Filtering the Crowd

How to be found

My gym instructor, Adam, runs both in-person and virtual programs.

Now Adam knows that the online fitness market is worth more than US$25 billion. Thousands of coaches, apps and platforms are competing for attention. And, Adam wants just a tiny slice.

So, I thought his response was brilliant.

His new offering isn’t for everyone. It’s for young men with ADHD.

You wake up wanting to exercise. Instead of choosing a workout, you choose your mood. I’m distracted, frenetic, unfocused. Or I’m relaxed. Or energised. The workout adapts to the mood. Ten dollars a week.

This is a lesson in micro-niching. It means Adam can make witty Insta reels like this one, which get him a lot more attention than trying to appeal to everyone.

The smart play, which is Adam’s approach, is to enter through a niche and sell to a market. The niche gives the product a clear identity, story, and customer acquisition channel.

But the underlying product solves a much broader problem.

Think Strava. The brand screams cyclists. Yet runners, walkers, swimmers, hikers, triathletes and skiers all happily use it. The cycling focus gave them a tribe.

Or Canva. The original positioning was effectively: “Design for people who aren’t designers.” Yet many professional designers now use Canva for speed and collaboration. The niche was an entry point.

Or Australian Pensioners Insurance. The pitch is something like this: “Insurance made simple for people who don’t need much of it”. I joined them when I was 25 years old. I know, spare the jokes.

The best niche is often not the smallest market. It’s the clearest story.

Question: What’s a niche you can drill down into get the sharpest value proposition?

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Believe nothing; test everything

I almost used an unverified study in 5MSM this week.

Would you fall for this? I did.

A researcher in China had students do an intellectually demanding task. The were also given three minutes of funny panda videos to watch, during breaks. And, guess what? Fatigue dropped 18%, mood improved 67%, heart rate variability jumped 32%. Very specific numbers. A plausible claim that our attentiveness and focus is easily malleable.

It even felt true.

But then I tried to verify it.

I couldn’t. Not in peer-reviewed databases, not in news coverage, not in any systematic record. I was about to build an argument that didn’t exist.

It happens constantly.

Pauline Hanson (a right-wing nationalist politician for our overseas readers) recently told a National Press Club audience that the Clean Energy Finance Corporation had received $200 billion of taxpayers’ funding. It hadn’t. She claimed that an Indigenous Voice to Parliament would allow the government to form a new “Black state”. And, she said that foreign students could vote.

These weren’t slip-ups. They were lies. Stated as fact. Just like the pandas.

What dismays me isn’t that this misinformation exists. It’s how easily it spreads. Often, how plausible it sounds. How it then gets repeated as common knowledge before anyone actually checks. I fully expect the panda data to be quoted by OD consultants, and Hanson’s ‘facts’ parroted by our monocultural citizenry.

Which brings me to you. And I.

We work on strategic questions: organisational change, policy design, service and product innovations, significant investment decisions. And, sometimes, we’re offered plausible but unverified claims. Someone cites a study. A paper quotes a statistic. Someone claims “research shows.” Or our AI bot outlines an argument for us.

And we act on it.

The answer isn’t cynicism. It’s a different discipline: believe nothing until you’ve tested it. Not “trust but verify.”

We’re in a world where we need to reverse that. Start from skepticism. Make the claim prove itself.

Question: What assumptions is your strategy built on that you absolutely should verify even better than you do?

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Beyond the lightbulb

If I asked you to name some societal innovations, what would you come up with?

Perhaps agriculture, the printing press, mechanical timekeeping, refrigeration. Many others. These all enabled humanity to do certain things better. And faster. But they also changed what’s possible to think about, what’s framable as a problem, and what then humans can coordinate themselves around.

Think about the baby sling.

Someone invented it. Probably a woman. With a baby. This didn’t just allow her to forage while carrying her baby. It made nomadic motherhood possible, which reconceptualised settlement and gender roles. Importantly, the carried babies happened quickly, but the new settlement patterns took millennia.

Electrification followed the same arc, only faster. The immediate, individual economic value-add to manufacturers started quickly. In the 1890s the lightbulb lit factories, which stayed the same, just brighter, so they could work later. Then came the ‘group drive’: one motor driving belts that ran dozens of machines. Same geometry, distributed power. By 1913, Henry Ford thought to not just ask “how do we work faster?” but “what if we rebuilt everything around throughput?”.

That one question rewired the entire floor, not just his, but every manufacturer’s on the planet.

It’s often my job to help people think beyond personal productivity, to functional improvement and, often beyond that, to genuine reconceptualisation.

A regulatory authority I worked with consciously worked through these stages. For decades, actual humans had solved matters one by one and at the end of each week, they tallied their ‘open cases’ (usually the complex ones). A digital platform then allowed them to crowdsource expertise. Many hands made light work (on the complex cases especially) and end-of-week open cases plummeted. But then they asked the Stage 3 question: ‘What if we didn’t need a human to advise at all?’ Machine learning took hold. Now users get instant responses in 95% of cases. They reconceptualised their entire work from ‘solving a case’ to ‘immediate response’.

Of course, the innovation of our time is AI. And here, I agree with Azeem Azhar that we’re still at the lightbulb stage. We’re all hurriedly using Claude and ChatGPT to help us individually be more productive. We haven’t yet cracked how to combine agentic workflows to help our businesses be more productive, or profitable. Let alone the fundamental re-conceptualisations that will follow.

Of course we don’t yet know what that looks like. But the cycle time is shorter than either the sling, or electrification, so we will.

Question: What genuine re-conceptualisations are you thinking about for your own work?

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Sometimes we’re drowning in noise and we need to know what matters.

So, this week as you go about your work, think about how to filter yourself out of the crowd by niching, verify before you act, and ask what true re-conceptualisation would look like.

Click the heart to let me know you’re out there and see you next week,

Andrew