The Genius Guide to Dealing With Market Saturation
How to stop letting a crowded market be the reason you never start. Read time: 7 minutes
I have a friend who is one of the most talented photographers I know, not hobbyist-with-a-nice-camera talented, genuinely gifted, the kind of person where you look at her work and think people would pay real money for this.
She tried building a business as a photographer and stopped, then she tried again and stopped again.
Every time I’d ask her what was going on I’d get some version of the same answer: there were already so many photographers, everyone had a good camera on their phone now, who was even going to hire her over someone with more experience and an established name.
She’d spiral through all of it and talk herself back to the starting line before she ever ran the race, she’d find a niche she thought nobody was touching, pour energy into it, get some encouraging feedback, and then hit a wall when people weren’t quite ready to let a stranger into that part of their story, and that was it for her, she stopped trying to find another way in.
She never fully committed, and today she’s not a photographer, and what makes it sting is that since she first started dipping her toe in the water she’s watched so many photographers dive in and build something real.
I think about her story a lot because the thing that stopped her wasn’t the market, it was the story she told herself about the market.
Here’s the thing you want:
You want to build a business and stop thinking there’s no space in the marketplace for what you have to offer.
You want to stop the repeat cycle of trying and then circling back to start again, and somewhere in the back of your mind you already know that a crowded market simply means a product is in demand and all you need to do is figure out what’s going to make customers buy YOUR product instead of someone else’s.
Here’s how to do it:
A saturated market isn’t a bad thing, it just means that step one is already taken care of and you don’t have to test the theory that people want something because it’s already proven. It’s a demand signal and a lot of people are paying for it, the only real question is whether you can give them a reason to want it from you.
“Every market is saturated. The only question is whether you're remarkable.” - Nicolas Cole, entrepreneur and writer
My friend’s fatal mistake wasn’t that she picked a competitive space, it was that she kept trying to compete on the same terms as everyone else, and when her first attempt at differentiation didn’t immediately stick she concluded the whole market was the problem instead of just that one angle. Saturation doesn’t mean no room, it means no room for another version of the same thing, and that’s a different problem, a solvable one.
When I was building in a space that felt genuinely overrun, things shifted for me when I stopped trying to appeal to everyone who might possibly want what I was selling and started getting really specific about who it was actually for. Who is this person at exactly this moment in their life, what have they already tried, what about it isn’t working, and how can my product solve that problem for them?
When I got that specific, the market didn’t feel saturated anymore, it felt like I finally knew where I was standing in it.
The photographers who built real businesses in my friend’s city weren’t doing something she couldn’t do, many were objectively less talented, what they had that she didn’t was a committed point of view. One of them only shoots families during major life transitions like moving, new babies, kids leaving for college, she charges more than almost anyone in her area and has a waitlist. Another one built hers around making introverted people feel at ease in front of the camera, that’s her entire brand, she talks about it constantly, and she stays booked. Neither of them is trying to be everything to everyone, they both made a choice about who they were for and then they showed up for those people consistently until it compounded.
The thing I’ve seen derail founders in crowded markets is they confuse the discomfort of not being the best known option with evidence that they can’t win, and these are not the same thing. Every business that exists right now entered a market where something else already existed, Google wasn’t the first search engine, Slack wasn’t the first workplace communication tool, the question was never whether the space was occupied, it was whether they had something genuinely better to offer a specific set of people and whether they were willing to be patient enough to let that play out.
What I’d tell my friend now if she were still trying is that her first niche idea not working wasn’t a sign that the market was full, it was data, it told her something specific about that particular audience that she could have used to find the next angle. Instead, she let one failed attempt become a verdict on the whole thing, and that’s the part that actually cost her.
The hard truth for a lot of people is that market saturation is often just an excuse for an underlying problem, confidence. She was using the market as cover for not thinking she was good enough and the lack of confidence was feeding the market anxiety, and neither one ever got addressed directly because she kept running the same loop. When you’re confident in what you have and you commit even imperfectly, market feedback stops being scary and turns into something you actually want to hear, you’ll still feel vulnerable but when you can stand tall and push through that discomfort you’ll get something real to iterate on instead of just a fear to manage.
The people who succeed in saturated markets aren’t usually the most talented or the most innovative, they’re the ones who were confident in what they had, stayed in long enough to learn from the friction, and didn’t let one thing not working become a reason to stop trying other things.
Obstacles don’t have to stop you if you run into a wall. Don’t turn around and give up. Figure out how to climb it. Go through. Or work around it. - Michael Jordan
Here’s why it works:
When you stop trying to shout at everyone in the room and start talking directly to one specific person, the competition mostly disappears, not because the other people are gone but because you’re focused on your conversation. When you’re talking to a smaller group of people you get better feedback faster, they either convert or quickly tell you exactly why they didn’t, and that information is worth more than any amount of time spent worrying about how crowded the space is.
The confidence problem quietly solves itself too because you’re measuring success against the specific problem you’re solving for a specific person instead of trying to solve every problem for everyone, and that’s a much more winnable game.
Now go:
This week, try this:
Write down exactly who your most specific possible customer is, not a demographic, a situation. What have they already tried, what didn’t work about it, what are they actually frustrated by right now. Then look at how you talk about what you do and ask yourself honestly whether that specific person would read it and feel like you were talking directly to them. If not, that’s your first thing to fix.
Start here if you only have 10 minutes:
Find one competitor who is winning in your space and figure out who they’re NOT serving. Not who they’re ignoring on accident, who they’ve structurally opted out of by the choices they’ve made. That’s your opening.
Next Tuesday: The Genius Guide to Staying Motivated
P.S. The thing I never said to my friend and probably should have is that the market was never the real obstacle. She was talented, she had good instincts, and she found a real gap on her first try even if the timing wasn’t right. I should have told her that committing, iterating, and staying in long enough is the secret sauce, I wanted her to be successful and had I known it was just her thinking she wasn’t good enough I could’ve been a louder cheerleader and encouraged her to keep going. Saturation doesn’t stop the people who decide to stay in the game, it just thins out the ones who were looking for a reason to leave.
If this resonated, hit reply and tell me where you’re stuck. I read every response.
Writing from Austin, still backing people who bet on themselves,
Alex
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