Blue Oceans

In my previous post I talked about how having a focus is super important to a product’s success.  The question comes, what to focus on?

Here’s one angle.

I have been a big fan of Kim & Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean Strategy since I first read it in 2008.  If you haven’t read it yet, I encourage you to get it.  The basic premise is well known.  Instead of competing on the same attributes for the same customers as everyone else (i.e. red ocean), go after the customer who is not served and focus on the attributes most important to them.     For example, take Southwest, who carved out a great business for themselves by competing not with other airlines, but for the customers who normally take buses and trains.  And there are dozens of other examples of companies who got their first foothold going after markets that did not really exist beforehand (Honda and racing motorcycles, AirBNB and the home-owner willing to rent on a nightly basis, Salesforce and small sales teams without IT resources).

When I started working on Shop It To Me in 2004, buying apparel online impulsively was a blue-ocean.  Online shopping at the time was optimized for planned purchases — electronics, books and DVDs. Comparison shopping sites ruled the day and few people (women included) thought of it as a place to buy clothing and certainly not impulsively.  I believe a 2004 survey showed that 75% of women would never buy clothing online because of fit issues.  Sites like Gilt Groupe did not exist; apparel retailers were still looking at the Internet as an experiment, and designer brands often did not even have a website let alone a store.   Investors looked at our service — a free personal shopper that would get people to buy items they didn’t plan on buying that day — as a novelty.  Who would buy clothing on impulse without being able to try it on?  47 of the 50 investors I pitched turned me down — mostly because they did not think impulse apparel purchases was a big enough market.

Today the impulse shopping space is a complete red-ocean. Hundreds of companies are trying to be in the “discovery” or “sample sale” space.   The fact Shop It To Me launched and built out our site before these sites existed gave us a huge advantage.  We were different and were able to build out our brand identity before the space got crowded.  It allowed us to grow our user base and leverage that base to make our future products even better.   Had we started now, we likely might not have separated from the noise.

When you think about the market you are in, instead of blindly going after the same customers everyone else is going after with the same features and attributes,  step back and think — who is NOT using the product?  Who is underserved?  Who do all of the competitors overlook because they are just not profitable enough?   What do those people value the most and what product would best suit them?    If you see an opportunity, sacrifice the “good users” and go headstrong into this new market instead.   Focus on just the attributes that will help those people and get them to pay up.  Keep building and take that market away.    The entrenched players won’t be able to compete and you may end up the leader of a new market bigger than the one that currently exists.