Someone bigger will always be doing your idea.

This week one of my brand clients told me a well-known mentor’s emails had started to sound like some of what Deia does. Then she said something that stayed with me all evening. She said there’s room for everyone coming at this from their own angle and expertise, and she loves seeing business owners lift each other up.

Years ago, that conversation would have finished me off.

The one that got away

Anyone who’s been around long enough might remember a membership I ran called Get It ByDeesign.

The idea came from my brand clients. Once a project wrapped up, they’d need a flyer or a social graphic and had no way of making one without coming back to a designer. So I built them easy-to-edit design templates in PowerPoint, since Canva didn’t exist yet. (Yes, there really was a time before Canva.)

While I was building mine, someone on the other side of the world was having the same idea. Within a few months of my launch, Canva arrived.

I sulked properly. I decided they’d done it bigger and better, that I’d had the idea first but hadn’t moved fast enough or well enough to make it what Canva became, and that there was no point carrying on. So I stopped. Then I did what any self-respecting sulky teenager would do and vowed I would never, ever use Canva.

What changed

A few stern talkings-to and a couple of kids later (nothing rearranges your perspective quite like children), I see it very differently.

Now when someone tells me a bigger name is doing something similar, I hear proof that the need is real and I wasn’t imagining the gap. The big name confirms there’s a market. My job is to serve my corner of it better than anyone else could.

I’m competing with nobody except the version of me from last month. Looking at what others are doing keeps me inspired and fuelled, and that’s healthy. What I watch for is the moment inspiration tips into comparison and my inner sulky teen starts reaching for the door. She still turns up now and then. I just don’t let her run the business anymore.

Your lane is your brand

Two businesses can sell almost the same thing, and a stranger will still choose one over the other based on whether she recognises herself in it. I chose my gym that way. It’s further away and it costs more, and I’d pick it again tomorrow for the people.

Your brand has one job when a bigger name moves into your space. It needs to make you impossible to mistake for anyone else. If it looks like a softer copy of what’s already out there, strangers will pick the name they’ve heard of every time. If it looks like you, they’re choosing between two different things, and the right ones choose you.

So decide which lane is yours and refuse to leave it. Then find out whether your brand is backing you up. Mira will tell you what strangers think it’s worth, and she won’t soften it.

Find out what strangers think your brand is worth →