The empty lanes
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Most of the people you think you’re competing with have already quit.
When I started the podcast, I was convinced I was late. It was already a crowded space. Every time I searched for shows in the business and entrepreneurship category, the results went on forever. Thousands of podcasts, all fighting for the same listeners, all interviewing the same kinds of guests, all trying to carve out the same territory. I remember sitting at my desk, scrolling through Apple Podcasts, and thinking: how is anyone supposed to break through this?
That feeling almost stopped me before I recorded a single episode.
A few years later, I looked up the actual numbers and something shifted. There are over four and a half million podcasts indexed across all platforms. That’s the number people cite when they tell you the space is saturated. But only about 350,000 of those are actively publishing new episodes. The rest went dark. Nearly half of all podcasts ever created stopped after three episodes or fewer. If you make it past twenty episodes, you’ve outlasted ninety-nine percent of everyone who ever started.
I didn’t know that when I was staring at my screen feeling overwhelmed. I was looking at a graveyard and mistaking it for a battlefield.
The phantom field
I think about this all the time now, and not just in podcasting. In almost every space I’ve operated in, the competition I feared turned out to be a fraction of what I imagined. The vast majority of people who say they’re going to start something never do. Of the ones who start, most quit within weeks. Of the ones who survive the first few months, most plateau and drift away. The actual number of people doing the work, every week, for years, with real intention, is so small that calling it “competition” feels like the wrong word.
But you’d never know that from the noise. The people who are loud about what they’re building, the ones posting every day, announcing every milestone, filling your feed with their wins, represent a tiny sliver of the total. Maybe a tenth of a percent. And because they’re the ones you see, your brain does the math wrong. It takes the volume of noise and assumes a corresponding volume of people. It’s the same mistake Grant made on the Texas prairie (I wrote about this a few weeks ago): two wolves making enough sound for twenty.
The field looks packed because the loudest people are the most visible. But visibility and persistence are different things. Most of the visible ones will be gone in a year. The ones who are still here in five years are the ones you’ll actually have to contend with, and that number is so small it should change how you think about everything you’re building.
What actually thins the field
I used to think the differentiator was talent or resources or connections. That the people who made it had something the people who didn’t were missing. After hundreds of interviews and years of watching people build and quit and build again, I think the differentiator is much more boring than that.
It’s the willingness to keep going after the initial excitement dies.
The first two weeks of anything feel electric. You’re full of ideas, the work feels fresh, and the gap between where you are and where you want to be feels like a challenge instead of a problem. Somewhere around week six, the math changes. Growth is slower than you expected. The feedback is sparse. The work that felt exciting now feels like a grind. And that’s where ninety-five percent of people make a quiet decision to stop.
They don’t announce it or write a post about why they’re pivoting. They just stop showing up. One missed week becomes two, two becomes a month, and the thing that was going to change their life joins the four million dormant podcasts and abandoned Substacks and dusty YouTube channels that make up most of the internet’s creative output.
The field doesn’t thin because of competition. It thins because of time.
The wrong question
I wasted years asking “how do I stand out in a crowded market?” The question assumes the market is crowded. It assumes you’re competing against the full number of people who’ve ever entered the space. And that assumption is almost always wrong.
The better question, the one I wish I’d asked earlier, is: “what happens if I just don’t stop?”
Because the data is clear on this. If you keep showing up and publishing and reaching out and getting a little better at the thing you’re building, you will outlast the vast majority of the people who started alongside you. You won’t beat them. They’ll just leave. And the space that felt packed at month two will feel wide open at year three.
I think about the week I launched the newsletter. It felt like every person with a podcast already had one. I could name dozens off the top of my head. Today, most of those newsletters don’t exist anymore. The people who wrote them moved on to something else, or just stopped. And the ones who are still going, the ones I respect and read every week, are the same ones who were willing to keep writing when nobody was responding.
I believed the competition was real for years before I ever counted who was actually in the race.
Thank you for reading,
— Scott
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