How To Stand Out From Your Competition

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1:02Why should someone choose you? Not your product, not your service. Why you specifically over every other single alternative that's out there in the world? Because here's the reality in 2026. Your customer has options. More options than any point in history. They can find 10 businesses that do what you do on their phone in the next 30 seconds that quickly. They have similar features, similar prices, similar promises that you're making. And when everything looks the same, the customer defaults to the cheapest option. And when that happens, it's a race to the bottom. It's a race that you do not want to run.

1:39And the way out of that race is what I'm going to share with you today, is being yourself, being unique, being different. And don't worry, I promise you that your difference already exists. You just have to uncover it. You have to just realize it. I'm going to show you how to do that today. Full transparency, I consider myself a bit of an expert in this area because I struggled with this tremendously in my journey in entrepreneurship until I realized that the things I've been hiding, the things that I kind of try to soften and not show the world is really what makes me different and allows me to stand out and be better than the competition.

2:16Let's get into it.

2:22Welcome back to the$100 MBA show. I'm your host, Omar Zinhome. where I deliver practical business lessons three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to help you start, grow, and scale your business. I got a quick favor to ask. If this show has helped you in any way, leave me a quick review. You could do so wherever you listen to podcasts. This helps me and my team reach even more people who need the same no-fluff practical business advice that you're getting from the show. It only takes a few seconds, but it makes a huge difference. Thanks for being a part of our journey to help others on their journey.

3:24maybe just a little bit outside the norm. Most people, when they start out in business, they look at all the successful people out there, the people they look up to, and they just copy them. They try to look like them. They try to sound like them. And what happens is that you get ignored because you just look very generic. And the problem is, is that when you hide the things that make you different, you make yourself easily forgettable. You're not very memorable when you don't stand out, when you don't have anything unique about you versus somebody else. Take me, for example. For a very long time, I hid the fact that I grew up poor in a poor family.

3:57My parents were immigrants from Egypt. They came over to the U.S. They tried their best, but we really didn't have a lot of money. And for a very long time, I thought this was a weakness. I thought that I shouldn't share that with the world because I want to not have that stigma of where I grew up poor. I also hid the fact that I didn't come out of the womb as an entrepreneur, right? I was a teacher for 10 years. I had a career. I had a job. And then I left my teaching career to become a business owner. So I kind of started late in life in business. But after a few years of struggling and having no real identity or brand in my business, I started to embrace my difference.

4:32I started to share a little bit about my story, about how I grew up and how my parents immigrated to America from Egypt and how we didn't grow up with much. I also shared my career as a teacher and realized, hey, my experience in teaching actually is my advantage. I actually have a lot of experience in education on how to break down complex ideas and explain them in an easy way. That was my job for a decade. Once I started to embrace these things in my life and I started just owning them, I really started to differentiate myself and people started to see me in a different way. I looked a little bit different from the competition.

5:04Even when I ran my software company, Webinar Ninja, I'm not a typical software engineer that's a genius, right? I know a very little about software engineering, just enough so that I could start the company. But then I had to hire some really good experts. But what I am good at is I'm good at teaching. so that when I was selling the product or service, I ran webinars to sell WebinarNagia the software. And I used that to my advantage. And a lot of people love the software because I built it for me, which is somebody who's not super techie. And I built something that's easy to use because that's what I wanted to have.

5:36So my ideal customer resonated with that. The other thing about embracing your difference and embracing the things that make you different from the competition is that it enriches your brand, enriches your story. One of the things that make me a little bit different is that I'm neither very young. I'm not some sort of young whiz kid. I'm also not super old, right? I'm not in my 60s or 70s. I'm middle age, sort of to speak. I'm in my 40s. So I resonate with a lot of people that are my age as well. Also, to enrich your story, you should share some of the things that you enjoy in life outside of business, inside of whatever you do.

6:08Like I share a lot that I love to play poker. I love playing basketball. I love teaching. In a lot of ways, these things are characters in my story and create a bigger or better picture about who I am and what my brand is all about. And when I hide these things, if I don't talk about these things, I become very dull. You don't really become very memorable. You don't really remember anything about me if I don't share anything about me. Now, going back to you, you have your own unique story. You have your own background. You have your own experiences. And that really shapes who you are as a business.

6:40People buy from people, not just from brands or they don't just buy products. A lot of people, they want to know the story behind why you built the thing that you built so that it can resonate to see, hey, do I want to work with this person or not? I can tell you firsthand when I was selling Webinar Ninja software, there were a lot of competitors out there. There's a lot of choices out there. And the reason why a lot of people chose us is because of us, because they resonated with the fact that, hey, this person taught for a living for 10 years. And I shared the fact that I was a teacher and I wrote curriculum and all that kind of stuff.

7:11And they like the fact that, hey, somebody that understands teaching and learning is building a webinar software rather than some big corporate entity that has nothing to do with teaching. So you have to understand that people will buy from you because of who you are. So I'm here to tell you to stop. Stop hiding your stories. Stop hiding who you are, your uniqueness. So what I want you to do so that you can implement this and actually take action is to do this exercise. I want you to write down the five things about you, your story, your background, your perspective, your experiences that make you different than the typical person or typical company in your industry.

7:48I want you to dig deep. I want you to really look at the things you've been downplaying in your life and list as many as you can and then choose the top five that you want to start sharing. It doesn't have to be dramatic. It doesn't have to be some sort of rags to riches story. It could be something as simple as that you've been working in this industry for X amount of years and understand the pains that the customer goes through. Now, step two, we're going to leverage all those experiences, our own story, our uniqueness to find a gap your competition is ignoring. And that is step two. You want to find a gap that your competition is really not working on.

8:22And I'm going to give you a perfect example. When I was running my software company, Webinar Ninja, we were competing against some huge companies, GoToWebinar, Zoom. You might have heard of them, right? They basically ruled the world during the pandemic. And they have hundreds of millions of dollars in funding, right? We were a bootstrapped, self-funded company. They had literally thousands of employees. We had a team of 30, but we were still competing despite the fact that we could not outspend them. We could not outbrand them. So what we did is we decided to work in an area that they're not working on.

8:56We wanted to solve some problems that they were not solving, problems that they would never solve because it just wouldn't work for the size of their company. So we focused on giving superior customer support. We noticed from our customers that have migrated from other companies like Zoom to us, they would complain about the support that they were getting back in Zoom. They would say that the average response time for a support ticket from Zoom was like 48 hours. Like, that's not good enough when you have to run a live webinar right now. So Nicole and I dedicated ourselves to building an incredible customer support team so that we were available 24-7.

9:33And our response time was under 30 seconds. Again, under 30 seconds, 24 hours a day, 365, we never took a day off when it came to customer support. Somebody was there to help somebody out, even jump on their webinar to help them during a live webinar. And that single difference became the reason customers chose us, stayed with us, and even came back to us after leaving and maybe trying to shop around and see other competitors. And they say, nope, Webinar Ninja is better. Their customer support is amazing. Notice that we did not compete on features or innovation in technology in the features or the product itself.

10:07What we did is we leaned on our experience of knowing how to deal with people, work with people, how to create a system for our company so people are supported 24-7. And that had nothing to do with being a tech genius or being a huge company. We could do this with our small team. We used what we can use to differentiate ourselves. And we had countless customers that would email us and tell us that our support alone was worth the monthly subscription. So here's the takeaway. Here's the lesson for you. Every industry has a gap, including the industry that you're in. Something that the established players are neglecting because of their size, because of the way they're incentivized to perform, because of the assumptions they've made over the years.

10:50You can come in and disrupt your industry by filling that gap. For us, it was customer support and response time. For you, it could be something else. But your job as the founder of your company is to find that gap and to fill it in the best way possible so that you can differentiate yourself from the competition. And the gap is rarely glamorous, right? It's probably some grunt work that no one wants to do, but you'll do it and you'll benefit from that fulfillment of that gap of actually fulfilling that need for your customer. So here's an exercise for you so that you can implement this step. Talk to your customers, whether you get on a phone call, a Zoom call.

11:27Even if you communicate over email or over chat on WhatsApp or whatever it might be, talk to your customers because you want to find out what are the three most common complaints your customers say over and over again. If you are starting out and you have no customers, go to your competitors' reviews online, whether it's Google reviews or some sort of industry reviews. Go find out what people are complaining about. What are they frustrated about? Look at the three-star reviews, because those are a little bit more fair than one star or five stars. And look at all these problems and ask yourself, which one of these problems can you genuinely solve better than anyone else?

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12:41Ads, referrals, word of mouth, doesn't matter. The moment it rings out unanswered, that's not just a missed opportunity. That's a sunk cost walking out the door. That's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo, spelled Q-U-O, the business phone system built so you never miss a call. With Quo, all your calls, texts, and voicemails live in one place so anyone on your team can pick up a conversation, see the full history, and respond fast. Set up in minutes on any device, keep your existing number, and add teammates as you grow. No IT, no hassle. And Quo's built-in AI agent handles after-hours calls, answers questions and even books appointments so you never miss a lead even when your team is offline one of the reasons i attribute any success i've had in business is great customer support and service and quo makes that easy money's on the line always say hello with quo try quo for free plus get 20 off your first six months when you go to quo.com slash mba that's q uo.com slash mba Step three, niche down until you are the obvious choice.

13:54Nishing down is one of the biggest challenges a lot of businesses have because they feel like if they niche down, they won't serve enough customers to be viable. And it's actually the opposite. When you narrow your market, the easier it is for you to get customers because you're talking directly to somebody. As they say, if you're trying to talk to everybody, you talk to nobody. You just become white noise. When you niche down, you actually are talking directly to the pains and the problems of a specific customer. At Webinar Ninja, I could have easily just said, hey, we are a webinar software for everybody.

14:23We're just like Zoom. You know, you could choose Zoom or you could choose us. That's the easy way to go out of business. OK, I couldn't afford to do that because I can't serve everybody. I need to serve a specific group of people. So we really niched down. It took us a while to get to that niche, but we eventually got there. And what we did is we went after creators, small business owners, teams of five people or less, right? People that are going to be running the webinars themselves. They're the ones that are actually going to be paying for the software. They're not like a big company where, you know, the person that's making the decision to buy the product is not the person that's using the product.

14:57We wanted to make sure that we know exactly who we're serving. So we made it very specific. So for us, it was teams of five or less. The decision maker, the person that's choosing to buy the software is the person running the webinar. And that was kind of our criteria to niche down. The great thing about niching down is that it relieves you of having to cater for every need. Specifically, it meant that we didn't have to build every feature for every different type of customer. We only had to build the features that were important to this type of customer, designed for this type of user. So anytime that we had an idea for a new feature, we would ask ourselves, would this feature be helpful to this avatar, to this type of specific customer?

15:36And often the answer was no. Like they don't actually need this. It's not really part of their work cycle. It's not part of the way they actually run webinars. It's not something they actually need. But sometimes we realize, hey, if somebody is running the webinar by themselves, they need an easy way to be able to manage the chat while running the webinar. So if we can make an interface that makes it easy to do that, to tab from one thing to another, then that would make sense. That would be useful for our user. And then we would build those features because that would add value to the product and they'd be willing to pay for this product.

16:06and we attract new customers because this is what they were looking for. But it's hard to know what to build. It's hard to know how to market. It's hard to know who to hire when you don't know who you're building for. This is why niching down is so important because once you do that, things get a lot easier in your company. I also found that when you niche down, you get raving fans. Why? Because they feel like you built something for them. They felt like, oh, this is exactly what I've been looking for. You built something that's specifically for my needs. And that's exactly what you did because you know exactly who you're serving.

16:37But when you try to serve everybody, everybody's kind of like, oh, it's kind of good, but it doesn't do exactly what I want. So you don't want that kind of lukewarm feeling. You want people to be raving fans that absolutely love you. Why? Because they'll tell other people just like them to bring in more customers into your company. So here's an exercise so that you can implement this step. Complete this sentence with ruthless specificity, okay? I am the obvious choice for blank. What type of person, what type of needs, what type of outcome are they looking for? Because the more specific, the better.

17:10So I'm for this person that does this type of job or does this type of work that is looking for this type of outcome, right? So for example, we were for small business owners that had a team of five or less that's looking to run a webinar smoothly by themselves. So you have to be very specific about who you're serving and how you're going to serve them. A good way to check if your one sentence is specific enough is if your answer could describe any of your competitors, okay? If that sentence would also apply to your competitors, then you know that you're not specific enough. You need to rework that.

17:46Hey, really quick, if this episode is giving you value, if you're enjoying it, I want you to subscribe to the show because we have an upcoming episode I do not want you to miss. This episode's all about how do you choose which business to start. If you haven't started a business before, or maybe you're thinking about starting a second business or your next business, I'm going to give you my blueprint, my metric, my framework of how to know which business to get into so that you have the best possible chance of success. Hit subscribe right now on whatever app you're using so you don't miss that episode when it comes out.

18:18Step four, turn your difference into your message. Once you find your difference, once you start owning who you are and your story, you have to start sharing it, right? That's what's really going to make people know what you're all about. Even if it's uncomfortable to share the truth. At first, it's going to be uncomfortable because you're not used to sharing it. You're not used to telling that story. But once you start doing it, you're going to start seeing it's going to resonate with people. People are going to say, hey, I'm just like you. I had the same experience. I can really resonate with what you just said.

18:48And I'm more receptive to what you have to offer. Whatever is, you know, you're selling a product, whether you're posting on social media, even if it's just one-on-one in person. Like, for example, I was driving to basketball practice with some of my friends that were on my team, and one of them in the back made just a comment to say, hey, not all of us can drive Porsches. You know, my car is a Porsche. I drive a Porsche. And in that moment, I took the opportunity to share my story. I said to my friend, his name is Nguyen. Nguyen, shout out to you. I said, hey, Nguyen. I know that's just a joke, but, you know, I didn't come from a lot of money.

19:21I actually didn't grow up with much. My parents were very poor, and I shared a few of my stories of how he struggled financially. And I said to him, it took me a very long time to get to this point, but that's why I'm not ashamed to drive a Porsche. I'm not ashamed to share these stories with you because I had to work for it. And in that moment, you know, he shared with me like, hey, I didn't know that. That's really inspirational. And he actually asked me, what's your podcast again? And I told him what my podcast was, and he subscribed in that moment. So I share this story because it's uncomfortable in that moment when we're driving to practice to kind of, you know, I could have just ignored it and said, yeah, it's true.

19:58Ha ha. I drive a Porsche. But I decided to share why that is important to me. What's the story behind that? Why that is a milestone in my life to actually drive this car and why I wanted to really express to him that I earned that right to be able to drive this car and not just something that was given to me. And he resonated with that because he didn't grow up with money either. So it's okay for you to share your story, but you have to recognize the fact that it's gonna be uncomfortable. It's not gonna be easy. It's not gonna come natural to you. But the more you do it, the more you're gonna own it, the more it's gonna be easier to share with other people.

20:31And by the way, I shared these stories with my customers when I was running webinars for Webinar Ninja. I didn't have some cheesy taglines hoping that people would resonate with that and say like, oh, we're a quality service that you could trust. No, that's not what we did. I actually shared the stories like, Like, hey, the reason why I built this company, the reason why I built the software is because I know the power of webinars can help you make more sales and help you grow your business. They can help you become more financially independent. And that's important to me because financial independence is something that I was striving for all my life because I didn't have that as a child.

21:04My parents didn't have that. My parents struggled, and I didn't want anybody to struggle like my parents did. I shared some stories about how they're behind on their bills and how as kids we felt the tension around the house and all that kind of stuff. and people really resonated with these stories and started to say, hey, I rather work with this company and I'm gonna do webinars, I'm gonna do webinars. I might as well sign up with this company because I can resonate with this story. I can resonate with this person. There's a bigger why. There's a reason why I'm building this company beyond than just making money is to help other people become financially independent.

21:34So as much as possible, infuse it in your marketing, infuse it in your sales, infuse it in what you do, in your content, in your videos, in your reels, in your stage presence or, you know, your speeches online, whatever it might be. But the point is that you have to get in the habit of sharing it. Now, I mentioned that, you know, the cheesy tagline, right? Whatever, like we're number one in service or whatever it might be. The reason why that doesn't work is it's very vague, right? And the reason why stories are better, sharing stories and the reasons why you're doing what you're doing is because it's specific.

22:04People remember stories because there's a specific order to the story. There's memorable parts to it. There's characters to the story. There's emotions and stories. And these things really resonate with people. You have to understand that at the end of the day, when people make decisions, they're making decisions based on how they feel. Okay? Not all our decisions are super logical. I would say most of our decisions are made based on how we feel in the moment and how we feel about somebody or how we feel about a company. What I found is that the moment that you accept that standing out means being right for people, but also wrong for people, you start to unlock the ability to be able to resonate with the right customers.

22:43You have to understand if you're going to be right for people, you're also going to be wrong for people. Okay. People are going to say, oh, I don't like that. I don't like this person. This person's too much or this person's extra or whatever. And that's okay. They're not the person you're meant to serve. And if you're not getting any kind of haters or people saying no to you, or they resisting you, that means you're not really resonating with anybody. You're not really striking any kind of emotion. I rather have somebody say, I strongly disagree with you, or like, I completely don't like what you do.