You want a monopoly

Belle Delphine sells her bath water for 30 pounds per unit.

There are businesses out there providing genuine value to their customers and solving problems who can only dream of reaching the million pound per month earnings that the 24 year old commands.

Apple is worth $2.9 trillion.

The iPhone is the equivalent of selling a Lamborghini in the numbers of a Toyota. A sports car in EVERY household.

However, if every household genuinely started buying and being able to afford Lamborghinis, their prices would plummet.

Apple sell a new version of the iPhone every year with negligent drop in sales and increase in prices.

How are these two things related?

Both of them have been able to achieve results which are otherwise unheard of via the same method.

Monopolies.

Apple is the easier one to explain. Even technophobe Warren Buffett recognises the moat which the tech giant possesses.

A large segment of the world’s population associate the word ‘phone’ to ‘iPhone’. You hand them an Android and they genuinely don’t know how to use it.

Its a status symbol and a common good at the same time.

But when I try to pitch Belle Delphine as a monopoly to you, I can feel you raising your eyebrows.

However, there are incredible similarities in their approaches.

Belle Delphine too possesses a moat which differentiates her.

She has cornered the ‘gamer-girl cat woman’ aesthetic (I don’t understand her aesthetic fully, sorry Delphine fans).

For many people, when they think of OnlyFans, the picture that comes to their mind is of Belle Delphine with her signature pink hair.

Buffett would refer to that as a moat.

She has a competitive advantage, in a world full of “competitors” (we keep it family friendly here), she has managed to differentiate herself and carve out a niche when her products demand premium prices.

So when lesson can we take away from the young business savant and the tech titans?

It’s the power of monopolies.

Even conventional microeconomics reaches the conclusion that only monopolies can make a profit in the long run. Other businesses just end up attracting competitors who drive the profit margin to zero.

But when we think of monopolies, we often make the mistake of imagining a billion dollar Apple-esque giant while failing to recognise the individual monopolies all around us.

That Youtuber that you always watch during lunch? That’s probably a monopoly. You tune in for their specific personality and content niche which caters to your individual interests.

Niching down as a business to work in a market of one is an old business tactic.

Running a plumbing business? No, we run a plumbing business only for doctors. Doctors need specific pipelines to deal with hygiene and runoffs from an emergency operation which might happen at their place.

Now you don’t need to compete with every plumbing business in the city. You have a monopoly of one. Businesses like these exist everywhere and command premium prices for their specific services.

You can join a random networking group or you can join a private one where your interests align with everyone else’s because you coincidentally read the same newsletter every week

It’s going to be a short one this week since the last few newsletters have been very long.

TLDR ; Monopolies are the only businesses that can command egregious prices for their products and services and get away with it. For most people, this doesn’t mean disrupting a market but niching down until you’re competing in a market of one