I’ve never believed in being the best-kept secret. It’s a romantic notion that’s also a direct path to bankruptcy. The founder’s journey is littered with well-meaning but flawed advice, and "find a small niche and be the best in it" is one of the most dangerous.
Niche competition is a trap. It’s an invitation to fight over scraps in a market someone else defined. You become a slightly cheaper, marginally faster, or differently-coloured version of the incumbent. This is the definition of a red ocean, and it’s where margins go to die. The real game isn’t about winning a race someone else designed; it’s about building a new track, setting your own rules, and being the only one on the starting line. It’s about being a category architect.
This isn’t a task reserved for venture-backed Silicon Valley behemoths with nine-figure marketing budgets. It is a mindset, a strategic discipline that any founder, any agency, any business with genuine ambition must adopt. In the age of agentic AI, it’s the only durable competitive advantage left.
The Utter Futility of Competing on Features
For years, the SaaS playbook was simple: find a successful product, build a version with one or two extra features, and then try to out-market the leader. This strategy is now utterly defunct. It’s a high-effort, low-reward race to the bottom.
AI-powered development tools have collapsed the time it takes to replicate functionality. That unique selling proposition you spent six months building can be copied in a week. Your moat is a puddle. We’ve seen this play out across every software vertical. How many more project management tools that are "like Asana, but with..." does the world need? How many CRMs are just fractional improvements on a 20-year-old model?
This isn't just a feeling; it's a statistical reality. A decade ago, the average new SaaS company had perhaps two genuine competitors. Today, that number is 9. In some verticals, it’s dozens. This hyper-competition commoditises everything. When products are functionally identical, the only remaining lever is price. You become a line item on a spreadsheet, your logo indistinguishable from the rest.
Here lies the contrarian take that’s central to my thinking: aiming to be the "best" is a strategic mistake. The moment you define yourself as a "better" version of something that already exists, you have lost. You’ve accepted your competitor’s frame and are now playing their game. The only winning move is to refuse to play. The goal isn’t to be the best CRM. It’s to be the only solution for a problem that no one else has properly diagnosed.
Category Architecture: The Three-Step Framework
Category architecture is not a new coat of paint or a clever tagline. It is the disciplined process of defining a new market that places your solution at its centre. It’s about shifting the customer’s perspective from "which product is best?" to "this is the only product that solves the problem I now understand I have."
My approach is rooted in a simple, three-step framework: Name, Frame, and Claim.
People do not buy products. They buy solutions to problems. But often, they lack the language to articulate their problem clearly. Your first job as a category architect is to give it a name. You must diagnose a pain point that is latent, poorly understood, or aggregated with other, lesser problems, and then crystallise it into a powerful, memorable concept.