Water, but make it fancy

A new gym opened up in my neighborhood and I ran into one of their sales reps on the sidewalk. He started into his pitch on the great features and benefits of this particular gym:

"State of the art equipment!

Group classes!

Special branded water!" (wait, what?)

He lost me there. I was off on a scorched earth rant in my head. The top three reasons I should join this gym include BRANDED WATER?! Thanks, I hate it here.

So let's talk about the thing vs. the reason for the thing.

The core tension here is that almost everything has been built before in some form (in the case of water and air, they just exist as part of life on this planet). So the question isn't "is this new?" it's "does this solve something in a way that meaningfully changes the experience for the person using it?"

Take water. If this new gym has notoriously bad tap water and you're mid-workout, a cold bottle with a branded label at the front desk is actually solving something. The product didn't change, the context did. That's the honest version of repackaging. The dishonest version is selling you that same bottle right after you walked past a clean water fountain. (I have a guess about which of these describes this new gym)

This problem isn't unique to gyms. It shows up everywhere, and software is not immune.

A lot of agencies sell the same product, the same process, and the same deliverables to every client and call it custom. Real differentiation in software means the solution is shaped by the community it serves, not the other way around. That requires asking harder questions up front: who is this actually for, what do they need that doesn't exist yet, and what would it look like if we built around that instead of around what we already know how to build?

That's a different starting point. And honestly, it's a harder one. It's easier to rebrand the water.

We built Option C around that harder question. We weren't interested in being another agency offering the same services with a different logo. We wanted the work to start with the community and build outward from there. That's what Option C means to us: when A and B are both just repackaged versions of the same thing, there's always a third way worth finding.

Coming soon to our merch site: Option C Water! Come C how it changes your life!

*shoutout to Liquid Death though- their differentiator is that they are so funny :)