Clownfish, whales, the ocean
Are you selling yourself short?
No matter what we do for a living, how senior we are, and what industry we operate in, we will always have peers and betters. If we are competitive, we focus on surpassing our peers (the clownfish). If we are ambitious, we try to surpass our betters (the whales). Very few attempt the extraordinary and produce outstanding results, something that lies in the rest of the unexplored ocean.
My hope is to convince you to consider the ocean's hidden wonders and stop paying too much attention to the clownfish and whales. This applies equally to individuals and businesses and I will give relevant examples for both.
🐠 Clownfish - our peers
Many actions we take are driven by our peers. School and college life are driven by peer pressure and the need to be accepted. Our fields of study and our first jobs are influenced by our classmates. We marry, buy homes, or have children when a majority of our friends do so. We feel an itch to switch jobs when our friends join "cool" companies or get raises.
In a business, this is visible when multiple companies build similar products, price them similarly, sell them to the same customers, and use the same language to promote themselves. There are good reasons to do this, especially in commodity businesses, and you see this when an industry starts maturing. Just see the product names and pricing of the top cloud providers - AWS, Azure, Google Cloud.
🐠 - Peers are a great way to calibrate decisions and make sure we are doing something that is not out of the ordinary. However, this limits how well we can do because to the outside world we all look the same like a school of clownfish.
The next time we take a big decision, we should ask if we are doing this because our peers say it is OK or because we think this is the right thing for us. As a business, we should ask if we are influenced by other businesses or by customer feedback, underlying market forces, or first-principle thinking.
🐋 Whales - our betters
Harder than looking around at peers is looking up to those far more accomplished or talented than us. These whales set a high watermark in terms of what we can accomplish. However, following their path blindly has issues.
Someone we think is a whale might be another clownfish (to test this, we can look up our school's superstars on LinkedIn and see how many are still far ahead of us). Or we may not have easy access to whales to understand what path they took and why. Or we might be disheartened if we do not see the results we expect.
As a business, it is great to play up the David vs Goliath story and say we are challenging Flipkart, InMobi, or BigBasket. However, these companies have access to resources and teams that we do not. Simply doing what they do may not even be possible. We need to set lofty goals and talk about the big boys and girls while fundraising. However, when it comes to strategy or tactics, we should not be influenced by the whales.
🐋 - Whales are a great way to set a high bar for ourselves and our business. However, there is a risk we will be stuck following someone else's path that may not be suitable for us.
🌊 Ocean - the unexplored opportunity
Very few are able to zoom out and see the ocean we swim in, the boundless opportunity and options available to us. This approach seems the riskiest because no one else seems to do it. However, it is the most rewarding for exactly the same reason.
In a personal context, this might mean joining a company where we learn a lot more but earn less, moving to a neighbourhood that is far away but one that affords a higher quality of life, spending time on enriching hobbies instead of socialising with the same people in the same hangout spots.
For a business, this might mean having a unique voice and message, targeting a different customer segment with a tailored offering, or having a pricing model that suits the customer and their workflow.
🌊 - The ocean represents the space where others do not operate because it is too different. Those who go into the deep blue after due consideration can get far better results because most never venture there.
Please note that this is not about dreamy ideals like "follow your heart" or "do what you love" without considering the outcomes first. This strategy is about not being fixated with what others are doing and deciding your actions based on other factors.
Our journey at Rocketium
In the early days of Rocketium, we focused only on our competitors because we had no customers to talk to. Once we got users and users became paying customers, we started positioning ourselves against the 800-pound gorilla of video - Adobe.
Today, we realise that the opportunity is far bigger than the few videos created by in-house design teams or agencies on Adobe software. The real opportunity, the ocean waiting to be explored, is in transforming all business communication from text and images into video - ads, articles, internal communication, newsletters, training material, ....
After 3 years, we have realised that comparing ourselves to other clownfish or whales will make us miss the big opportunity and only lead to playing catch-up. We are now seeing the big blue ocean and charting a new course. Do you see a chance to do this in your life and your business?
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