No One Is Making Bets

Everyone’s optimising what they’re currently doing, trying to steal a little marginal improvement here or there

Better hook, tighter funnel, cleaner offer, slightly different colour on a landing page

Same launch sequences everyone bought from the same mentor.

Looking at other people’s content for what to post, see if they can create the same thing because ‘it’s doing well at the minute’

That certainly doesn’t move the industry along, and I don’t think it moves a business along, either.

I want to see more bets.

A bet is a position that you can be wrong about - a claim that might lose followers, an idea that you’ve staked something on that the market hasn’t validated yet - and that it might not.

I think optimisation feels like progress because we can measure it - you can A/B test a subject line.

You can’t A/B test a worldview, or a prediction for the future, or an entirely different business model.

It’s easy to retreat to the measurable thing.

Tweak, tweak, tweak - the whole industry slowly converging to the same beige middle, where every coach sounds like every other coach because they’re all optimising toward the same proven template.

The uncomfortable bit of this is that a template has already been de-risked by the person who sold it to you - they’ve tested it, it can’t lose.

But it can’t really win, either - it can just return the average, and the average in a commodity market is a price war - no coach wants a price war.

The coaches who break out aren’t running a better version of someone’s playbook, or any playbook.

They’re placing bets that nobody else is making, showing up to defend them and then letting the market slowly come around.

It’s easy to copy and measure a funnel - hard to copy a 3-year bet.