Why I still use Blue Ocean after 25 years launching successful products (including boring ones that make tons of money)

Most indie tools die fighting in a red ocean of identical products.

Blue Ocean Strategy (Kim & Mauborgne) offers a different move: don't try to out-compete a crowded market — make the competition irrelevant by opening space nobody else occupies.

The tool for doing that is the ERRC grid. You take the factors your industry competes on and sort them into four buckets:

* Eliminate — Which features does everyone copy that nobody actually buys for? Cut them completely. Every one you keep is time spent matching competitors instead of beating them.

* Reduce — Where can you go below the industry standard because your buyer doesn't care? Good enough here funds excellence elsewhere.

* Raise — What's the one thing your buyer genuinely pays for? Push it far above what anyone else delivers. This is where a solo founder wins.

* Create — What does nobody in the market offer at all? This is your new space — the reason someone picks you instead of comparing you.

For a solo founder, ERRC usually collapses to one sentence: stop building the features everyone has, over-deliver on the one thing your buyer cares about.

But here's the catch — you can't run ERRC on vibes. You need the real competitors, their real feature sets, and their real prices. Otherwise your "differentiation" is a hopeful sticky note.

That's what ShipFit does: it pulls real competitor sites and sourced prices, then runs the ERRC grid against them. Your positioning becomes a decision grounded in the market, not a whiteboard guess.