Why Doing The Opposite Of Your Competition Works

The $100 MBA Show - Omar Zenhom

Omar Zenhom explains how taking the opposite approach of your competitors can lead to rapid growth and market leadership by targeting underserve

Key takeaways

Doing the opposite of your competition isn't just a gimmick—it's a strategic way to serve unmet needs, avoid red ocean battles, and stand out in crowded markets.
The most powerful opportunities often lie in what customers quietly hate—especially in three-star reviews or common complaints.

Main topics

Opposite positioning as a growth strategy
Blue ocean vs. red ocean competition

Notable quotes

The opposite position is the only unoccupied real estate in your space.

You're not stealing customers from your competitors—you're rescuing those who are being ignored.

Conclusion

By identifying what your industry takes for granted or automates, and doing the opposite

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) If you're struggling to get traction right now, if you are stuck at a plateau that you can't grow past, I've got something for you today. I've got something that's gonna change things immediately. And here it is. I'm just gonna give it to you right now from the top. If everyone in your space is saying, doing, and offering A, the easiest way to stand out and become the industry leader is to say, do, and offer Z, or whatever the opposite of A is. The opposite position is the only unoccupied real estate in your space. You have a very crowded market, so go where it's not crowded. But there's a right way and there's a wrong way to do this. Doing the opposite badly will kill your business and really ruin your life in a lot of ways. So it's important to do this right. And I'm going to show you both the right way and the wrong way to do this. Plus, I'm going to show you a massive opposite opportunity that's in the market right now that you can leverage, that you can take on here in 2026. Welcome back to the $100 MBA show. I'm your host, Omar Zenhom, where I deliver practical business lessons three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, to help you start, grow, and scale your business. Speaker 1 (1:17) If this show has helped in any way, it would be amazing if you could drop us a quick review on whatever app you're using to listen to this podcast right now. It helps me and my team bring new episodes every week. And more importantly, more entrepreneurs will be able to discover our podcast so you can help someone else start their journey. Thanks so much. So let's start why the opposite actually works. What's the mechanism behind this? Well, there's three reasons why this isn't a gimmick and is an actual real strategy. The first reason is that you're serving an underserved need. When everyone is doing a, is doing a certain thing in your market, customers who don't want that are not being served. They have nowhere to go. They exist. They are frustrated. They're waiting for someone to serve them. And the best part of this is that you're not stealing customers from your competitors. They are customers that exist that are not being served, that your competitors are not dealing with. You are rescuing these customers that are being ignored. The second reason is the blue ocean strategy. This is a very famous book that we covered here on the show. And it's the idea that competing where everyone competes is a red ocean. It's bloody, right? Price wars and feature wars. And it's really tough. to survive in a red ocean. But the opposite position is a blue ocean. It's non-competitive because no one is there. No one is doing anything there. You don't have to out-compete anybody. You don't have to be better than anybody. You just have to be the option for people that are looking for that option. Reason number three, and one of the biggest reasons you should do this, is that you become memorable. The brain ignores sameness, okay? You are probably experiencing this right now as you're scrolling through your feed on Instagram or on YouTube or whatever it might be, where you're just seeing the same thing over and over again. I personally have seen it. The people in the business education space, like there's like five or six people, basically they're the same person, okay? And they just say the same things. They're doing the same things. They're preaching the same kind of ideas and it's exhausting. By doing the opposite, you're standing out from the noise. It's not a marketing tactic. You're actually taking a position. It's important for you to understand that you need to believe in this position. It can't be just something for the sake of doing it, like just for the sake of being contrarian. No, you actually have to believe in it and maybe have a story behind why you believe that. Maybe that's your experience. But reason number three really is powerful because you become a memorable brand. You have free word of mouth that compounds over time because you are different. We're all about being practical here on the podcast. So let's get real. Let me give you some real examples of how I have applied this myself in my own businesses. The first one is a podcast that I shared with you in a previous episode called People Who Know Their S**t, which is a podcast that was an interview podcast. And every business podcast at the time was doing interviews, long intros, backstories. Tell us about your journey. You've heard of this before, right? It was like an hour of fluff with five minutes of insights. What we decided to do is to do the opposite. We're not going to do interviews. And now we do do extended interviews now on the podcast because there are some insights that I cannot share. Perspectives I don't understand, like how to be a female entrepreneur. And that's why we bring on guests once in a while. But the vast majority of our episodes. are lesson-based. And that's how the podcast started, where we teach a lesson, where we show you what we failed at. We show you what we've won at, what works, what doesn't, and helping people with concise business lessons so that they can build upon their own skills and be a better entrepreneur. So we thought to ourselves, what's the opposite of a hour, two-hour interview? Some of these interview podcasts are three hours long. Well, we're like, we're going to make our podcast so short. but feel so long. What does that mean? Well, we thought, how do we make our podcast so valuable in just 20 minutes that people feel like, wow, this was great. I can't believe that was just 20 minutes. I learned so much in just 20 minutes. Like how can we can concentrate as much information as possible and deliver incredible value to our audience? At the time, this was a very novel idea where people were just teaching on the podcast. Now, it's quite common.