{"course":{"slug":"independent-creative","title":"Working for Yourself","url":"https://addaly.com/learn/independent-creative","level":"intermediate","track":"create"},"lesson":{"slug":"who-you-are-competing-with","title":"Your competitor is a template and a nephew","url":"https://addaly.com/learn/independent-creative/who-you-are-competing-with","position":5,"of":84,"minutes":8,"answer":"Most lost work goes to doing nothing, an internal amateur, a template or a cheaper professional, and since each loses to a different argument.","keyIdea":"Most lost work goes to doing nothing, an internal amateur, a template or a cheaper professional, and since each loses to a different argument, the useful exercise is tallying which one actually took your last five jobs."},"body":{"format":"markdown","text":"## The comparison set is not other professionals\n\nWhen you lose a job you imagine it went to a better designer with a nicer site. Usually it did not. The four things that actually take work off the table are:\n\n1. **Doing nothing.** By a distance the most common outcome. The owner decides the current packaging is fine for another year. Nothing was chosen over you.\n2. **Somebody internal.** The marketing executive who is reasonably good at Canva. The founder's nephew who did a course.\n3. **A template or a tool.** A ₹500 Canva Pro subscription, a Shopify theme, a ₹3,000 logo from a marketplace, a Figma community file, an AI generator.\n4. **A cheaper professional**, often in a lower-cost location, often competent.\n\nEach of these loses to a different argument, and using the wrong argument is why pitches fail while the work is good.\n\n## Against doing nothing\n\nYou cannot win on quality, because the comparison is not being made on quality. You win on the cost of the delay, and only if that cost is real and theirs.\n\nConcretely: a listing photo set that converts two per cent better on a store doing 400 orders a month is eight extra orders a month, every month, for as long as nothing changes. A trade fair in eleven weeks is a date, and missing it costs a year. Find the deadline or the leak. Where neither exists, *doing nothing is often the right answer*, and telling them so is one of the cheapest ways to be remembered when a deadline does appear.\n\n## Against the nephew and the internal person\n\nNever compete on craft insults. Attacking work that a colleague or family member made puts your buyer in the position of defending them, and you will lose that.\n\nTwo arguments work. The first is **time**: the marketing executive spends four days a month on graphics badly, and those four days were meant for the thing she was hired to do. The second is **the thing they cannot do at all**: not \"nicer\", but categorically absent. Print-ready CMYK files that the printer will not reject. A system that holds across forty SKUs instead of forty separately-made files. Label panels that meet the regulator's type-size rules.\n\n## Against templates and tools\n\nBe honest here, because pretending templates are bad makes you sound like somebody protecting a rent. For a lot of jobs, a template is the correct purchase. A two-person consultancy that needs a website this week should use a theme.\n\nWhere templates actually fail is narrow and nameable, and you should be able to say it in one breath:\n\n- **When it has to be unique for legal reasons.** You cannot register a trademark over a mark that ships with a template and is in use by four thousand other businesses.\n- **When it has to survive a constraint the template never considered**: a shutter at four metres, an embroidery machine, a 58mm thermal printer, a Devanagari headline that breaks the template's line-height.\n- **When the cost of the decisions exceeds the cost of the making.** Templates supply execution, not judgement. Which of your forty products goes on the front of the carton is not in the template.\n- **When it must extend.** The template does the first four items and cannot do the fifth, and somebody spends three weeks fighting it.\n\n## Against the cheaper professional\n\nThis is the one people handle worst, usually by implying that cheap means bad. It frequently does not.\n\nWhat actually distinguishes you is rarely craft and usually **risk**. A cheaper supplier who disappears mid-project, misses the print date, cannot be reached in the client's working hours, or hands over files the printer bounces has cost the client far more than the difference in fee. So the counter is evidence of reliability rather than assertions of quality: named references, a written schedule with dependencies, a payment structure that gives them recourse, a portfolio piece with the same constraint solved.\n\nAnd sometimes the honest answer is that you are not the right supplier for this job at this budget, and saying so plainly earns you the next one.\n\n## Doing the exercise once, properly\n\nTake the last five jobs you did not get. For each, write which of the four it lost to. Most people find that three or four of the five were *doing nothing*, which is a completely different business problem from the one they thought they had: it means their conversations are not finding a deadline or a leak, not that their portfolio is weak.\n\n> Figure: What took the last twenty jobs you did not get. Bars (jobs out of twenty that went this way): Doing nothing at all 11; Somebody internal with a subscription tool 4; A template, a theme or a generator 3; A cheaper professional 2. More than half went to a decision not to buy, which is a different problem from a weak portfolio. It means the conversations are not finding a deadline or a leak, and no amount of polishing the page fixes that.\n\nThat single tally usually changes where the next month's effort goes more than any amount of portfolio polishing would."},"check":{"question":"A studio keeps losing packaging work and responds by improving its portfolio and lowering its prices. A tally of the last five losses shows four clients simply postponed the project. Why do the two fixes fail to address the problem?","options":[{"text":"Because postponement means the clients were never serious buyers, and no argument can change that.","correct":false,"tempting":"Treats postponement as disqualifying, when it usually signals an absent deadline rather than an absent budget, and deadlines can be surfaced."},{"text":"Because portfolio and price beat rival suppliers, while inaction is beaten only by a cost of delay.","correct":true},{"text":"Because lowering prices always signals low quality, so the portfolio improvement is cancelled out by the discount.","correct":false,"tempting":"Reaches for a general pricing maxim instead of the specific mechanism: against inaction, no price is being compared at all."},{"text":"Because four out of five is too small a sample to conclude anything, and the studio should keep going and re-tally after twenty losses.","correct":false,"tempting":"Applies sampling caution where the pattern is qualitative and actionable; waiting for fifteen more losses is expensive and the diagnosis is already legible."}]},"prev":{"slug":"choosing-a-narrow-thing","title":"Narrow enough to be remembered","url":"https://addaly.com/learn/independent-creative/choosing-a-narrow-thing"},"next":{"slug":"the-income-map","title":"Five ways money arrives, and only one of them is a job","url":"https://addaly.com/learn/independent-creative/the-income-map"},"authorship":"Founder and series editor: Dr Mustafa Mun. Written by AI models to a written standard. Exam keys checked blind by a second model: 3,665 of 3,666 agreed. Academic review invited.","review":{"status":"Draft, open for academic review"},"cite":"Addaly (2026) 'Your competitor is a template and a nephew', in Working for Yourself. Edited by M. Mun. Addaly. Available at: https://addaly.com/learn/independent-creative/who-you-are-competing-with (Accessed: 13 October 2026).","licence":{"name":"CC BY-NC-SA 4.0","url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/"},"reader":{"schema":1,"title":"Your competitor is a template and a nephew","courseTitle":"Working for Yourself","module":{"index":1,"slug":"whether-there-is-a-business","title":"Whether there is a business here"},"answer":null,"keyIdea":"Most lost work goes to doing nothing, an internal amateur, a template or a cheaper professional, and since each loses to a different argument, the useful exercise is tallying which one actually took your last five jobs.","hero":{"kind":"figure","figure":{"t":"figure","label":"Figure","figure":{"type":"bars","unit":"jobs out of twenty that went this way","title":"What took the last twenty jobs you did not get","series":[{"label":"Doing nothing at all","value":11,"highlight":true},{"label":"Somebody internal with a subscription tool","value":4},{"label":"A template, a theme or a generator","value":3},{"label":"A cheaper professional","value":2}],"caption":"More than half went to a decision not to buy, which is a different problem from a weak portfolio. It means the conversations are not finding a deadline or a leak, and no amount of polishing the page fixes that."},"alt":"Figure: What took the last twenty jobs you did not get. Bars (jobs out of twenty that went this way): Doing nothing at all 11; Somebody internal with a subscription tool 4; A template, a theme or a generator 3; A cheaper professional 2. More than half went to a decision not to buy, which is a different problem from a weak portfolio. It means the conversations are not finding a deadline or a leak, and no amount of polishing the page fixes that."}},"blocks":[{"t":"h2","id":"the-comparison-set-is-not-other-professionals","runs":[{"text":"The comparison set is not other professionals"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"When you lose a job you imagine it went to a better designer with a nicer site. Usually it did not. The four things that actually take work off the table are:"}]},{"t":"ol","start":1,"items":[[{"text":"Doing nothing.","b":true},{"text":" By a distance the most common outcome. The owner decides the current packaging is fine for another year. Nothing was chosen over you."}],[{"text":"Somebody internal.","b":true},{"text":" The marketing executive who is reasonably good at Canva. The founder’s nephew who did a course."}],[{"text":"A template or a tool.","b":true},{"text":" A ₹500 Canva Pro subscription, a Shopify theme, a ₹3,000 logo from a marketplace, a Figma community file, an AI generator."}],[{"text":"A cheaper professional","b":true},{"text":", often in a lower-cost location, often competent."}]]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Each of these loses to a different argument, and using the wrong argument is why pitches fail while the work is good."}]},{"t":"h2","id":"against-doing-nothing","runs":[{"text":"Against doing nothing"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"You cannot win on quality, because the comparison is not being made on quality. You win on the cost of the delay, and only if that cost is real and theirs."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Concretely: a listing photo set that converts two per cent better on a store doing 400 orders a month is eight extra orders a month, every month, for as long as nothing changes. A trade fair in eleven weeks is a date, and missing it costs a year. Find the deadline or the leak. Where neither exists, "},{"text":"doing nothing is often the right answer","i":true},{"text":", and telling them so is one of the cheapest ways to be remembered when a deadline does appear."}]},{"t":"h2","id":"against-the-nephew-and-the-internal-person","runs":[{"text":"Against the nephew and the internal person"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Never compete on craft insults. Attacking work that a colleague or family member made puts your buyer in the position of defending them, and you will lose that."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Two arguments work. The first is "},{"text":"time","b":true},{"text":": the marketing executive spends four days a month on graphics badly, and those four days were meant for the thing she was hired to do. The second is "},{"text":"the thing they cannot do at all","b":true},{"text":": not “nicer”, but categorically absent. Print-ready CMYK files that the printer will not reject. A system that holds across forty SKUs instead of forty separately-made files. Label panels that meet the regulator’s type-size rules."}]},{"t":"h2","id":"against-templates-and-tools","runs":[{"text":"Against templates and tools"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Be honest here, because pretending templates are bad makes you sound like somebody protecting a rent. For a lot of jobs, a template is the correct purchase. A two-person consultancy that needs a website this week should use a theme."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Where templates actually fail is narrow and nameable, and you should be able to say it in one breath:"}]},{"t":"ul","items":[[{"text":"When it has to be unique for legal reasons.","b":true},{"text":" You cannot register a trademark over a mark that ships with a template and is in use by four thousand other businesses."}],[{"text":"When it has to survive a constraint the template never considered","b":true},{"text":": a shutter at four metres, an embroidery machine, a 58mm thermal printer, a Devanagari headline that breaks the template’s line-height."}],[{"text":"When the cost of the decisions exceeds the cost of the making.","b":true},{"text":" Templates supply execution, not judgement. Which of your forty products goes on the front of the carton is not in the template."}],[{"text":"When it must extend.","b":true},{"text":" The template does the first four items and cannot do the fifth, and somebody spends three weeks fighting it."}]]},{"t":"h2","id":"against-the-cheaper-professional","runs":[{"text":"Against the cheaper professional"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"This is the one people handle worst, usually by implying that cheap means bad. It frequently does not."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"What actually distinguishes you is rarely craft and usually "},{"text":"risk","b":true},{"text":". A cheaper supplier who disappears mid-project, misses the print date, cannot be reached in the client’s working hours, or hands over files the printer bounces has cost the client far more than the difference in fee. 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