I Spent A Year Building A Product, And Made The Same Mistake (Many) Entrepreneurs Make……
If you’re someone who wants to create an exponentially different future.
For yourself.
Or your company.
You’re in the right place.
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The Different Newsletter.
Musings for entrepreneurs, marketing leaders, category designers and creators with a different mind.
Sponsored by Bad Tuna Industries.
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I Spent A Year Building A Product, And Made The Same Mistake (Many) Entrepreneurs Make……
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on his family’s boat — where they live. He wrote what follows)I spent a year building a product, went $20,000 into debt… and no one wanted it.
Everyone said they would. Local business owners told me it was a great idea. They gave feedback. They gave encouragement.
But when it came time to pay $20/month?
Crickets.
Not a single customer. Just silence.
I shut it down.
A year wasted.
$20,000 gone.
Epic failure.
But that failure forced me to ask: Why?
That’s when I found a book called Play Bigger by Al Ramadan Christopher Lochhead 🇺🇸🇮🇱🏴☠️ & Kevin Maney.
It gave me a new lens to see the business world, the lens of categories.
I realized I hadn’t built the wrong product…
I had built the wrong category.
Or worse, I had stepped into someone else’s.
The big players already owned the space. I had no language to explain why my product was different. And if you can’t explain different, you die as a commodity.
So I took the Play Bigger framework and rebuilt everything.
New category.
New language.
New POV.
It worked. The company I built, IA Path, is still here 8 years later and I have an amazing team that helps me run our happy little $700k/yr online business. (and yes people consider us the category king of our category)
That’s the day I stopped stepping into markets and started creating them.
Fast forward to now: I’m building books, frameworks, and businesses that don’t just compete, they lead.
And today, I hoist the
Creating new categories.
Colliding two I’ve been building quietly in parallel.
Category design is never guaranteed.
But it’s always better than the alternative.
The flag is up.
The mission continues.
I’m not chasing markets.
I’m chasing meaning.
And if you believe in creating new categories instead of competing in existing ones…
Then you’re one of us.
You’re a category creator.
A category designer.
A Category Pirate.
ARRRR.
🏴☠️
Whoa didn't expect my LinkedIn post to get shared to your newsletter, thanks for sharing!
And if you can’t explain different, you die as a commodity.
👌 that hit home