Swimming in the purple ocean

I’ve been reading up on strategy a lot lately. Not just reading up on it. Applying it to myself and to my business. I figure the times were good enough these past 10 or 15 years to cruise by on, as they say, the “low-hanging fruit,” but now it’s time to up my game and do it for real.

(yes, I am aware that it’s a little weird to say that after 15 years it’s not “real” yet)

I was reading something the other day from Melissa Kwan, founder of multiple startups and the author of the newsletter “Founder Next Door”…

https://open.substack.com/pub/melissakwan/p/purple-ocean-strategy

Melissa writes about blue ocean strategies (yes, that book, the one we all know and love) and red ocean strategies, and how inbetween them lies a purple ocean where you are using a business model the market is already familiar with (that’s where red ocean comes in) but you introduce it into an untouched market (that’s where blue ocean comes in).

In other words, find a product category that already exists, study what is out there, and build something for a completely different audience.

She talks about how she built her first two companies using a Blue Ocean strategy, and how that was way more work than it needed to be, and how there is a Purple Ocean in between, but in that purple ocean there is not one group of people but two, and how you talk to one group is very different than the way you talk to the other group.

I don’t know yet how this will apply to my business. I suspect I will find down the road that, like Melissa Kwan did, the people who are aware they have a problem, the people I have been serving for 15 years, make up 2.5% of my TAM, and to tap into the other 97.5% I will need to do something else. I don’t know yet what that “something else” is.

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