How To Design Your Own Personal Category & Capitalize On Opportunities
Being a successful Category Designer requires hard work, luck, and commitment to something bigger than yourself.
Fortunately, you can do this at any stage of life if you position yourself well and niche down.
Engineering Exponential Moments: How To Recognize & Capitalize On Opportunities
Some opportunities, you discover. Others, you create.
In a mini-book I wrote alongside my fellow pirates at Category Pirates, Engineering Exponential Moments, I share how “happy accidents” are really serendipitous, exponential moments — and they are always happening.
The question is, are you looking for them?
Most people are surrounded by serendipitous moments with exponential potential but fail to recognize them.
To wake you up to these moments, ask yourself these questions:
- How different is this person from the people I normally interact with?
- How is this moment (and what it is being asked of me) different?
- What different destination could this moment lead to?
Recognizing and engineering serendipity in your career, business, and life are crucial to living with purpose and making the most of your time here on earth.
Learn more about how to unlock opportunities by engineering “happy accidents.”
Position Yourself Or Be Positioned: The Personal Category Design Playbook
In the mini-book Position Yourself Or Be Positioned, I talk about how to be uniquely you — in a way that serves others in a meaningful and valuable way.
This is called Personal Category Design, which is your commitment to something bigger than yourself, a movement of which you inevitably become the leader. And it starts with becoming known for a new and differentiated niche you own.
Step 1: Get in the game and start creating categories.
Start small, and use this easy equation: You do X for Y because you want to solve Z.
For example: You help musicians (X) turn their songs into NFTs (Y) because you believe artists should be fairly compensated for their music and blockchain technology is a step in that direction (Z).
Step 2: Pick a specialty.
What you’re looking for here is: what can you be legendary at, that creates significant value for others, that few people can do. Then, Frame, Name, and Claim that thing.
Step 3: Figure out pricing.
Pricing is not a reflection of self-confidence.
How you make more money in your business, your career, and your life, is by acquiring skills that widen the Value Perception Gap. Figure out what problems other people value being solved, go acquire those skills, and set your price.
Step 4: Hitch your niche to a rocket ship.
Personal category design + an intentionally created Value Perception Gap will allow you to charge 2x, 5x, 10x+ more than whatever it was you were doing before.
But in order to get above a 10x or 20x or 50x pricing increase, you will likely need to hitch your niche to someone else’s rocket ship. This means finding ways to tie your incentives and earnings to someone else’s success.
See how to position yourself like some of the highest-paid people on the planet.
How To Create A Category: 7 Legendary Ways To Niche Down
Creating a category for yourself is about niching down, getting more specific about your offering, and having a point of view.
In the mini-book, How To Create A Category As A Small “e” Entrepreneur, I walk through the 7 ways solopreneurs, small business owners, consultants, advisors, and freelancers can become known for a niche they own.
1. WHAT do you do… that you are uniquely known for?
The single greatest way to create a category of your own is to do something no one else does.
Take Velveeta, for example.
Most people would say Velveeta is a great queso dip for Superbowl parties. If you ask a Superconsumer of Velveeta, they will say it’s “the melt.” But it took eagle eye executives to see “the melt,” shine a spotlight on it, and turn it into a $100 million dollar plus growth strategy.
When looking for “something no one else does,” the proper starting point is not “what everyone else does.” Instead, you want to root your thinking in what you are currently doing and experiencing that you see is being underserved.
In other words, what is your “melt”?
2. WHO do you do it for… who are surprisingly willing to pay large premiums?
Another way you can niche down is creating a product or providing a service for a group of people who are radically underserved.
Steer away from the typically over-served, “busy moms” or “mid-market sales managers.” Instead, think about who isn’t being served. ****
- Who, within or separate from those established buyer personas, needs help?
- Who is being ignored?
- Who does the rest of the world see as an inconvenience, an afterthought, or even a “bad” customer?
Chances are, these are niches worth their weight in gold.
3. WHEN do you do it… that sits at the peak intersection of Important and Urgent?
Every single person in the world is on their own journey to somewhere.
Your job is to figure out the point in time along their journey where they’re stuck, and then help them get unstuck.
Think:
- Uber surge pricing.
- Diners that service breakfast from 3am to 8am.
- San Francisco’s The Endup that stays open ’til 8 or 9am, when every other bar closes at 2am.
The more “niche down” opportunities you combine together, the more different you are and the more difficult it becomes for someone else to do what you do.
This is one of the Category Design Roundups I create with the crew at Category Pirates. To discover more, hop aboard and become a Category Designer yourself!