This week, I’m discussing the problem of uniqueness. Many times, we want our business or our product to be truly one of a kind. But there are times when being too unique can actually hinder your success. Learn how to strike the right balance to grow your business.
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Transcript
Hello, and welcome to season three, episode three of the Grow Your Side Hustle Podcast, the podcast to help women grow the business of their dreams, whether they want to run it as a long term side hustle or build it into their main business so they can control their time with their families and control their money.
I’m your host, Jennifer Roland Cadiente, here to provide short actionable episodes that will help you build your business.
This week, I want to talk about why you don’t want to be too unique. So you know, we’re all unique, we all have our own special things that make us who we are. And that works for us as humans, it’s not always the best formula for a successful business. So if you feel like the thing that you do has never been done before. Or no one can ever do it the way that you do. That may be that may be something that’s holding you back.
I would look at ways to make sure that the things that you do, which are uniquely you are also translatable into something that has already been done before. So, you know, if you want to start a product business, and you’re making a product that’s never been made before, it’s going to be really hard to convince people that they need it. Say you’ve come across a novel solution to a situation, that only happens to you, that’s probably going to be great for you. Not so great for long term business success.
But if you’ve come up with a novel solution to a problem that a lot of people have, the way you’re going to want to position that is in relation to the things that people already know. You know, I always think about the ways that people pitch like movie and TV show ideas, you know, it’s James Bond meets Rebecca, or something. They take things that we know, that the producers that they’re pitching to are going to know and understand and see a market for and combine them together or tell them in their own special way.
Say you have come up with an idea for an insole, that completely relieves foot pain. You’re going to definitely want to focus on what makes it different, but also what makes it the same. What makes it understandable. What makes you know, people see, you know, this is something that you understand already, but it’s a better way, it’s a new way. It’s a way that’s actually going to fix the problem that you’ve tried to fix so many ways in your life.
If you are, say, writing a book, you may be combining genres in a way that no one has combined them before. But to get people to buy the book, to read the book, you need to look at the genres that they understand. So say it’s, you know, Fantasy, Romance and cyberpunk all put together, or, you know, fantasy, romance, and steampunk. Don’t focus on the different focus on the things that you’re doing that fit those genre conventions that readers of those genres are going to love and understand. Rather than what makes your book so different from all the books like I mean, we all want different, but we also really want the same. Like you know, if you like fantasy, if you like romance. If you like steampunk, you want the conventions, the things that are true about those books. You know, a thing that I see so much of and really I mean it really gets romance readers and writers in a tizzy is when someone says oh Oh, I wrote a romance, but they don’t end up together in the end. Now, then you didn’t write a romance, you may have written a tragic love story, a realistic love story, because many relationships do not last forever. But you didn’t write a romance. Because a romance has either happily ever after, or a happy for now, the couple ends up together or, you know, the throuple or, you know, the, the pod of people that are getting together, they end up together and happy at the end of the story. And that’s what readers want.
So when you are thinking about your unique business, please also be focused on what makes your business the same? What makes it relatable, what makes it understandable? What can you use to show people that this is something that they want, and need.
So I hope that has that short discussion has helped you try to contextualize what you’re doing in the market that’s already there. I’d love to discuss this more with you in the Grow Your Side Hustle community on Facebook. You can join that using the link in the show notes. Or just go to Facebook and search for grow your side hustle community, and it should come right up for you. It’s a free group, you just need to answer a few questions and agree to a few things to be part of it.
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All right, talk to you next time. Hope to see you in that Facebook group.