever want? It doesn’t really matter. So you really just need to focus on your plan and not worry about anyone else at all. The second you start doing in quotes market research where you’re really just looking at other people’s Instagram accounts and feeling crappy about yourself, like that’s not helpful.

And guess what? Those people generally aren’t that successful and aren’t making that much money. That’s what I see with people who have massive Instagram followings aside from like the celebrities and the one-offs, like they’re not actually that good at business, they might not be that good at getting results for people, but you know what?

how many customers do you actually need

You want to follow their life or they had a good six pack or whether some other reason that people were really following them. So don’t worry about those people. Don’t worry about the competition. Play your game and focus on results. That is the superpower. When I came on at PT Biz as a partner and I kind of explained in the very intro episode like kind of the different things I’m working on between Garage Gym Athlete and End3 Fitness and PT Biz, I had been a business coach for Danny who originally founded PT Biz.

And then we got more serious in our relationship on the business side and it eventually formed into a partnership. But the biggest reason I was interested in that and I was okay with like doing a partnership was because of the results. Like Danny had already gotten for people that he had worked with.

People were already seeing results. I don’t like just selling things to sell them, right? Someone who wants to, if the only goal is to have a lifestyle business and where you work from home and make a lot of money, if that’s the goal, you’re not gonna make it very far. You have to interweave someone else at some point.

What is the result you get for them? What is the life-changing result? Remember, these are better human businesses I’m talking about. How are we making them better? And by making them better, their business gets better. And when their business gets better, other humans get better. If that doesn’t motivate you, maybe you’re listening to the wrong podcast.

But it has to be about impact. It has to be about getting results for other human beings. And once you can get obsessed with that, you do not have to worry about the questions that are even being asked. I already talked about building a business without the use of having to be popular on social media and all these things.

play your game, ignore the noise

So you just need to get the people, and it’s not gonna be that many, the amount of people you need to run a successful business, focus on their results like it’s your life. Get the results for the people who you can influence, and then you can scale from there. Don’t start in reverse. Don’t start thinking, this market’s so saturated.

If the market’s saturated, at least you know people are making money doing what you wanna do. If you’re just looking to get started, I mean, you can niche down, you can do all these other things, but even the niches within the niches within the niches are getting saturated. So the only real question you need to answer is how can I get people results?

How can I be so freaking good at getting people results? And then you can turn around and market that, but without the experience, you got nothing. You’re not gonna go battle head to head with these people who do quote unquote have the influence and have all the noise that you’re trying to crack into.

So you just need to focus on the results for the people, how many you need to live the life that you want, then we can start talking about scale, which I’ll do in future episodes. For now, focus on results like your life depended on it, and that is how you gain influence and you stand out from everyone else because that’s not what everyone else is doing who’s coming to the market and saturating it.

They’re just mimicking what other people have done. You’re gonna do your own thing. You’re gonna crush it. You’re gonna make other better humans, and that’s how you’ll grow. ♪♪♪