Stop Fighting for Scraps: How to Find Open Water When You're One of Many

You run a team in a crowded market. You have a dozen rivals who all do roughly what you do. So you ship more features, drop your price, and try to out-work everyone. It feels like progress. It rarely is. You end up bleeding in the same water as everyone else, and the customer can barely tell you apart.

There is a better move than fighting harder. Go where the fight is not. This brief pulls together blue ocean thinking and beachhead thinking into one practical method: stop competing for the same customers, and start creating value nobody else is offering, in a niche small enough to actually win.

Adding features is how you lose slowly

When you are one of many, the instinct is to match rivals feature for feature. The problem is that this keeps you playing their game. W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne call this the red ocean, a market so crowded with competitors that everyone is fighting over a shrinking pie. You can win a bigger slice, but it costs blood.

The trap is thinking product improvement leads to new markets. It usually doesn't. Making things better for the customers you already have is a fine habit, but it rarely brings in the people who aren't buying from anyone yet. If a new market does show up, it tends to be a happy accident, not a plan.

The harder truth: a value proposition your customers want only earns you the right to compete. It does not win. Nabila Amarsy's point is blunt. A great product alone no longer sets you apart.

Chase the people who aren't buying

The shift starts with a different question. Not "how do I beat rival X," but "who is sitting this whole market out, and why?" These are your non-customers. The people who tried the category and left, the people who refuse to buy it, and the people no one has thought to serve.

Winning them means changing what you offer, not just polishing it. The ERRC framework is a clean way to force this. Eliminate what the industry takes for granted, reduce what adds little value, raise what actually matters, and create something no one offers. Budget airlines cut business class and meals, then raised the one thing flyers cared about: a low fare.

Cutting features is the hard part. Every feature has fans inside your own building, and the team that built it will fight to keep it. That is why this call often has to come from the top. Do not expect a squad to volunteer to kill its own work.

Land somewhere small enough to win

Open water is not the whole ocean. If you go too wide, your product drowns in a sea of sameness. So pick a beachhead: one tight, well-defined niche where you can land, win, and expand from. Sovita Chander frames the beachhead strategy as four moves. Brainstorm every market your idea could serve. Get out and talk to people in each. Stay curious until something surprises you. Then pick one.

The interviews matter more than they sound. Keep them short, ten minutes, and do not pitch your idea. Ask what keeps them up at night. You are hunting for a surprising insight, the thing a Google search won't give you. If ten conversations turn up nothing that surprises you, move to the next market.

When you pick, use plain questions. Can this market pay? Can you reach it? Is the pain real enough to buy? And do you actually care about these people enough to serve them for years?

Make the new ground hard to copy

Say you find open water and win a beachhead. Rivals will follow. The gap between you and them is how well your business is built to hold. A better product buys you time. A better business model buys you distance.

Amarsy lists mechanics that build that distance: switching costs, recurring revenue, and models that scale without hitting a wall. Apple is the clear case. There are arguably better phones, but its ecosystem of apps and developers is hard to copy, and that, not the hardware, is the moat. When you design your blue ocean move, ask what would make it costly for someone to chase you.

The deep cut

Blue ocean thinking gets sold as a clever product idea. It is really a mindset shift, and it lives above the team level. The reason is uncomfortable: the boldest moves involve cutting popular features and sometimes eating into your own revenue. No squad will make that call on its own, and no honest business case will show clean numbers for a market that doesn't exist yet.

So this is your job, not a working group's. Before any of it, map the ground you're standing on. Osterwalder's habit of scanning your environment, the market forces, trends, and rivals around you, tells you whether the water is truly open or just quiet for now. Look first, then leap.

Three questions for your team

1. Are we fighting in a red ocean we should leave, and what would it cost us to stay? Name the market, then name the price of another year of feature parity.
2. Who are our non-customers, and what would we have to eliminate or create to win them? Pick one group that buys from no one today and design a real offer for them.
3. Which single niche is our beachhead, and does it pass the test: can they pay, can we reach them, is the pain real, and do we care? Answer all four before you commit resources.