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A Mouse Pod
AKA How to Stand Out in a Crowded Market
Brian Scordato
May 30, 2024
A Mouse Pod ( AKA How to Stand Out in a Crowded Market)
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Why This Episode Exists + Nerdy Stuff Not In The Pod 💡
This week, we dig into a challenge nearly every founder faces: how to differentiate yourself in a noisy, competitive landscape. How do you prove to customers that you're uniquely qualified to help them, especially when you're just starting out?
Through the story of a mouse exterminator who's doing things radically differently (and wildly successfully), we unpack four counterintuitive(ish) principles. We expand a bunch on these in the pod, but they’re here in case you want to reference:
Match Your Funnel to Your Customer's Emotions
Map out your customer's journey and the emotions they're feeling at each stage
If they have urgency, focus on providing momentum - make the first step incredibly easy
People will overpay for momentum, so structure your onboarding around it
Create Contrast with a "Feature Fold"
List out all your competitors' features, then build yours to have zero overlap
Focus on the customers who need what only you offer
Frame your unique feature as the real solution to the customer's problem to give them a break on decision making
Take Yourself Seriously
Charge premium prices from the start - it's how you'll attract the right customers and fund your growth
Narrow your scope to provide maximum value to a specific customer
Overdeliver on your promises to build trust and loyalty
Do What Others Can't or Won't
Look for the things people are inexplicably bad at or hate doing
Lean into the areas that come easily to you but are hard for everyone else
Build your business around solving those specific, overlooked problems
Pod References
Pod Timestamps:
00:30 Intro
02:00 We’ve Got Mice
05:15 The Mouse Man’s Funnel
07:50 Smooth Jazz
08:21 One - Build Your Funnel to Match Customer Emotion
11:45 Good Questions For Your Funnel
12:30 Two - Contrast from the Feature Fold
14:30 Saving your Customers a Decision
15:53 Three - Take Yourself Seriously
19:14 Four - The Things Other People Stink At
22:14 The End
22:50 Recap of the Four Lessons
Transcript - Feel Free to Read it Like a Long-form Article:
Today, we’re going to talk about three things.
We’re going to talk about mice.
We’re going to talk about the best business I’ve stumbled across in the last five years.
And we’re going to talk about standing out in a crowded market. How to create obvious, real contrast against your competitors in the mind of your customers.
We meet founders tasked with this all the time. You’re building in a hot or crowded space and, when it’s nearly free for anyone to spin up a product and grab a megaphone and shout about how great they are whether they’ve built anything impactful or not, how will you - the person building something that’ll actually help people - stand out? How do you prove to your customer that you’re legit - that you’re uniquely qualified, willing, and motivated to help them, especially during the early days, when you’re starting from zero?
Today, I’m going to tell you a story about a guy who keeps mice out of peoples houses, and, along the way, we’re going to help you build a business that’ll stand out. We’ll pull four counterintuitive things out from our mouse fighting friend’s business and plop them into a nice framework you can use. And we’ll shoot get you out of here and applying that framework to your business in 20 minutes. Let’s go.
And, if you hadn’t already guessed, I know about the mouse guy because we’ve got mice in our house. That’s tough to say out loud because ideally I’d like to live in a house that doesn’t have mice. But at least I got a pod out of it.
So let’s hop into a time machine - all the way back to two Thursday’s ago, in quiet, suburban, occasionally boring but apparently mouse infested, connecticut.
—
As any parents of an 18-month old know, the only thing better than your kid being awake is your kid being asleep.
It doesn’t happen as often or for as long as you’d like, but, every once in a while the stars align and you find yourself looking at your spouse at 8pm on a Thursday, realizing you’ve got roughly 45 minutes of glorious freedom before you need to start your own wind down routine.
For the magical 45 minute slot we’ll talk about today, my wife and I decided to watch a show a friend had suggested - Sugar, on Apple TV, starring Colin Farrell and Holly from the Office. It seemed like a detective show and we were both getting into it, talking about how impressive it was that Colin Farrell could do an American accent while acting, when we heard something. We looked at each other and both said, hopefully, “dishwasher?” But we knew it wasn’t.
A trip to the kitchen confirmed it - mice. We heard them scurrying and clawing at the inside of our walls like they were scooping out a bagel to cut down on carbs.
I jumped into action. We had a few mouse traps lying around in the basement and I rigged them with some peanut butter. I’d barely gotten back up the stairs before I heard pop, pop, pop, one after the next, like fireworks on the fourth of july.
Now, I feel bad about the mice. I really do. But we have a kid and a dog and mouse poop is super toxic to both. By the way, if you’re wondering what Ruby did during all of this, she didn’t budge off the couch. To this day it seems that she has no idea our walls were full of more mice than the opening scene of ratatouille. She’s the best.
Back to the story.
A quick google on mice made it clear that this problem wouldn’t fix itself, so my next google search was for an exterminator near me.
Dozens of results popped up, each boasting they were the best extermination in my town, most with a rating of 4.6 or higher and lots of positive reviews. Every listing looked - identical. I recognized most as local branches of bigger names - like Terminix or Orkin. We clicked and saw sterile landing pages that seemed to be cut and paste templates where my town name was automatically generated. I assume these were all smaller companies rolled up by private equity firms and put under a big umbrella for efficiency. They each listed their services - pest control, termites, bees, ants, roaches, and on and on. The business model seemed clear - they set up traps and poison for whatever nuisance you had, then they managed those traps and that poison monthly for… well.. ever. If I was the nameless, faceless private equity shop who owned all of these, that sounds like a pretty good business model.
My wife picked the highest rated vendor and called - it went to an answering machine, and we left a message. It was nearly 10pm at this point, so, not surprising.
We were about to go to bed, but we heard more scurrying and it didn’t feel like we’d made progress. So, we kept looking.
Maybe 10 slots down on the Google search, I saw a listing that leapt off the page. The headline said “You’ll Never See a Mouse Again,” and the sentence below said “Every listing above and below us uses traps and poison. Those don’t work. We’ll actually keep mice out of your house. Book a consult now.”
When I clicked, the website had a giant picture of the owner of the business. It was the first non-stock image I’d seen after over 10 exterminator websites. He’d been running this business for 28 years. I live nearby, the website said, so I don’t use poison. Because poison ends up in the soil which ends up in our drinking water or in our pets. And I don’t use traps, it said, because traps kill lots of mice but don’t keep them from coming back. I don’t want to kill animals. I just want your house to not have them.
The site was old and goofy. There were low quality pictures of mice and a clipart picture of a guy scratching his head that said “not sure what to do?” then a header that said we can help.
But the unpolishedness of it was refreshing. The messaging felt like a real person who cared about the results of their actions. And, the call to action was striking. A huge contrast from all the rest.
It said:
“You’re here because you just heard mice in your walls. That means it’s late at night. Everyone else is closed, but you can’t wait until working hours to book an appointment - mice can have 7-14 babies every 2 weeks. So, book our next slot now. We’re usually available within 24 hours.”
A signup page asked for my name, email, cell phone and address. I put it all in, and immediately got a text message from the owner’s cell. It said that an invoice had been sent to my email, and that the first available slot was Friday at noon. That was about 14 hours away. It also said that because both our time was valuable, a consult would be $368 dollars and would be comprehensive. Once I paid, the slot would be booked.
During the consult he’d tell us how the mice were getting in and how expensive it’d be to have that stop permanently. At the bottom, there was a link to reviews of that $368 consult itself. I clicked, and people were gushing - the guy was unbelievably knowledgeable about every bit of your house, everyone said. This was worth 10x the cost.
Every other vendor offered a free consult. This guy was… really … expensive. But he could come in 14 hours. And he lived in my town. And he cared about my drinking water and my dog. And he took it all seriously enough to put his face on the site. And if he did a bad job, it was clear it’d affect him personally. So, I paid to lock in my slot. It was 10:49pm. And my wife and I went to bed happy. We had momentum.
Whew boy have we got some lessons to pull out. Some stuff that can change your business.
And we’ll get to the four big ones … after…. a little smooooooth jazz.
One - Build Your Funnel to Match Your Customer’s Emotions
There’s an exercise we do with founders at Tacklebox called Customer Journey Mapping. The basic idea is to get a big piece of paper and map out the steps that led your customer to your business, the first experience they have with your business, and how they feel along that journey.
We start by using emojis to show how customers feel at each point in the process, but as we learn more we dive deeper into those emotions so that our product flow can reflect them properly.
A big mistake lots of founders make is to assume that the journey starts at their landing page, but, of course, it doesn’t. It starts way before that - from the moment the customer encounters the problem you’ll solve for them.
So, for my wife and I, the moment started the second we heard mice in the walls. And that brings us to point number one - the more detailed you are with the customer journey of your customer, the more likely you are to stand out. This, of course, requires you to pick a customer. Because the journey of someone with termites is different from the journey of someone with mice. And if you try to compromise and help people with both, the specificity of your journey messaging will be watered down.
Our mouse friend focused on people with mice, which allowed him to realize a few key things. First, that most of the people searching would be searching at night because that’s when mice are active. Second, that they had a ton of urgency - it was late, they were trying to go to sleep, and they wanted this solved. And third, that the thing they wanted was momentum - to feel like they’d gotten the ball moving before they went to bed.
If the customer you’re targeting has urgency, the feeling you need to deliver is momentum.
You need to make the first step of their process blindly easy.
A customer with urgency will overpay for momentum. So, organize the top of your funnel around that.
If you go back and look at our customer journey, the mouse guy acknowledged our urgency at every step. The copy on their google search result talked about booking a consult immediately, the landing page talked about how fast mice procreate and how other companies weren’t open but you could book a slot with them any time. And, the pricing hit on urgency, too. Charging a lot to get started is a feature. It conveys that the process has started with someone serious about fixing the problem.
A free consult, scheduled at some point, shows no urgency.
An expensive consult, scheduled immediately, does.
So, how does this work for the business you’re starting? The same way.
Let’s say you’re building an AI tool that helps people schedule meetings. Step one is thinking about how people will find you.
And, sure, there will be the random, one-off conversions. Maybe you get press or someone with a big following tweets about your service or whatever. Fine. In my mind, that’s all noise and should be ignored - it’s stuff you don’t have the luxury of paying attention to early on.
When you’ve got condensed resources, the only people you can focus on building a flow for are the repeatable, reliable ones. The ones under your control. You need to optimize for people with urgency to solve the problem.
So, if 60% of your customers are going to search google for AI driven scheduling software because, maybe they’re fitness coaches and they can’t afford a virtual assistant but calendly doesn’t work because of the nuances of their clients - some are virtual, some in a downtown gym, others in an uptown gym, some in-home - what are they going to search?
And, what was the straw that broke the camels back and caused the search? And how can you message directly towards that?
What do all the other search results say, and how can you play off those recognizing you’ll be read fourth or fifth or ninth in a sequence? How can you make it feel like you see your customer whereas every other listing is talking about their company? What’s momentum look like in a sentence?
What’s your version of the mouse guy saying - these other companies all do X, but we do Y, and you need Y now, so let’s get started?
Which brings us to big point number two:
Two - To Create Contrast, Make a Feature Fold
My old boss used to encourage all the early-stage companies we worked with to do what he called a Feature Fold.
You’d take a piece of paper and fold it in half the long way, so your paper had two big, long columns. Then, on one side, you write all the features your competitors had. Then, you’d write out the features you planned to have on the other.
The idea was to make sure there was no overlap.
If your competitors all offer a certain service as table stakes, it’s logical to assume you’ve got to offer it, too. But, the best thing you can do is not offer it. To assume that customers that want that feature are happy with the competitors offering it. Because it’s unlikely you can win on that feature, or a combination of all the features your current competitors offer. You don’t want to play the game with all the competition, you want to play the game with none.
So, strategically, the best thing you can do is to offer nothing that your competitors do, then find the customers that need something else.
This leads you to the most compelling marketing message on earth -
Everyone thinks you solve x problem with y feature. But that’s wrong. To actually solve Y, the way you want it solved, you have to do Z. It’s a bit counterintuitive, but it’s true.
Y is the thing all your competitors offer. Z is the thing only you offer. And, your messaging must nod and wink at something your customer already believes.
Our mouse friend did this in his google ad. Every other company on this google result uses traps and poison, he said. Those don’t work for people that want mice gone permanently. And they’re bad for the environment and for your town.
The wink and nod is - if it feels like throwing poison and traps at a problem indefinitely doesn’t seem like a great solution, trust your instincts.
Not offering what your competitors offer is also an enormous favor to your customers.
Your customers are burdened with a decision - they’re looking at a bunch of service providers and trying to figure out which one to pick. The best thing you can do is to help them make the decision.
If you’re in this X, and you believe Y, we help you.
If you’re in another situation, or you don’t believe Y, we don’t.
This creates a favorable decision for you - everyone else does one thing, we do something else - encourages your customer decide if they want the other thing or your thing. But, in the back of their mind they know that if they choose the other thing, they’re just setting themselves up to have to make another decision. Which of all of these companies that do the same thing should they choose? But, if they decide your unique approach is best, they’re done making decisions.
By offering a different feature, you cut down on the number of decisions your customer has to make. Humans hate decisions, and will avoid them when they can. Saving them one will get you more business.
Mouse guy saying everyone does traps and poison, and only I don’t, makes me decide between traps and posion and not traps and poison, which led me to not traps and poison, which made my decision to work with him easy.
Mouse man wins again.
Three - Take Yourself Seriously
This is an epidemic amongst founders.
It seems like a good idea to beat your competitors on price. If you use the Feature Fold we talked about above, you’ll feel like you absolutely have to beat your competitor on price, because you aren’t offering as many features as they are.
But, when a customer is new to your business, they’ll take your cues as to what type of business you are. If you’re cheaper than the competition, you’ll attract customers interested in paying the least amount of money to get a job done. These are horrible customers. If price is the variable they’re choosing on, you’re in a race to the bottom. Someone will price below you and you’ll lose all your customers. Never build anything for people that add up input costs.
Also, when you have a lower price, people assume your product isn’t as good. They take your cue.
Even when founders know this, they still like the idea of charging less because they think it lets them off the hook. If you make a mistake, but didn’t charge a lot, no one will be mad. Right? This obviously sounds silly when you say it out loud, but it’s the core thinking for most founders. If you charge a lot, you’re on the hook to deliver a lot, and who’s to say you can do that?
Charging less than the competition is a way of telling people to not take you too seriously because you aren’t taking yourself all that seriously. It’s also a way to guarantee you don’t survive.
When you’re a startup, or a new business, you’ll need your first set of customers to pay a big margin. It’ll likely be the biggest markup you’ll ever have. Because, theoretically, these are the customers that can’t get their niche, hard problem solved well by anyone else. You’ve decided to focus on it, and solving it creates a ton of value. Then, as you grow, you’ll move to the right of the adoption curve and charge less, because the problem you solve will be less painful and urgent.
Early on, you’ve got to put yourself on the hook to attract the customers willing to pay a big margin. And that margin will fund your business and allow you to move to the right of that curve.
So, pick a specific customer and take yourself seriously. Charge a lot to solve a hard problem and then bust your ass to solve it. Narrow your scope to make sure you can do it. Don’t compromise on price, compromise on customer. Narrow that range - fewer customers, more value.
For our calendar example, start with the weird outlier niches that have lots of qualifiers for scheduling and would get enormous value from those nuances being solved.
The mouse guy takes himself seriously and that’s ridiculously attractive. He won’t meet with you unless you pay a big chunk of money up front because his time is valuable and he’s only interested in people likely to work with him. The ones that already buy into what he’s about. He doesn’t want to get there and have to convince you - he wants there to be a 90% chance you work with him after the consultation before he shows up. He wants to speak to the people already listening.
Promise a lot, charge a lot, overdeliver. That’s how you build a business.
Four - The Things Other People Stink At
I’m going to do another podcast on the mouse guy’s product and stack because I think it’s just as brilliant as his marketing. I was going to squeeze it into this episode but the guy deserves two pods.
But I will end with something he said to me while we were walking around my house checking for mouse entry points. He had such a ridiculous amount of enthusiasm for his job that I had to ask - how did he find it? How did he decide that protecting your house from mice was his calling?
Well, that’s an interesting one, he said, while lying on his back next to the foundation of my house trying to mimic the point of view of a mouse.
I’ve always felt that the best way to figure out what you want to do in life isn’t to think about what you’re best at or what’ll make the most money or even what you get most excited about. I’ve always thought the best way to figure it out was to look at what other people are weirdly terrible at. The things that you just can’t believe they can’t do well or don’t want to do.
For me, I always wanted to buy a house, he said. And, once I bought it, I wanted to know how everything in it worked. How the HVAC worked and the plumbing and electricity. It was, by far, the biggest purchase of my life and every bit of it was fascinating. It’s this living, breathing thing. And, if you get it working right, you can save enormous amounts of money and keep your family safe and grow your investment and work on it yourself. And I just… couldn’t believe that no one else was as interested as me. That people just live in the thing they spent probably 10x more money on than anything in their life and don’t care.
So, I knew that when stuff happened - the HVAC breaks or whatever - I could help. Because I understood it all.
Then I looked for the stuff people hated the most, and the stuff that professional services were doing the worst job at. And that was the rodent stuff. Everyone hates that. They won’t look in the basement because they’re afraid of what they’ll see. But I love it. It’s a big puzzle - how do we make this house impenetrable so everyone is safe - the animals and the people.
Look at my neighbor, he continued. He’s a crazy successful accountant and he says the same thing. He can’t understand how so many people are so bad at understanding money, but it’s so obvious to him. So, he does it professionally.
And that’s the advice I give to everyone. Don’t look for what you’re great at, because that’ll always have a bunch of emotions attached to it. Look at what other people are terrible at and hate and you just can’t fathom why. And that’s your thing.”
He hopped up off the ground and said “do you like that ivy? Because mice use it like a highway up and into your second floor. Should probably chop it down unless you’re doing a wrigley field sorta thing,” then went on acting like he hadn’t said one of the more profound things I’d heard in a while.
Don’t look for what you’re good at. Look for what other people are inexplicably bad at - something that comes easy to you but hard to everyone else. And do that.
The End
Back to today.
We’re well on our way to the mouse guy shoring up our house. And, we finished Sugar.
And I’ll be honest, I think I was more upset at Sugar than the whole mouse fiasco. I mean.. if you’ve seen it, you know. That could’ve been the worst twist in television history. And for all the farrell heads out there - this wasn’t about him. He acted his little butt off. I blame his agent. He should’ve ran away from this script faster than the mice do when I turn on the lights in my laundry room. Although at least that’ll get fixed.
To recap, the lessons from our mouse friend are impeccable.
First, understand exactly what your customer does to find you and how the feel in that moment. Then, build the product that is your onboarding funnel as a reaction to their emotions. If they’re feeling a ton of urgency, make sure your onboarding meets them where they are and gives them momentum. Your messaging and flow should be a reaction to what’s happening to your customer that moment. And, people will always overpay for momentum.
Second, to get the type of specificity that allows you to build an efficient funnel, create a Feature Fold. Don’t do anything your competitors do. Only do things they don’t. And market them directly to the customer that needs them and don’t compromise. Only go for the people already in on the joke.
Third, take yourself seriously. Charge a lot, overdeliver, and solve a specific problem. Narrow your customer to increase the value you can provide.
And fourth, to find out what you should be doing in the first place, think about what’s hard for other people but easy for you. What are you shocked that other people can’t do? That’s where you start.
And, if you want to keep mice out of your house, don’t ask Ruby to help. She’s so indifferent to mice running on the floor right in front of her I’m wondering if she’s on their side. She’s the best.
Have a great week