Startup School 5: How to find that elusive USP
Kiteline Health has closed its doors. This is a series exploring what I’ve learnt over the past three years as CEO. Kiteline provided B2B2C health coaching to people with long-term health conditions, helping them improve their lifestyle habits and increase longevity.
What makes your business different to (and better than) your competitors? If you can’t answer that question with conviction, keep working on it. It is what makes or breaks so many things — your product design, your outreach, your sales pitch, your customer retention.
A sales advisor described it like this. Picture you are driving down the motorway and you see a field of sheep. They all look the same (and do the same things, and produce the same milk and wool) but one is purple. Which one catches your attention? Figure out how to be purple.
What is unique about any business anymore?
In order to succeed, you need to know what sets you apart. But we also know there are no new ideas. Mark Twain said:
“There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations. We keep on turning and making new combinations indefinitely; but they are the same old pieces of coloured glass that have been in use through all the ages.”
How do you square that circle? You need to be different, but can never really be new. I find that to be comforting, as no one else is doing anything new either. It gives you a lot of scope on how you can be different.
We learned that some competition is a good sign — your market is worth pursuing. Too much competition, on the other hand, can signal that your market is saturated and there may not be any unique approaches left.
During Kiteline’s life, the HR wellbeing space we were targeting became very competitive and we didn’t have a clear enough USP to cut through. The differentiation slide in our pitch deck was never quite right. We kept revisiting it, constantly trying to jimmy something real into it. Was it the rigour of our integrative medicine approach? Or the health coaching we delivered that set us apart? Or my personal story and deep patient experience?
It’s not only about having a clear story, but also about how you tell that story. We were offering a preventative health solution, alongside a number of other businesses. Our competitors pitched themselves as solving the major pain point of declining mental health. They rarely mentioned solving a future-focused unquantifiable problem (prevention), like we did. Competitors defaulted to a deficit model in their communications — “Buy us or your employee base’s already horrid mental health will spiral out of control”. We used an excellence model— “Buy us and ensure your people continue to perform as brilliantly as they possibly can”. Not quite as compelling, is it?
The key to truly understanding (and communicating) your uniqueness is to really understand your customers, their needs and priorities, and why they buy from you.
Differentiating through co-design
The Kiteline platform connected people with long term conditions to health coaches who would help them improve their daily behaviours to give them longer, happier lives. A criticism we heard time and again was that this approach could not be scaled. The only path we could see to scale (before Generative AI has made coach-like chatbots a real possibility) was through killer content, and one-to-many coaching.
Our strategy was to record and distribute world-class coaches delivering courses on topics like nutrition, exercise, behaviour change and sleep. Our Wellbeing for Line Managers course was co-designed by one of our first clients who wanted something for their managers who were bearing the brunt of employee burnout during the pandemic. The course was a hit, and we later sold it into John Lewis.
Co-design is a great way to build and learn — as long as you validate that what you are building has wider relevance than just your co-design partner. The downside is that it can take a long time.
The course worked well, not only because it was tailor-made for a specific audience, but also because that audience was given dedicated time and space by their employer. Our other courses covered topics that people rarely find time for in their day to day lives. What can you actually learn from a pre-recorded video course on exercise? It turns out a lot, but only if you make the time to do it.
We asked our first few clients what made us stand out. They told us there wasn’t anything else like our Wellbeing for Line Manager’s Course on the market. Using co-design as a technique to develop something new that addressed an unmet need was really useful. Other clients loved our real-time coaches, who all got great feedback, particularly in delivering group sessions. Ultimately, though, there wasn’t much we were doing that couldn’t be copied in the short-term.
Content is a tough road
It is difficult to use content as a differentiator now as so much is freely available online. We heard blatantly from one investor that “content is commoditised”, particularly content for employers. Part of the magic is making it easily findable when needed, and in a format that engages people versus static PDFs that sit on a virtual shelf gathering dust.
We heard from people that our video formats were too long at 10–15 mins — they wanted 2–3 mins max. In fact, one minute was even better! Because of time and resource constraints, we were unable to adapt our content formats to what we knew people wanted.
Tell me what you do?
We never nailed how to communicate what we do in a broad enough way that everyone understands but a narrow enough way to differentiate. We knew what we were trying to build was so needed, and we knew that we were different to what was readily available. Finding the right words was a challenge. I got very good at pitching my story, and the rationale for the business, but could never properly articulate quite what made us stand out without telling my full backstory.
Finding a USP is an essential piece of building a successful tech business — and one that requires a deep understanding of the problem, the user and your own capabilities.
Until next time.
Read Startup School 1: Product here.
Read Startup School 2: People here.
Read Startup School 3: Luck here.
Read Startup School 4: Sales here.
Read Startup School 6: Funding here.
