How a Blue Ocean Is Created: Before the First Line of Code, Look at the Playground Your Product Is Aiming to Play On
The Lead · Natalie Undermoore · 2026-11-05
"Most spaces similar to ours have bright white hospital-like lighting," Ireland McCaughey, a co-founder of a Brooklyn laundromat, told Apartment Therapy in July 2026.1 Laundry bags pile up on top of the machines. You load your clothes, and then you wait.
McCaughey and Ben Razin opened Launderette in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in early 2025, and set out to remove exactly those things. They moved bag storage to a basement, gave up prime floor space for a front area for working and gathering, put a power outlet at every seat and added a coffee bar. "Launderette wasn't designed to be a pit stop," the company's own site says.2 What changed, as I read it, was what the wait felt like. Apartment Therapy called the place "somewhere you might actually kick back for a bit."1
Seen from outside, this market is big, and it seems you can't offer anything new there: New York already has a great many laundromats. When founders choose what to build, many assume an innovative product has to start somewhere brand new. The products I see take off usually start where Launderette did, with a job people already get done again and again. They claim attention, demand and a share of the market that were there before them, and do the same job at a qualitatively new level.
W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, professors of strategy at INSEAD, call the space such products open a blue ocean: market space "untainted by competition." In most cases, a blue ocean "is created from within a red ocean," their name for the industries that exist today.3 Laundromats in New York are a red ocean. In my view, a blue ocean begins with a new position inside one, and I find that position by reading the playground.
In my view, a blue ocean begins with a new position inside one, and I find that position by reading the playground.
A playground is the space where one job gets done in different ways, in a particular place, under that place's rules, norms, habits and values. Launderette's is clean laundry in New York.
playground
AI products have the same opportunity. The same playgrounds are all still there, and AI can now do the jobs at their center more personally, faster, more precisely, automatically where that used to be impossible, and cheaply where a person used to pay for something expensive. So before the first line of code, it pays to see the playground your product is aiming to play on.
Why use a playground at all?
Because your customer never looks at your product alone. They hold it up against every other way they could get the same job done, and then they choose. The playground is that whole comparison. Read it before you build, while changing the product still costs little, and you will know who you are really up against, what decides the choice and where a new position is still open. Your go-to-market is built on those 3 answers.
In the free sessions we run at Beyonds, where founders show us their projects, I see what happens when nobody reads the playground. When they talk about their product, they almost never describe their playground. They build the product, find some users one way or another and maybe sell something to people they already know. Then they can't sell to people who don't know them, or turn users into paying customers: the go-to-market stops at warm contacts. One of the reasons is that they don't understand their playground, and they start from a losing position.
What is a playground?
At the center of every playground is something a person has to get done again and again. I call it a job; you can also call it a task or a problem. A playground forms only around a job that keeps coming back, since habits, rules and rival ways of handling it take shape through repetition. Take one in a person's own words: my laundry has to be clean. How can I get it done? I can wash it by hand. I can use the machine at home. I can take it to a dry cleaner, give it to my housekeeper, or go to a laundromat. Every one of these is a player on the playground. Ways that involve no product count too: washing by hand and the housekeeper compete with the laundromat.
A playground has rules and norms. The people on it already have habits: what they understand, what they choose and why, what feels convenient and what doesn't. Some norms are psychological, and some were put there by marketing. There are preferences and there are values. People choose among the players on the basis of all this.
A playground always belongs to a place, and its rules shift with geography. In New York, apartments have historically been cramped, many come without a washing machine, and there is a real culture of taking your clothes to the laundromat. Across New York State, 37% of homes have no clothes washer.4 In small European villages, families do their laundry at home. That is why Launderette, had it opened in one of them, probably wouldn't have caught on.
37% — Homes in New York State with no clothes washer. U.S. EIA, RECS 2024
How is a playground different from a shelf, a market, a category or a niche?
Each of these words looks at the same activity from a different angle, and only the playground looks from the side of the person who has the job to do. Marketers talk about the shelf a product stands on. A shelf is about the product, so I use my own word for everything around the job itself.
- A shelf is where products of one kind stand side by side at the moment of purchase, in a store or in the buyer's head. A person standing at the shelf has already decided to buy that kind of product and is choosing which one.
- A market is the seller's view of money: how much people spend on one type of product. A study of the New York laundromat market would leave out washing by hand, the machine at home and the housekeeper, because the money spent on them is counted somewhere else.
- A category is the view of the product: laundromats, washing machines, detergents, dry cleaning. Products in a category get compared with each other, so a product designed from inside a category tends to look like its neighbors.
- A niche is a narrower slice of a market or category, defined by audience: a laundromat for students. It is still the seller's view.
- A playground is the person's view at the moment of choice. One job, one place, every way to get it done, and the rules that decide between them. The shelf is one corner of it.
nest
One playground spans several markets: appliances, detergents, dry cleaning, home services and laundromats all compete for "my laundry has to be clean." And one product can play on several playgrounds: people use social networks for keeping in touch, for promoting a business or themselves, and for self-expression, and each of those has its own rules.
What changes a playground?
Usually a new player comes onto it, with its own take on the job: it finds a way to do it that nobody has tried before, or it notices something uncomfortable that everyone accepts out of habit and established norms. People inside a playground often wear blinkers, and the discomfort becomes invisible to them. A newcomer asks, "Why do you do it this way?" and the answer is: "We've done it like this for 50 years and never thought about it."
As I read it, Launderette's founders knew which playground they were on: clean laundry. Selling washing machines or detergent, or opening a dry cleaner, would have been other ways onto it. They chose the form New York already uses, the laundromat, of which the city has a great many, and fixed what makes such places unpleasant. They are cramped, and you have to stay for an hour or so. You get your laundry done under bright white light, between piles of bags, and the hour itself is no pleasure. In one line, their position: a laundromat in Brooklyn where the hour of waiting becomes time you'd want to spend there.
Brands such as the bedding company Brooklinen and the beauty brand Tower 28 had rented the space for events, and hotels and Pilates studios had become commercial clients by August 2026.5 Brands don't book an ordinary laundromat for their events, so this demand is new; in this case, it is the blue ocean. To me, a well-analyzed playground and a clear position on it were part of the foundation underneath.
Can AI make a playground disappear?
Rarely. Most of them evolve: the job stays, and the ways of doing it change. When Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone in 2007, Apple described it as 3 products in one: "a revolutionary mobile phone, a widescreen iPod with touch controls, and a breakthrough Internet communications device."6 Calling, listening to music and going online were jobs people already did every day. The iPhone became a new player on all 3 playgrounds, and they transformed around it. In the same way, a large part of keeping in touch moved into social networks, and self-expression moved from blogs into social feeds.
When a playground does disappear, the job itself goes away, usually when something in the world changes. After the World Health Organization declared smallpox eradicated in 1980,7 no parent had to protect a child from the disease any more. Once euro notes and coins arrived in 12 countries in 2002,8 people living there stopped changing money for a trip from France to Germany. When AI arrives on a playground, the job stays, and the open question becomes who does it.
When AI arrives on a playground, the job stays, and the open question becomes who does it.
What does this mean for an AI product?
It means your product can be the one that does the job from now on. AI changes who can do an old job well enough for people to switch. That works in both directions: a company that served a playground for years can lose its new customers, and a newcomer can find room on a playground that looked closed.
Homework help is an old playground: a student, a problem, a deadline. A general-purpose chatbot arrived on it, solving the problem in seconds and for free. Chegg, the American homework-help company, had built a large business there and watched its shelf, the other homework-help sites. The player that took its new customers never stood among them. Chegg lost half its subscribers in a little over 2 years; this issue's Breakdown9 shows what AI took and what had started going wrong earlier. Students still have homework.
Source — Chegg's subscribers fell from 5.1 million in Q1 2023 to 2.6 million in Q2 2025, by the company's own quarterly results.
Abridge, a medical AI company, shows the other direction. After every visit, a doctor has to write it up: they type the note, dictate it or hand it to a scribe. Abridge built a tool that listens to the conversation and drafts the note. In August 2024 the U.S. health care provider Kaiser Permanente made it available at "40 hospitals and more than 600 medical offices in eight states and the District of Columbia."10 The tool follows the rules of this playground: it requires the patient's consent, and the doctor reviews every note before it goes into the medical record.
40 — Kaiser Permanente hospitals where Abridge was made available. Kaiser Permanente, 14 Aug 2024
600+ — Medical offices in 8 states and D.C. with the same tool. Kaiser Permanente, 14 Aug 2024
Copying the latest startup is usually the first idea that comes to mind. On an old playground, the field nobody has plowed is often the thing everyone there has stopped noticing.
Wouldn't a brand-new playground, with no competitors, be safer?
Not necessarily. An empty space is tempting because nobody seems to compete there, but brand-new playgrounds appear less often than founders usually expect.
On a playground, every way of getting the job done counts as a rival, including doing it yourself. If you find no players at all, it can mean nobody wants that job done. So check that first.
How do you read your playground?
5 questions, answered on paper.
- What is the job? "My laundry has to be clean." Describe it with no product in the sentence, and check that the job keeps coming back.
- Where is the playground? Start with geography: is it global or local? Even an international project has customers somewhere, and the rules change with the place.
- Who plays on it today? List every way people there get the job done now, including the ways that involve no product: doing it themselves, asking a colleague, paying someone.
- What are the rules? For each way, note what people understand and choose, what they find convenient and inconvenient, and which habits and norms keep it in place, including the ones marketing put there.
- Where do you stand? Write your position in one sentence: whose attention and demand you take, what you solve at a new level, and why people will choose you.
What can you do this week?
Answer the 5 questions for the product you're about to build, before you write any code. Mark each answer you know from what you've seen yourself and each one you're guessing. The guesses are where to start: interview people who have this job about how they handle it today.
We use the playground to find market pull: proof that people will pay for what you're building.
At Beyonds, every startup starts here, before anyone writes a line of code. Once that demand is confirmed, you build the company.
You can take both steps with us in AI Startup Reality: find customers who pre-order, build the product they're waiting for and turn it into a working company built on systems that sell, deliver and grow.
Reality starts on December 1 and runs for 4 months as one mass Build in Public case: 50 founders build their companies in front of the market at the same time, and Beyonds publishes the whole case, each company's story included. Your company reaches people who don't know you yet, and that kind of attention is hard to attract on your own. Apply until November 27.
Route — AI Startup Reality: market pull first, then the company. From December 1, applications until November 27.
FAQ
What is a playground in business?
A playground, in Beyonds' terms, is the space where one job gets done in different ways, in a particular place, under that place's rules, norms, habits and values. The job is something people have to get done again and again, and the playground covers every way of doing it, including the ones that involve no product. Reading it shows a founder what a new product will be compared with.
How is a blue ocean created?
Usually from within a red ocean, an industry that already exists. W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, professors of strategy at INSEAD, describe it as a company changing the boundaries of an existing industry. For a founder, that starts with reading the playground before building and finding what everyone on it has accepted out of habit.
Should a startup enter an existing market or create a new one?
Many innovative products that take off aim at a job that already exists and do it at a new level, taking attention and demand that are already there. Brand-new markets, built around a job nobody had to get done before, appear less often than founders usually expect. Either way, it helps to know every way the job gets done today where your customers are, and the habits that decide between them.
Where does a go-to-market strategy start?
With the playground: the job your customers have to get done again and again, the place where they are, and every way they handle it today, including the ones that involve no product. That shows whom to sell to, where to reach them and what they will compare your product with. Then write your position in one sentence: whose attention and demand you take, what you solve at a new level, and why people will choose you.
What is Launderette in Brooklyn?
Launderette is a laundromat in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, founded by Ireland McCaughey and Ben Razin and opened in early 2025. It combines self-service and drop-off laundry with a coffee bar and space for working and gathering, and it rents out its space for brand events.
Sources
- [1] Erica Finamore, Apartment Therapy, July 19, 2026: link
- [2] Launderette, Our Story: link
- [3] W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, "Blue Ocean Strategy," Harvard Business Review, October 2004: link
- [4] U.S. Energy Information Administration, Residential Energy Consumption Survey 2024, appliances by state (preliminary, March 2026): link
- [5] Tatiana Sataua, "'Your back's against the wall': How two Gen-Z founders bet everything on a Brooklyn laundromat," Fortune, August 9, 2026: link
- [6] Apple, "Apple Reinvents the Phone with iPhone," January 9, 2007: link
- [7] World Health Organization, "Commemorating smallpox eradication," May 8, 2020: link
- [8] European Central Bank, The 2002 cash changeover: link
- [9] Beyonds Journal, "Did ChatGPT Kill Chegg? What AI Took, and What It Left": link
- [10] Kaiser Permanente, "Kaiser Permanente improves member experience with AI-enabled clinical technology," August 14, 2024: link
Beyonds Journal, issue 003
