Doing The Opposite

In both Marketing Strategy and Product Strategy, there is often a question of how you differentiate. Differentiation can help you grab a foothold and grow more easily rather than grinding head to head with others. Categories tend to converge on value props, features, messaging, and even design over time. It's why every SaaS website looks exactly the same. This means you need to reinvent yourself on a consistent cycle.

A Converging Category Creates Opportunity In The Opposite

When a category converges, there tends to be an audience looking for something completely different. One of many ways to find this open space is to ask what the opposite is:

1. List out all the main characteristics/elements of the category.

2. Ask "If we were to do the exact opposite for each of these, what would that look like?"

When we started Reforge, this is exactly what we did. In 2016, there were some common themes among most professional education programs:

1. They were designed for entry-level (helping someone get a job).

2. They were cheap.

3. Open and available to anyone.

4. The typically promised big results, in a very short period of time.

5. They all advertised a "certificate" as the gold at the end of the rainbow.

This converging led to what I called the "X-minute abs" problem. Everyone was promising "Get X, in Y time." where X kept going up, and Y kept going down — until the point that many were flat-out advertising false claims (and still are).

So, to create Reforge we did the exact opposite:

1. We designed for experienced professionals (those with a job).

2. We priced the programs at the premium end of the market.

3. We actively advertised "you get out what you put in" and the effort required.

4. We required you to apply and accepted only a small percentage of applicants.

5. We did not give out meaningless certificates.

The end result is that we tapped into an audience that did want to be challenged, who did want to put in the work, and had the willingness to pay for that experience. Four years later, there are a lot of new players entering the market with similar messaging to Reforge. The space is once again converging, and as a result we need to reforge Reforge (terrible joke I know). More on that another time, though.

Navigating Reinvention

Navigating reinvention is not easy. It is hard to let go of something that has worked for you. It takes significant energy to pull away from the gravity of whats been established. But a lot of the best companies find a way. Some other great examples of this are HubSpot and Drift.

• HubSpot went from an Inbound Marketing tool → All In One Marketing Platform → All In One Marketing + Sales Platform → Growth Platform

• Drift recently went from Conversational Marketing → Revenue Acceleration Platform