You are the USP: why your personality is what competitors can’t copy

Man, I wish someone had drummed this into me years ago.

When I launched my first business, I was selling ride-on toy cars on eBay, on Shopify and on Amazon. And I was undercutting on price, because price was the only thing separating me from every other person selling exactly the same toy car.

Which is a miserable place to be. You can knock a pound off, then another pound, and there is always, always someone with a bigger warehouse who can knock off two. The real problem was that I had no brand at all.

No one can really replicate you, because no one can be you.

Why price and information aren’t enough any more

Being the cheapest gives people nothing to remember you by. They’ll leave the second someone cheaper turns up, and someone cheaper always turns up.

Information used to be a decent fallback. If you knew your stuff, that set you apart. Now anyone can get a solid answer to almost anything in about four seconds, and someone with no experience at all can set up shop in a field they know nothing about. So information is worth very little on its own.

What’s left is you

Thought leadership is showing up with more than your knowledge. It’s your opinions, your stories and what you believe, the stuff that only comes from having actually done it. Nobody can lift that off your website and paste it into theirs.

And yes, AI makes this more urgent. Pasting your personality through a tool that sands it all off leaves you sounding like everyone else, which I rant about properly in the AI era piece.

Niching is a front door

People get nervous about niching because it sounds like a cage. I think of it as a front door. You put something specific on it, so the window shoppers walking past can connect with you emotionally.

Once they’re inside, you can show them everything else you do. Nobody’s checking.

The reason this matters is that people make decisions on emotion and justify them with logic afterwards. And you can’t reach anyone’s emotions from a vague, everything-for-everyone front door. It’s like trying to make friends by standing in the middle of a car park.

Being yourself does the filtering

When you let your actual personality show, some people won’t like it. There are plenty of people who don’t like my content, and that’s absolutely fine.

I talk fast. I go off on tangents. The people who can’t stand that leave early, and the people who stay are far more likely to be my kind of people. Your personality is quietly doing your sorting for you.

“But I’ve been told I’m too much”

I know. And I’m not going to pretend this is easy. If you got teased at school for being yourself, or told at work you were too silly or too loud, then “just be yourself online” can sound terrifying. After a lifetime of feeling like you had to fit in, that makes complete sense.

We change ourselves to meet other people’s expectations all the time, often without noticing. You don’t need to become a big personality or suddenly go wild. You just need to stop sanding yourself down every time you hit publish.

If you want a place to practise, a weekly live show is brilliant for it, because the mistakes stay in and there’s no edit button to hide behind.