How to find your Blue Ocean[Storytime Saturdays]
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The Blue Ocean Strategy is a strategy taught to top-level decision-makers in businesses to allow them to differentiate themselves. However, this has a lot of applications to life, beyond just big businesses. If you’re someone looking to build a career, this concept is going to help you stand out from the competition and shoot through the hierarchy. If you have any entrepreneurial aspirations, the Blue Strategy will give you a framework for creating solutions that will let you escape competition.
Want to hear the best part? The essence of Blue Ocean is effortless. You will still have to put the work in, but at its core- the Blue Ocean strategy will help you find the most frictionless path to victory for yourself/your team.
This post will build upon the landmark book- Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant to cover how you can implement this to thrive in a competitive field like Tech. More specifically, we will cover the following ideas-
What is the Blue Ocean Strategy?
How to Find a Blue Ocean?
Let’s get right into it.
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Key Highlights
What is the Blue Ocean Strategy- The Blue Ocean Strategy involves finding a strong niche with the following properties: low competition; high growth potential; aligning with your skills and specializations. The goal is to become a big fish in a small pond, consolidate your resources, and expand gradually. Getting into a field with a lot of competition will lead to price wars, low wars, and giant battles of attrition. It’s best to do so after having a stable base of customers that you can rely on to finance the expansion.
How to find a blue ocean- The Strategy relies on creating uncontested markets for yourself by stacking goods and services in unique ways to create a unique value add. The way you do this is by exposing yourself to a lot of ideas, feedback, and approaches. Some ways are discussed below.
What is a Blue Ocean
Think of a giant ocean. Teeming with life, in a world where the rising temperatures and acidification of the ocean are not a threat to marine life. A veritable paradise for giant and fierce sharks, who can feast to their content.
In this ocean, there is an area, filled with lots of fish, seals, and dolphins. The most dense part of the ocean. All the sharks find themselves here. However, since they’re all here, they end up competing with each other, leading to a lot of bloodshed. This part of the ocean becomes red thanks to all the blood spilled. Competing over here is a game of tight margins, where the smallest errors and deviations have drastic consequences.
However, one shark is like me. It is woke. This shark decides to not go there. Find another area of the ocean, that is still nice and blue. Sure, on the surface, this might not have as many creatures. However, here, the shark can feast in peace. It enjoys all the benefits of having a blue ocean all to itself. This is the essence of the Blue Ocean strategy.
Humans are social creatures. Many things tempt us towards the red ocean. Reasons can range from the Status-Quo Bias (assuming things have to stay the way they are), the sunk cost fallacy (we have already put in so much, to switch focus now would be a waste), prestige (imagine how cool it would be to thrive in this red ocean), to a lack of imagination (how many people make life decisions because others around them were making it). To veer towards a blue ocean takes deliberate effort. Let’s discuss some strategies for that.
How to Find your Blue Ocean
Comptetion is for Losers
-Peter Thiel, legendary tech startup investor. My post on his talk
Blue oceans are infinitely diverse. Based on your time, resources, and environment, your blue ocean will look very different. However, there are a few commonalities and ideas we can always look through to make the exploration less painful.
The first is to look outside. This can be to look outside your country/economy. Many successful Indian apps and companies like Flipkart and Ola are clones of Western Apps (Amazon and Uber respectively). Simply taking a successful product and bringing it to a different audience can work wonders.
You can also look outside your industry. We covered how the ‘as a service model has spread from software, to literally everything else in this post. Sometimes, you can have successful products/services by simply taking and tweaking a business model in another domain. Now BMW is even selling heating seats as a service.
You can also look outside your present time for ideas. Reading some history can give you a lot of insights into repeating patterns and trends (what are MBAs if not studying historical case studies with suits). Looking ahead into the future, you can work backward from your ideal end goal. Both are extremely powerful and should not be overlooked.
Lastly, peer feedback is great for course correction and refinement. Outsiders have a different perspective into your strengths, which can help in identifying your unique strengths. I’ve experienced this personally. None of my teachers/professors in school told me that they liked my writing. It was only after I started writing online that I learned that it wasn’t that I was a bad writer, my style just didn’t do well in academia. Reader feedback also taught me that my visualizations/diagrams were useful, I was good at talking about a variety of topics (technical, business, and societal), and that I had a unique perspective. All of these inputs have directly led to the services I provide to the people I work with. Reader feedback/testimonials were instrumental to me refining what I do well while experimenting with new ideas/styles.
You don’t need to build up an audience for this. Simply exposing yourself to new groups is enough. Some ways I recommend this is-
Sports. Undeniably the greatest thing in my life, Sports also brings a lot of benefits when it comes to making new friends/contacts. Fun fact- after writing this article, I will be meeting 2 friends + tech collegues (a Data Scientist and a Business Analyst) both of whom I met through Boxing.
Volunteering.
Interest Groups/IRL Meetups (PS we will likely host one for our cult in NYC when I get back from traveling ~Jan 2024). These don’t have to be tech related (you just need to show up regularly).
Online Communities/Open Source Projects. If you’re trying to get your first job in software, I have a NO BS guide to using Github to do so here
The first 3 are also how I gained a lot of my early partnerships. People can unlock a lot of growth for you. Exposing yourself to a lot of interesting folks will only benefit you. Take some time,experiment with the process, and have fun with it. Finding a blue ocean is a lot like going to the gym- reaching your end goal might take some time, but the process brings a lot of rewards on it’s own. Even a few months of solid ideation, implementation, and iteration will lead to great insights about your strengths/market needs.
Have any stories about the Blue Ocean Strategy? Share them with me.
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Devansh <3
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