The Purple Cow Problem: Why Your MSP Isn’t Standing Out

I ran an MSP for years. I know the pitch. Great service, fast response times, cybersecurity experts, trusted partner. We said it too! And I can tell you with total confidence after talking to thousands of MSP owners: so did every single MSP your prospects talked to before they got to you.

That’s the problem. Not that those things aren’t true or don’t matter, they do. But when every MSP in the room is saying the same thing, none of it lands.

I went back to a book I’ve loved for years and reread it: Seth Godin’s Purple Cow. This book explains better than almost anything else I’ve read why so many MSPs are stuck. Why they struggle to grow. Why they compete on price. Why their marketing doesn’t work.

Better Is Invisible

Here’s what Godin makes painfully clear: being very good is no longer enough. Being better is not enough. You have to be remarkable. And remarkable doesn’t mean polished or well-reviewed. It literally means worth talking about; something that makes people stop and say, “Hey, you’ve got to see this!”

When I was building my MSP, we spent a lot of time on the wrong things. Better engineers. Better tools. Faster tickets. And none of it moved the needle on growth the way I expected, because prospects couldn’t see any of it.

Think about it from their side. They’re not technical. They don’t know your stack. They can’t evaluate response time benchmarks or compare your tooling to the MSP down the street. So when you tell them you’re better, all they hear is that you sound like everyone else. Because everyone else is saying the same thing.

Different is what gets noticed. Not better: different.

What a Purple Cow Actually Looks Like

I didn’t build a seven figure MSP by being the best IT company in my market. I built it by being easier to understand. We leaned hard into cloud before it was mainstream. We leaned hard into disaster recovery. We worked with businesses that genuinely couldn’t afford downtime. And instead of saying “we offer cloud services,” we said “we help businesses stay operational no matter what happens.”

One of those is a service. The other is a result. One is technical. The other is something a prospect can actually feel. That is a purple cow!

Godin talks about this with companies like Krispy Kreme: people would literally pull off the road when that “Hot Now” sign lit up. Starbucks wasn’t the first coffee company, but they created a place people wanted to be in. These companies didn’t win because they were slightly better. They won because they were obvious. They interrupted the pattern.

For an MSP, that looks like: we only work with law firms. We specialize in disaster-proof cloud environments. We eliminate downtime for manufacturers. Simple, clear, repeatable. If your prospect has to think hard to understand what you do, you’ve already lost them.

The “Everyone” Trap

When growth stalls, the instinct is to go broader. Cast a wider net. Appeal to more people. I get it; I’ve felt that pull too.

The problem is that broader messaging doesn’t bring in more leads. It makes you invisible to all of them. An MSP website that says “we provide IT services for small and medium-sized businesses” could describe literally any of your competitors. That’s not a purple cow. That’s a beige cow in a field of beige cows.

Godin is direct on this: when you try to market to everyone, you end up being interesting to no one. Prospects today are overwhelmed. Their inboxes are full, their attention is gone, and when your message is unclear or generic, their brain does the simplest thing it can: it ignores you. Not out of malice. Just because you didn’t make it easy.

How to Find Yours

Here are the questions I want you to sit with:

• Who do you serve best?
• What problem do you solve better than anyone else in your market?
• What do other MSPs avoid that you lean into?
• What do your clients actually thank you for?

Take those answers and sharpen them until you can say it in one sentence. Then make sure someone else can repeat that sentence back after hearing it once. If they can’t, keep sharpening. My rule of thumb: if it’s not obvious, it’s not working.

When I finally got this right at my MSP, things changed. The right prospects started coming to me instead of me chasing everyone. Price resistance dropped because people understood my value. Referrals increased because my clients knew exactly how to describe me to someone else.

That’s what a purple cow does for your business.

What Made You Different Then Might Not Now

One thing I keep coming back to from this book: what made you remarkable five years ago might not make you remarkable today. Godin uses Howard Johnson’s as an example. They were a big deal once. Then they became invisible. The market moved and they didn’t.

Cloud services, cybersecurity basics, remote monitoring: these used to be differentiators. Now they’re table stakes. If your differentiation is something every other MSP also offers, you’re back to being a beige cow!

Your Challenge This Week

Go look at your website. Your pitch. Your LinkedIn profile. Ask yourself honestly: would a prospect immediately understand what makes you different? Could they repeat it back to a colleague after hearing it once?

If not, that’s where you start.

At Cloud Services for MSPs, I built this platform around helping MSPs stop competing on price and start competing on clarity. When you’re finally saying something worth noticing, everything gets easier.

“Different is better than better.” – Seth Godin

Have a great week and weekend!