I live by this idea. 

Most founders and leaders waste a lot of time thinking about the “Blue Ocean Strategy” in the hope of finding an untapped market. Of course, it works but for a certain period of time. Because the reality is, you have to compete at some point or another. 

If you think that you’ll come up with a crazy, new idea that the world has never seen before and completely dominate the niche forever, make no mistakes, I want to remind you that, practically it’s not possible. There is no way you’re going to completely dominate a niche forever. 

And here’s why: 

Let’s say you come up with a “Blue Ocean” idea. It's a great, novel idea. So you build the product and dominate the niche within 24 months. Great. Now what? People and other founders will see it and they’ll build better products similar to yours. Now you have to compete with them, even if you don’t want to—because they are now your competitors!

It’s the same case again and again. Let me show you how.

OpenAI introduced ChatGPT in 2022. Became a massive success—100 million users within two months. Now what? New tools like Perplexity, Claude AI, and Grok came that were inspired pretty much by ChatGPT. Now ChatGPT had to compete with these tools if it wanted to dominate the market and thrive, even if it didn't want to.

And that’s what ChatGPT has been doing for the last few years. But when ChatGPT came first time in the market, it was revolutionary, the internet had never seen any AI tool like this. But who took advantage of the idea and built similar products like ChatGPT?—the other AI tools that came after ChatGPT—Perplexity, Claude AI, Gemini, Grok, Copilot, and more. And now they all are competing with each other.

Another example: Uber. The idea of opening an app and booking a taxi—safer, easier, and timely was a revolutionary idea. Uber disrupted the transportation industry and changed it forever. But guess what? Seeing Uber's success, new similar products emerged—Lyft, Cabify, etc. Now of course, Uber needs to compete with its competitors in order to retain the market share and thrive, even if it doesn't want to. 

Another example: TikTok. The idea of watching short 30-second videos was revolutionary. No big tech company—Google, Meta, Twitter, Snapchat—had thought about this before. But because of TikTok’s success, these companies built their version of TikTok—YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, Spotlight Snaps. Not only that, there are countless apps separately dedicated to TikTok. Now they all compete with each other. But who created the market? TikTok. 

The reality is, there is no such thing as the“Blue Ocean” Strategy because you have to compete at one point or another—doesn’t really matter who created the market first. Said differently. Competition is inevitable. The sooner you understand it, the better.