Stop Competing for the Obvious

Power Rangers: A Case Study

One pattern I see with founders: they're all chasing the same deals, the same markets, the same customer profiles because that's where the opportunity is "supposed" to be. Meanwhile, many of the actually lucrative plays are sitting right there, ignored because they don't look prestigious enough.

Haim Saban built an empire on this principle. Before Power Rangers made him wealthy, he made his money composing music for cartoons. Not exactly glamorous. Every other composer in LA was fighting for sitcoms and late-night shows. The credits that would look good on a résumé and lead to more high-profile work.

Saban did the math instead. Music publishers are paid based on the number of minutes of airtime. Cartoons have wall-to-wall music. A single episode of a cartoon nobody's heard of could pay better than a prestige sitcom. While everyone else competed for the "good" gigs, Saban built twelve studios, cranking out music for Inspector Gadget and He-Man.

He applied the same thinking to Power Rangers. On a trip to Japan, he saw a show with actors in full-body suits fighting monsters. The suits covered everything - faces, bodies, all of it. Which meant he could buy existing Japanese fight footage, film American teenagers for the dialogue scenes, and sell it as a new show for a fraction of what it would cost to produce from scratch.

Everyone in American TV thought it was too weird, too risky, even though the show had been running in Japan for twenty years. The US executives couldn't see past "this isn't how we do things here." When Fox finally gave it an early-morning time slot, basically a graveyard, it pulled double or triple the ratings of everything else on the network.

The opportunities that look obvious are obvious to everyone. That's why they're crowded. The better question is: what's everyone ignoring because it doesn't fit their assumptions about where value comes from? 

Going after the non-obvious opportunity is harder in one specific way: there's no playbook. You can't copy what worked for someone else because the whole point is that no one else is doing it. That's where most people stall out, not because the opportunity isn't real, but because figuring out the path forward feels like guessing. It doesn't have to be. That's the work I do with founders: turning 'I think there's something here' into an actual plan you can execute.