The Existing Market Trap: Are You Caught in It?

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THIS WEEK’S LESSON

The Existing Market Trap

One of the BIGGEST mistakes you can make as a Former Educator Founder is to compete in an existing market.

This is called The Existing Market Trap, and Former Educator Founders do this all the time.

Think about it:

• PLCs are a crowded space — do you really want to compete with Solution Tree?

• Phone distraction is a crowded space — do you really want to compete with Yondr?

• SEL informed by diagnostics is a crowded space — do you really want to compete with Panorama?

The obvious answer to these questions are a resounding NO.

And still!

The majority of Former Educator Founders walk straight into these saturated markets anyway.

And what happens next isn’t competition.

It’s slow death.

You don’t just blend in. You burn out. You build a business you resent. And worse — nobody notices.

The better way is Category Design

This path require courage and a level of creativity you might not have expressed since kindergarten.

If it were easy, everyone would do it.

And here’s something about Category Design that all the hustle business loser consultants won’t tell you …

(But a Category Design Advisor like myself will …)

It’s not easy. It’s not guaranteed. It will take time.

But if it works for you.

It really works.

An example of Category Design

Category Design includes a variety of elements:

• Claim, name, and frame the category (which you express through your Category POV)

• Identify the enemy (or problem). Fall in love here and talk about this 90% of the time.

• The art of the “no sell, sell” and good-better-best pricing

• Lightning strikes (in lieu of peanut butter marketing spread thin throughout the year)

• And more …

I like to use what I’ve built as an example.

“Ruckus Makers Do School Different” …

The gist of the POV has two parts:

• It’s about making shifts FROM old, broken, and traditional ways of educating TO new, different, and creative ways.

• And it pulls on tension created between two school leaders: Play-It-Safe-Principals and Ruckus Makers.

If you have heard and accept that POV, how many places do you have to choose from to get support?

There’s only one place. And that’s by (category) design.

When you get your POV right, the market starts repeating it back to you.

Case in point...

I just booked a $15K speaking engagement in September with a forward thinking district in Ohio.

The prospect came to me. I did ZERO marketing or outbound outreach (not saying this is good — just proving the point, dramatically).

And on the exploration call I heard two things that made me smile:

1. My team heard you speak before and told me, “You have to hire Danny to speak to us this fall.”

2. Our district wants to: DO SCHOOL DIFFERENT. Can you help us?

How do you build the market of tomorrow?

One of my Category Design mentors — Christopher Lochhead — just came out with a book called The Existing Market Trap. It’s 100-or-so pages long. And you should read it today.

It has a ton of ideas in there that will inspire you to build your business in a different way.

But it also shares the most overlooked and powerful element of Category Design:

“If you want to build the markets of tomorrow, ask:

What problems will today’s solutions create?

Jam on that with the smartest, most curious, most future-attached people you know

That’s where the real categories are hiding.”

What I just shared there might be one of the best business lessons I can teach you.

Best of luck building!