Beating Giants

When I’m not at the gym, there’s a good chance I’m in the grocery store, standing in the cereal aisle staring at what we’re up against. It’s a strange habit, but I like looking at the challenge: rows and rows of boxes from brands that have been around longer than I’ve been alive. Companies with billion-dollar marketing budgets, massive teams, enormous factories, and relationships with nearly every retailer in the country. And then there’s us- just two people trying to build something new.

It can be intimidating. But the longer I’ve spent building a company, the more I’ve become fascinated by a bigger question: How do underdogs ever beat giants? Because somehow, they do... again and again.

Why Giants Lose

Harvard professor Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma (1997), explores why enormous, successful, well-run companies sometimes lose to tiny upstarts. His argument was counterintuitive: the giants don’t necessarily lose because they’re poorly run. Sometimes they lose because they’re doing exactly what successful companies are supposed to do.

They listen to their biggest customers, protect their most profitable products, and focus on opportunities large enough to matter at their scale. Then someone small comes along with a product that might initially look worse by traditional standards. Maybe it’s less polished, lacks features people expect, or serves a market that seems laughably small. But it does something different exceptionally well.

The incumbent looks at the opportunity and thinks, Why would we bother? The upstart sees its entire reason for existing. So it keeps going. It listens, iterates, and improves until eventually it becomes good enough at the things the incumbent does well while remaining much better at the thing that made it different in the first place.

That’s the part of Christensen’s argument that has always stuck with me. David doesn’t beat Goliath by becoming a bigger Goliath. He wins by playing a different game.

I’ve Seen it Happen

Before starting Man Cereal, I worked at Netflix (hence the embarrassing photo of me up top). Today, Netflix is itself a giant, but it began as the upstart.

Netflix mailed DVDs in red envelopes. You had to wait days for a movie you could pick up from Blockbuster that night. By the established rules of movie rental, that sounded worse. But it solved different problems: no late fees, a huge catalog, and no trip to the video store. Blockbuster had the stores, brand recognition, customers, and money. Netflix had a different idea about where the world was going.

Over time, what looked like the weaker offering became better and better. The behavior that initially seemed strange became normal, and eventually the entire basis of competition changed. Being inside a company that had once been the underdog taught me something I’ve carried with me ever since: the goal isn’t always to beat the competition at what they already do. Sometimes it’s to change what people expect in the first place.

The Advantage of Being Small

When you’re building a startup, being small can feel like a list of disadvantages. You don’t have enough money, enough people, enough time, or enough leverage. Problems a huge company could solve with a meeting and some cash can consume months of time and energy.

But being small comes with advantages too. You can move quickly. You can listen to ten customers and actually change the product because of what they said. You can take risks that would barely register on a giant company’s spreadsheet. Most importantly, you can obsess over something that isn’t big enough for the giants to care about yet.

Trying to beat a giant by copying what made it successful is usually a losing strategy. You don’t have its budget, distribution, infrastructure, brand recognition, or decades of accumulated knowledge. The opportunity is to find a game it isn’t playing yet, serve people whose needs aren’t being met, and build something the established players don’t think is worth building.

Then you keep getting better.

Our Different Game

For us, that idea happens to be cereal. The cereal aisle is dominated by companies that have spent decades getting incredibly good at making cereal people want to eat. We’re not going to beat them by trying to make another version of what already exists, so we started with a different question: What if cereal did more for you?

That’s what led us to build Man Cereal around protein and creatine. Creatine is one of the most extensively studied sports ingredients, but taking it still usually means another tub, another scoop, and another thing to remember. We saw an opportunity to take something people actively try to add to their routine and put it into something they already eat.

Is what we’ve built perfect? No. But that’s also where being small becomes an advantage. We can keep changing it.

Every production run teaches us something. We hear what people love, what they don’t, and what they wish were different. Then we go back and work on it. The flavor gets better. The texture gets better. The ingredients get better. The whole experience gets better.

What People Don’t See

From the outside, successful companies can look inevitable. They weren’t. Early products are often imperfect. Strategies change. Things break. Customers complain. Founders make bets that don’t work. Then they try again.

That’s the less glamorous side of disruption: iteration. You make something, put it into the world, find out where you’re wrong, make it better, and do it again. Whatever you’re building, the first version doesn’t need to beat the giant. It needs to give people a reason to care. Then you earn the rest.

That’s what we’re trying to do with Man Cereal. We want to keep closing the gap on everything traditional cereal does well while widening the gap on everything that makes us different. Eventually, we want the question in the cereal aisle to change from “Can a high-protein cereal with creatine actually taste good?” to “Why would I eat cereal that doesn’t give me protein and creatine?”

If that happens, we haven’t just built a better product. We’ve helped change what people expect from the category.

Every Underdog Needs Early Believers

There’s one more part of the story that I think gets overlooked. Upstarts can’t survive long enough to improve unless someone is willing to take a chance on them.

Someone had to sign up for DVDs through the mail when going to Blockbuster was easier. Someone had to buy an early electric car when gas stations were everywhere and charging stations weren’t. Someone has to try the strange new thing before it becomes the obvious thing. Those people give small companies something money can’t easily buy: time to get better.

That’s something I’ve become especially aware of while building Man Cereal. Every person who has ordered a box, sent us feedback, written a review, complained about something we needed to fix, reordered, or told a friend is helping us build the next version.

And that’s why I think this idea goes far beyond cereal. The biggest companies in the world don’t have a monopoly on good ideas. They’ll almost always have more money, people, distribution, experience, and resources. But an underdog doesn’t need to have more of everything.

It needs to see something the giant doesn’t, and keep going long enough to prove it.

 

Written by Dejan Rankovic, Man Cereal Co-Founder