Different Takes Time to Land. It’s Not Evidence That It’s Wrong
Prefer to listen rather than read? Listen to the podcast episode covering this same topic here → The Quietly Disruptive Business Podcast
When you do things the conventional way, there is recognition built into it. You say, do, or be the thing and it resonates instantly. We know what a copywriter is. We know what a brand strategist is. We know what a website designer is. The category already exists in people’s heads and you slot right into it. But when you do things differently — when you build something that doesn’t have an existing category to be filed under — that instant recognition disappears. And in its place is a pause. A tilt of the head. A moment of wondering. That pause is not evidence that what you’re building is wrong. It’s evidence that it’s new. And new takes time to land.
Convention Comes with an Instant Feedback Loop. Different Doesn’t.
If you’re at a networking event and you tell someone you’re a business coach who helps founders grow their revenue, the person opposite you gets it immediately. The category exists. They know what it means, where to file it, how to respond. There’s an instant green light that says yes, what you do has a place in the world.
Now imagine you’re at the same event and you say you’re a quietly disruptive business coach who helps founders build businesses that change their corner of the world without hustle or performance. The person opposite you is likely to pause. Tilt their head slightly. Wonder what that means. Not because it’s wrong — but because there’s no existing category for it. There’s nothing in their head to file it under. It’s new, it’s different, and it takes longer to land.
I know this from experience. In my first business — a model horse company — I dreaded the “what do you do?” question. I’d say what I did and watch people’s faces contort in confusion because they had absolutely no reference point for it. This was pre-internet, so I couldn’t even send them somewhere to see it for themselves. There was nothing to shortcut the understanding. That’s what different feels like at the beginning.
The Silence Is Where the Doubt. Creeps In.
When there’s no instant feedback, no recognition, no row of green lights telling you you’re going the right way, that’s when the doubt and the comparison creep in. You look at founders around you doing things conventionally and you see them getting results, getting recognition, getting clients. And you start to wonder whether different is just a polite word for wrong.
But you can’t measure the unconventional path against the conventional one. Just as you can’t compare yourself to another founder, you can’t compare the beginning of your different path to the middle of someone else’s conventional one. That comparison will always make the different path look harder, slower, and less certain than it actually is. The measurement systems are completely different.
Different Is Harder at the Beginning. But That’s All It Is.
This is the exact experience I’ve had building Quietly Disruptive. At the start, it was like talking into the void. No feedback. No green lights. No one saying yes, you’re on the right path. I just kept going. And over time, slowly and surely, the founders who it resonated with found it. And when they did, they said it was what they’d been looking for. They just hadn’t known it existed yet.
That’s the thing about building differently. When you wander off the path that everyone else is travelling, it takes time for the right people to catch up — to realise that the path you’re carving is the better one for them. Different is harder at the beginning and slower too, but that’s not evidence that it’s wrong. It’s evidence that you’re the first. You’re breaking new ground. And there’s no guidebook for that, no rules, no precedent to follow. You’re creating everything from scratch.
So if you’re building something different and the silence feels deafening, sit with this: the absence of instant feedback is the cost of going first, not a sign that you should stop. The question is how you know whether what you’re building is right before the world has had time to catch up, and that’s exactly what our next blog post covers.
About the Author: Becky Benfield Humberstone partners with Quietly Disruptive founders to build businesses that change their corner of the world, on their terms. If you started your business because you believed things could be done differently, and you're ready to make that vision real, she gets it. Based in the UK and working globally via Zoom and in person, she's done this work herself, more than once.
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