- Seth Godin 

Seth's idea of Purple Cow is a famous one. And a simple one as well. If you are in the business of being a cow, you had better be purple. You had better stand out. You had better be remarkable. Being black and safe is the riskiest thing to do, as you will never get noticed among all the other black cows.

It is easy to think that you can follow a successful product and offer it at a cheaper price and beat the successful product in the market. It is easy to convince others to join you in this pursuit. After all, there already exists a product. All you need to do is copy it and ensure your costs are lower than the price it is being sold at.

This will only work if you are Walmart or Amazon and have a cost advantage over your competitors. 

You can compete on price if you have the advantage of scale. You can have the advantage of scale if you build a product for the mass ensuring a majority of the audience is pleased with your product. This is only possible if your product is the first one in the segment. Unfortunately, I can think of no such segment that you can enter today (If I did, I'd be building that product!).

This leaves the only alternative of building something remarkable. Something whose goal is not to please everyone. But to be so very good at a certain thing, that it can draw a certain segment of people away from the mass product and to yours. Examples are a plenty, right from Uber to WhatsApp to Airbnb.

It is the age of the Purple Cow.