Brunson borrows an image from Blue Ocean Strategy by Kim and Mauborgne, and it does a lot of work in a single picture.
Most markets, he says, are red oceans — full of blood, because too many sharks are feeding on the same small pool of fish.1
A blue ocean is clear water. No sharks yet.
No competition, because you're somewhere nobody else has thought to swim.
The image sticks because it makes an abstract idea physical.
Competition isn't a spreadsheet. It's sharks in bloody water, and you can feel why you'd want to be somewhere else.
Brunson uses the frame to tell a story about how markets age.2
The first person to teach health, or wealth, or relationships was in a blue ocean.
Alone. No competitors. Clear water.
Success attracted others. They jumped in. The water reddened. So the smart ones created submarkets — new blue oceans inside the reddening one.
Those filled too. And so the pattern repeats: every blue ocean eventually reddens, and the move is always to create a new one at the next level down.
This is the same descent as the market-submarket-niche page, now given a temporal engine. Markets don't just have levels; they redden over time, pushing each generation of experts to carve a fresh niche below the last.
The useful shift is what red water tells you.
Most people read competition as validation — lots of players means the market's proven, which feels safe. Brunson reads it as a warning: lots of players means the water's already bloody, and you'd be arriving to fight.
Both readings are partly right, which is the tension.
Competition proves demand and proves the market's crowded. The red ocean is validated and dangerous at once.
Brunson's resolution: let competition validate the submarket, then create a niche within it where the water's still clear. You get the proof of demand from the crowded level above and the clear water from the specific level below.
Watch the frame as a clock rather than a map, because that's what makes it more than a metaphor.
A niche that's blue today reddens tomorrow. "Flipping houses on eBay" was clear water once; the moment it worked and people noticed, others arrived, and the water started to turn.
This means a created niche has a shelf life. First-mover advantage is real but temporary — you're only alone until success advertises your position. The advantage isn't permanent occupancy; it's a head start that decays as imitators arrive.
Which explains a pattern the static version misses: successful nichers don't defend one niche forever, they keep descending, creating the next blue ocean before the current one fully reddens. The Blue Ocean frame, read as a clock, is an argument for continuous re-niching rather than a one-time positioning decision.
The original Blue Ocean Strategy is written for corporations creating uncontested markets through strategic innovation — new industries, reimagined value curves, big moves.
Brunson miniaturizes it. His blue oceans aren't new industries; they're niches one or two levels below an existing submarket, reachable by a solo operator with no capital.3 That's a genuine translation, not just a citation — he's showing that the corporate strategy scales down to a person with a laptop.
The cost of the miniaturization is that Kim and Mauborgne's rigor drops out. Their framework includes tools for validating that the new space has demand and value; Brunson's version keeps the vivid metaphor and leaves the validation to other chapters. The picture survives the shrink; the discipline mostly doesn't.
The ocean image has a hidden assumption worth surfacing: that empty water is good water.
But an ocean can be empty because no fish live there. A blue ocean with no competitors might be uncontested because it's genuinely new — or because there's nothing to eat, no demand, no customers. The metaphor makes both look equally inviting: clear water either way.
That's the same trap as the created-niche page, and the Blue Ocean framing actively worsens it, because "clear blue water" sounds like paradise. Red water at least proves fish were there. Truly empty water proves nothing, and might be empty for the worst reason.
So the metaphor needs a caveat it doesn't carry: find blue water, but check it's blue-because-new, not blue-because-dead.
You're drawn to a market because lots of people are succeeding in it.
Notice that you're looking at red water. The success you find reassuring is also the crowding that will grind you down. Don't flee it — but don't plant your flag in it either.
Use the crowded submarket as proof of demand, then descend to find the clear water within it. Where in this proven, bloody submarket is there a specific angle or audience nobody's serving as its own thing? That's your blue ocean, validated from above and clear below.
Then check the water is blue for the right reason. Is it uncontested because it's new, or because nobody wants it? Look for adjacent evidence of demand — people asking, complaining, half-solving the problem themselves. Clear water with signs of fish nearby is opportunity; clear water with no fish anywhere is a warning.
And treat your blue ocean as a clock, not a deed. It will redden. Plan to re-niche before it does, because first-mover advantage is a head start, not a fortress.
Blue-because-new water has no direct competitors but shows demand signals nearby — people in the adjacent submarket clearly want something like this, they're improvising solutions, they're frustrated. The fish are there; nobody's fishing this exact spot yet.
Blue-because-dead water has no competitors and no demand signals. Nobody's here because nobody wants to be. It looks identical to the good kind until you check for fish.
The Blue Ocean metaphor can't distinguish these on its own, and its very appeal — clear inviting water — biases you toward assuming the good kind. The check is always demand, never emptiness.
Kim and Mauborgne's Blue Ocean Strategy (2005) is a real and influential source, accurately invoked.1 Its empirical status is contested in strategy literature — the case studies are retrospective and selection-biased, a common critique of business-strategy classics. Treat the metaphor as a useful lens, not a validated law.
Tension: the metaphor rewards emptiness, and emptiness is ambiguous. Blue water is good when it's new and fatal when it's dead, and the image makes both look like paradise. This is the same demand-blindness as the created-niche rule, amplified by a metaphor that makes empty look inviting.
Second tension: the frame is simultaneously static (a map of oceans) and dynamic (oceans redden over time), and the two readings give different advice. Static says find blue water and stay. Dynamic says find blue water and plan your exit. The dynamic reading is truer and less comforting.
Open question: if every blue ocean reddens, is there any durable position at all, or is the expert business a permanent treadmill of re-niching one step ahead of the imitators?
Convergence with the market-descent and created-niche pages is near-total — Blue Ocean is the strategic theory those tactical pages implement. Read together they're one argument: escape competition by descending into specificity, because specificity is where the clear water is.
The divergence, again, is with execution-first thinking. Blue Ocean says the winning move is finding uncontested space; the operational-excellence view says most value is captured by whoever runs a contested space best. Brunson is firmly in the first camp, and inherits both its power and its demand-blindness.
To Create a Niche, Do Not Pick One. These are the same instruction at two altitudes — Blue Ocean is the strategy, create-don't-pick is the tactic, and both hinge on manufacturing uncontested space.
The pairing sharpens the shared flaw: both make emptiness the goal and neither checks whether empty means new or dead. Held together they show the flaw isn't incidental to either — it's structural to the whole "escape competition" family of advice. Any framework whose core move is "find where no one else is" inherits the same blind spot, because absence of competitors is exactly as consistent with absence of demand as with untapped opportunity.
To Scarcity Bias. A blue ocean is, among other things, a scarcity claim — you're offering something no one else has, and scarcity drives desire. The status corpus explains why the uncontested position is attractive to buyers, not just sellers: being first into a new thing confers status on the customer too.
The insight neither reaches alone: a genuine blue ocean carries built-in scarcity that a red ocean can't, which is why niche positions can command premium prices the crowded submarket can't. The clear water isn't just easier to swim in — it lets you charge more, because the customer is buying something scarce rather than something available everywhere. Escaping competition and escaping price pressure turn out to be the same escape.
Sharpest implication. The Blue Ocean metaphor's power and its danger are the same feature: it makes empty water look like paradise. Empty is good when it's new and fatal when it's dead, and the image can't tell you which — it just makes clear water inviting. Read as a clock rather than a map, it delivers a harder truth than Brunson emphasizes: every blue ocean reddens, first-mover advantage decays, and the expert business is a treadmill of re-niching rather than a position you find once.
Generative questions.
If absence of competitors is equally consistent with untapped demand and no demand, is "find blue water" ever actionable without a separate demand test that the metaphor actively discourages you from running?
If every ocean reddens, what's the actual durable asset — is it any single niche, or is it the capacity to keep re-niching faster than imitators can follow?