How Freelancers Can Win Without Competing on Price | The Blue Ocean Trio

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, episode 339

Welcome to the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, where our mission is to help you turn your creative passions into a stable, reliable income. If you're in audio, video, design, photography, or really any other creative field, and you just want to learn from other successful creatives, you're in the right place. Have you ever felt like you are a tiny fish in a massive, huge ocean, where there's tons of people offering the same exact service as you?

Maybe they're the same quality or better than you. Maybe they're the same price or lower than you. And so you spend your life as a freelancer being beaten down on price, feeling like you're fighting for scraps, always getting pushback on your rates while also getting undercut by your competitors, so it can feel like a lot of times you're just barely keeping your head above water. This is what we call a red ocean. It is full of blood, gore, guts, the remaining body parts of all the other freelancers who tried and failed to swim in this horrible, hostile sea. And so many freelancers are stuck in this bloody red ocean where you were trying to outpitch, outprice, out portfolio or outskill your competition. And so you're just stuck fighting for this very limited piece of what is feeling like or could really be a shrinking pie. And because of that, the clients that are looking to hire you can't really differentiate you from any other butt that fits the seat. You all look the same to them. So they just go for whoever's the cheapest, given the quality level. So you're stuck in this price war where you start to resent your clients for this and you start getting burnt out. And I want you to think about the rows and rows and rows of Fiverr freelancers that you have to scroll through when you're looking for somebody to do some butt and seat gig. And I'm going to pull up some examples here if you're watching on YouTube. But this is that bloody red sea of sameness where I can get a new logo made for $10 here, or I can just get a full website built out for me on WordPress for just $75. Or I've even seen where you can get a song mixed and mastered for $10.

Through multiple people, not just one person, multiple people. Mix and master, $10. That is wild. This is a red ocean. This is where creativity can go to die many times, especially when you are forced to do high volume at those low prices. So when everyone else is more or less the same, how the hell do you stand out? You do it by either becoming the biggest, baddest fish, the one who is causing all those body parts and gore and blood and guts to be spilled out in this red ocean. Or better yet, you find a blue ocean where you're one of the few, if not the only option for the client, where price is not the main determining factor of whether or not you get hired. So I'm calling this the Blue Ocean Trio. It's three big areas that you can differentiate yourself and find blue oceans, all so you can have little to no competition. Think about a blue ocean versus a red ocean, sharks feeding off people versus a blue ocean, lounging, relaxing, enjoying yourself, not worrying about a shark coming up to bite a chunk out of you at any given time, right? So if you have little to no competition, where price isn't the only differentiator, where you can command higher rates and become the go-to person for what you offer, that sounds like a damn good place for me. If you're new here, hi, my name is Brian Hood. I have grown my freelancing business to multiple six figures. I have, I think, six or seven different six-figure income streams in my life and a seven-figure income stream. And I created this podcast for creative freelancers who want to earn more money from their creative skills without selling their soul. If that sounds like you, you are in the right spot right now. So let's talk about the blue ocean trio here. We're going to talk about three different areas that you can separate yourself to get out of the bloody red ocean. That is the goal for this episode. And after talking to and consulting with and coaching hundreds and hundreds, actually talking to thousands of freelancers, I've got a really good look at what sort of deficits people have at scale. So many people have these three deficits. And so I want to talk through each of these. We're going to talk about blue ocean versus red ocean niche. We're going to talk about blue ocean versus red ocean offer and blue ocean versus red ocean marketing, because I've seen red ocean on all three of these and I've seen blue ocean on all three of these. And the difference in your business between a blue and red ocean in these three areas is the difference between someone stuck at that 20, 30, $50,000 a year range and someone who's accelerated past 100, 200, 250,000, even $300,000 or more a year range as a freelancer. So let's talk about blue ocean niche first. This is all about finding untapped niches. And by the way, when it comes to the blue ocean trio, you don't have to necessarily have all three of these. It can be amazing if you do, but just one of these can be enough to differentiate yourself from the rest of people. But if you can get all three stacked, two or three of these together, it is way more powerful. So the first one I want to talk about is the blue ocean niche. This is where we can find untapped niches, small groups of clients where you can dominate rather than massive groups where you're all just another drop in the ocean. When you look at a red ocean niche, this is where there is way more competitors than there are clients. And you could probably all think of niches like that, where there are way more people looking for gigs than there are actually gigs. And while competition isn't always a bad thing, in many circumstances, it is. So I want to talk about this for a second. In Nashville, Tennessee, which is where I live right now, it's where I had my studio for most of my time, my background is music production. This is a city where there is a massive amount of recording studios. So it can feel like a red ocean. And in many ways it is. But just because there's a lot of competitors doesn't necessarily mean it is a red ocean niche, because in Nashville, Tennessee, there is also a disproportionately high amount of musicians and artists and bands that are here, because this is the music city. I've said this before way back when we were, if you don't know this, back in episode 1 through 150, the first 150 episodes, we were known as the 6 Figure Home Studio Podcast. We talked to just recording studio owners. And one of the things I said on that old podcast was, I would rather be the number 55 studio in Nashville, Tennessee, or the number 150 top studio in Nashville, Tennessee, than the number one studio in Reno, Nevada, because I would rather be someone who is sustainable in a city with lots and lots of clients for me to work with, enjoying a high quality of life as well, because Nashville is amazing versus living in a city like Reno, which last time I was there, hated the experience. And I can't imagine that there's much of a market there for studios. There's probably room for one or two. And I'll probably get an angry email from somebody in Reno later on. That's fine. But I just wanted to comment on, just because there's a lot of competitors doesn't necessarily mean it's bad. Doesn't mean it's unsustainable. It could be a sign of a healthy market, in other words. But when you see more and more and more people entering the market as competitors and fewer and fewer people or the same amount of people coming in as potential clients, then we start to have an imbalance. That's where we have too much competition for what little clients are left there. And that can happen where you have a massive growth in creatives in a niche, which in the recording studio space we saw a lot when to have a recording studio to start. It used to be hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars to get it off the ground. And then when home recording year got cheaper and cheaper and cheaper, and everything went in the box, we didn't have to have a ton of hardware. You could get started for hundreds or thousands of dollars versus hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars. It was a huge difference, so we had an influx of new talent, really good people, myself included, who could compete with the best of the best studios for $20,000 or less of gear. And so when we had that sort of growth in the market from the studio side, we didn't have the same exact growth from the musician side, so there was an imbalance. It could also come from shrinking niches, where the market is just shrinking. I think Alex Ramosi uses this example. He had a client or somebody, a friend, that worked in the newspaper world, which is a massively shrinking market. I think it's like 20, 30, 40, 50% a year decline every year.