Building competitive edge: what sports conditioning can teach us about differentiation | Startups Magazine

Differentiation is mission critical for startups. Many fail not because of poor products, strategy, or people but because they’re difficult to tell apart. Consumers can’t see how they’re different to, or better than, what is already available to them. And without this clarity, they aren’t worth the risk involved in deferring from the familiar.

This has always been true, but with AI, the pressure on differentiation is greater than ever.

LLMs are changing how people discover and choose products. 46% of shoppers already say they use AI every time they shop, and 80% expect this to increase in the future (IAB, October 2025). People are delegating the buying process to systems and services that search, compare and shortlist on their behalf.

This hasn’t created the need for differentiation, but it has changed what it means and how to build it.

Whilst humans can be swayed by emotion and ‘soft’ differences like visual identity, tone or story-telling, machines have a stricter definition of differentiation, and are able to be more exacting in their application of it.

LLMs prioritise for scale and documented fame, only credible specialists and leaders win. They are more functional and less emotional, what works wins. And they aren’t prone to the same pattern-driven simplification, over-achievers and polymaths win.

In short, the subtle differences that matter to people might not register to a system. Clearly evidenced and signalled ‘hard’ strengths are what makes differentiation in this world.

Differentiation is a performance discipline

With differentiation becoming harder to achieve, it also needs to be treated more seriously.

Rather than something built by branding or storytelling alone, differentiation needs to be achieved through performance. It’s the result of doing something demonstrably better than others, in a way that can be observed and repeated.

If the existing brand building playbooks won’t help to achieve that, where else can we turn for more meaningful guidance in this new competitive paradigm?

An experimental sports performance theory might offer an unlikely source of inspiration. Pioneered in 1960s Soviet Russia, periodisation was a radical innovation in sports conditioning, and continues to inform how athletes train to win today.

It is about being laser focused on building competitive edge, and it is built on three core tenets:

• You win by performing at your best, not just beating opponents. Build your strengths rather than obsessing over competitors’ weaknesses
• You need multiple strengths to win. But each one needs to operate at full capacity
• Effective training means ‘charging’ one strength at a time. Focused, measurable training targeting individual areas (perfect your serve, then your backhand) works better than trying to improve everything at once. This allows the parts that aren’t ‘in training’ to recover – a vital part of improving performance

Startups should train the same way

Startups often try to improve across all areas at once: product features, marketing, pricing, partnerships, and customer experience. The understandable product of zeal, ambition, and energy. But this spreads effort thinly and makes it harder for any single strength to stand out.

For a defined period, what if you committed to focus on making significant improvements in just one area?

Take a growing skincare brand in a crowded market. Instead of trying to improve everything at once; packaging, influencer reach, sustainability claims, product range; they run a single ‘training block’ on one strength – customer support. For three months, they obsess over response time, consultation quality and follow-up.

The result isn’t just happier customers; it’s a flood of reviews, forum mentions, and third-party proof. These signals are not only useful for people. They are also easier for AI systems to detect and use when making comparisons or recommendations.

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Not only might this unlock greater impact, but it also has an in-built resource management bias – by cycling through ‘training’, rather than trying to dial up every strength (and by extension, every team and every budget) simultaneously, you can deliver more with a tighter investment.

And critically, it doesn’t mean ignoring other parts of the business, it just means choosing where to apply intensity.

The differentiation block method

How could this method be tangibly applied to a scaling business tomorrow?

1. Identify your strengths – run a business FTP, or an organisational gait analysis – brutally identify the strengths of your business and brand (what you’re brilliant at, what people think you’re brilliant at)
2. Build a focused training plan that develops one area at a time. Prepare everyone for a short, but hard, effort
3. Amplify the real world effects of all this effort. We want to make sure all this effort is noticed by consumers and the bots alike
4. Build reflection and review into the process – when training switches focus, give time and space to the recently in-training to assess and learn

Over time, this builds a set of real strengths rather than a single claim, or a simple narrative.

Proof beats positioning

Clearly communicating differentiation has always been the battle ground for startups. And as more decisions are shaped by systems that value evidence over intent, differentiation needs to be built differently – seen, measured, and supported by others.

The companies that succeed will be those that build clear strengths, one at a time, and allow those strengths to speak for themselves. The future of differentiation may look less like traditional brand building, and more like disciplined training.