Evan Carmichael responds to a viewer who argues customers care about usefulness and price, not uniqueness. He agrees difference alone isn't enough, but reframes uniqueness as any dimension that makes people talk and return: Amazon's availability, superior quality, exceptional service, or strategic pricing. Competing only on low price is unsustainable.
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Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another edition of Ask Evan. Today I'm answering a question from one of my YouTube viewers, David, who took issue with something I said in one of my old videos. So it was a profile that I had, and one of the things that I, I mentioned was that you have to be unique if you want to be a successful entrepreneur. You've got to be unique. And so he wrote in saying, The information is useful and inspirational. I have a question regarding one of your action items. Personally, I don't buy things because they're unique. I'm not aware of others being inspired to buy things based on their uniqueness. Seems to me that usefulness, availability, quality, affordable price are way more important than being unique. So thanks for the question, David. A great point. I think what I would say to that is I agree. People are not gonna buy something just because it's different. It has to add a lot of value. And what I would think about the uniqueness is not necessarily uniqueness in your product or service, but in your entire business. So all the things that you talked about here— availability, quality, affordable price, usefulness— that can be a way for your business to be unique, right? If you have more availability than anybody else— this is what helped Amazon grow. They have way more availability when they started than anybody else in a bookstore. That availability made them unique. Right, if your product or service is way more useful than somebody else, then that makes your business unique. Quality, again, if you have a super outstanding quality product compared to everybody else, that makes you unique. The pricing is something that I tend to gear away from. So it can be a point of differentiation, it can make your business unique if you have, you know, the best price on the market. The challenge here is that's really hard to sustain in the long term, and you don't wanna race to the bottom. You wanna try to build up and be able to provide so much value that you're able to charge a premium price. Ideally, that's where I'd like to see you and all the other entrepreneurs as well, is not settling for the scraps on the bottom. But I think all the points you mentioned are right on, exactly true, and I see them as being ways to be unique with your business. My point about being unique is, if you're an average company selling an average product, you know, you're not doing anything special, you're not gonna get great results, right? Pick any business. If you're just selling the same thing everybody else is selling in the same way without anything that's different about it, then you're not gonna be able to build a successful, long-term, sustainable business. You've gotta have something that is different, helps you stand out, that is memorable, that makes people wanna come back to you and talk to you. If it's not in the product, it could be in the service, it could be just having the most friendly, staff and, you know, people who respond very quickly, that could be enough to be unique for your business. You have to have something that people talk about, want to come back to you for, you know, tell their friends about, and that has to be part of whatever business you're in. And sometimes it's possible on the product side to have, you know, innovations, but different for the sake of different won't help. Different and useful is really good, right? If you're adding new features to a product that will really help solve somebody's problem, then that can be unique and really help your business soar. So hopefully that helps answer your question. I absolutely agree with what you're saying. Those of you watching, if you like the video, please give it a thumbs up below. It always makes me wanna do more of these videos for you. And if you have a question about, you know, being unique or anything else about your business, feel free to leave it in the comments below. I always read those and try to respond as quickly as I can. So thank you, and we'll see you in the next episode.
