How to differentiate
a commodity product

The first few customers are very easy to come by. They're just your friends.

2DEGREES is a third-space hospitality company... which basically means we book out venues then generate enough online hype to pack them out. We've hosted over 30,000 people since we started. The first few events were surprisingly easy because we could just invite our extended friend group (no serious internet branding necessary).

BUT, after about 3 months it became painfully obvious that growth was something we were going to have to force.

People move on. They want different events, different bars. Maybe they grow up and decide going out isn't for them anymore. It's natural. And it gave us our first real business problem: how do you sell to a stranger?

You can't feature your way out of a commodity

My first instinct was to look for a product answer. What features can we add to the night? But I was met with the commodity problem.

Hospitality is functionally easy for anyone to execute. Book a venue, book a DJ, put the word out on social media. This isn't innovation. Like any commodity business, the real edge is in packaging and distribution.

I started thinking deeper. What's the difference between a friend (our original "demographic) and a stranger? A friend trusts you. They have a pre-built notion that you'll guarantee a great time. They know you're warm, inviting, someone who follows through. A stranger has none of that.

I realized the real thing we were selling wasn't entrance to an event. It was trust.

The maître d is selling before you sit down

Think about a nice restaurant. At a cheap one, you get a menu and have to figure out what you want yourself. At a great one, the maître d knows your name before you arrive, knows it's your anniversary, and has a special dessert planned. They ask your preferences, give recommendations before you look at the menu, and explain dishes you've never heard of.

In short: the higher-quality experience is more personalized, removes guesswork, and often includes surprises. The cheaper one is mainly just expected to provide food.

By addressing smaller objections before they come up, you impress people and engage them immediately. Even if the food isn't great. The pre-experience is the product signal.

I realized the equivalent for us was a website. Not a Eventbrite template. An actual site — testimonials, photos, videos, a mood board of what to wear and what to expect. Looking beyond the party to the entire experience of buying a ticket, waiting in line, and entering the venue. We see that as one experience, not just the night itself.

The site nobody asked us to build

I couldn't help but feel we were taking our eye off the ball. It seemed silly to conflate a website with the real, physical product.

This was before LLMs, so building something custom meant designing, coding, and deploying it myself. The easy path was Shopify, Eventbrite, Posh, or Partiful. Any of them could have a page live in an afternoon. Building from scratch, even for one page, felt like biting off more than we could chew.

But I kept coming back to one thing: there are many more people visiting the top funnel (in this case the Instagram and ticket checkout) than there are people actually using the product. The pre-product experience reaches more strangers than the party itself ever does. If that's where the decision gets made, that's where the work should go.

I ended up spending two grueling weeks grinding away on a full ticketing platform, complete with check out, check in, authentication, multiple event support, etc... All so we could control the first impression for a user.

The details nobody expected

The payoff became obvious when we spoke with customers. We asked what eventually won them over. Beyond the community we built on social media, many mentioned the site. And it was always different things.

The ability to request a song. The questions we ask when people create an account. (We usually pose a funny scenario: if we were throwing a bar-boat party and your friend fell off the boat, what would you do?) None of these features are particularly innovative. But looking back, I think they showed a level of care that people weren't used to seeing in hospitality. I think there was also a subconscious signal... if these guys are willing to put in this much effort to the non-core experience, the actual product must be even better!

To compete in a commodity business, look beyond the core product. The real competition happens before anyone's tried it. Every detail you obsess over before someone walks in the door is doing more work than anything you could add to the night itself.