Someone in your audience just paid $3,000 for a coaching program but last week, they told you $47 was too much for your course.

That's got nothing with pricing and everything to do with how your brand and product are perceived. So before you go and drop your prices, add more bonuses, give this post a minute. You'll learn about an essential marketing strategy concept, something the French call cherchez le créneau — find the gap. It's one of the most powerful positioning concepts I know, and it's almost entirely missing from the way most course creators market their work.

Let me show you what it looks like in practice.

The platforms already figured this out

Look at the biggest names in online education and you'll notice something interesting: they don't actually compete with each other, not really, because each one has claimed a very specific position in the learner's mental map.

Read that again.

Udemy is the everything store. It's defined by volume, variety, low prices. If you want to learn something quickly and cheaply, Udemy is where you go. The positioning is essentially Amazon for courses.

Coursera is the credentialing platform. University partnerships, certificates that go on your LinkedIn, learning that signals institutional legitimacy. The audience isn't hobbyists — it's professionals who need proof of skills.

Masterclass is something else entirely. It's not really selling education, but status and access to greatness. Gordon Ramsay teaching you cooking isn't about becoming a chef — it's about sitting at the same table as someone extraordinary. The production quality, the cinematic trailers, the celebrity names: all of it says this is aspirational, not practical. And people pay a premium for that feeling.

Mindvalley occupies a different territory again. Personal transformation, consciousness, the kind of growth that most professional platforms would never touch. Their audience isn't looking for a certificate necessarily (although they've got a coaching certification), most of their users are looking for a shift in how they see the world. Mindvalley understood that there was a huge, underserved market of people who wanted to grow in ways that went beyond career skills, and they claimed it entirely.

Then there's Ali Abdaal. A former doctor who built his entire brand around productivity — but specifically enjoyable productivity. Not hustle, not grind, but making your work feel better. That's a créneau: the doctor credential, the Oxford background, the emphasis on feel-good systems — it all adds up to a position nobody else holds quite the same way.

And Tony Robbins who doesn't sell courses, but intense transformation. People are buying because his events and experiences are known for a high level of energy and a sort of physical experience of breakthrough. He's not in the same category as anyone else on this list, even though on paper he could be described as a business or mindset coach.

Same industry, completely different position.

A few years ago, I worked with three course creators at the same time and they all taught IELTS preparation.

When I looked at their messaging, I saw the problem immediately: they were all saying practically the same thing, making the same promise to the same audience in a similar way.

From the outside, at a first glance, a potential student couldn't tell them apart and when that happens, you default to whoever you've heard of the longest, or whoever is cheapest. Branding is a start, but it's not enough to set you apart.

So here's the real challenge I had to solve: how do you work with three clients who basically do the same thing without diluting their brand or cross-pollinating the copy?

I went through their courses — yes, I'm crazy like that — and discovered that each of them actually did have something different:

• One specialized in writing skills
• The second worked almost exclusively with medical professionals preparing to move abroad.
• The third had built his entire method around mindset and test anxiety.

Voilà le créneau: the gap in the market that none of them were claiming.

Once we named it, their messaging stopped sounding vague because they were no longer writing for everyone who wanted to pass IELTS — they were writing for a specific person with a specific problem and that specificity is what makes someone feel like an offer was built for them.

The formula I use with clients is built around three things:

Who you're for, what transformation you deliver and how you uniquely get them there.

Gap = (Existing Market Options) − (Your Unique Approach)

The IELTS example made it simple:

IELTS courses are everywhere, but no one was offering IELTS training specifically for nurses who want to move to Canada.

That's an exact audience and this converts better than a broad one almost every time, because the message lands differently when someone reads it and thinks this is for me.

So why should you care?

Your audience is constantly sorting through an overwhelming number of choices. Whether they're looking for an English course, a fitness program, or a business coach, they don't have time to deeply research every option. Instead, they build a mental map — a ranking system where they place experts and brands based on what they remember about them.

Right now, potential students are running that sorting process on you and they're placing you next to every other course creator they've encountered in your space.

• If your positioning isn't clear, they won't know where to put you — which means they'll forget you.
• If your positioning is too broad, they'll file you under "one of many" rather than "the obvious choice."

The $3,000 coaching program that your audience happily invested in? It won the mental map and it got placed in the "built for me" category before the sales conversation even started.

So here's the exercise:

Write down the three biggest names in your space.

• What position do they each occupy in your learner's mental map?
• What do people immediately associate with each of them?

Now look at the gaps between those positions.

• What's missing?
• What's underserved?
• What would your most ideal student never find with any of them?

That's your créneau.

Let me know what you find. I'm genuinely curious where people land with this.