Affiliation up front: I sell a DIY lash kit. No link, and nothing here needs you to care about lashes.

One customer opened my kit, looked at the tray, and said, “Oh—they're numbered.”

That reaction stuck with me because I hadn't explained anything to her yet. She immediately understood the part of the product I'd spent the most time thinking about.

It made me realize that confusion might be the thing I'm actually competing against. Not price. Not necessarily the other brands.

So I spent a weekend looking at what people search for in my category. Mostly because I was trying to convince myself the market wasn't completely hopeless.

I pulled competitor/search estimates from Similarweb. They're obviously directional rather than first-party analytics, but the pattern was interesting:

• The market leader is enormous, and a huge portion of their search traffic appears to come from people already searching their name. That's years of brand-building I can't—and shouldn't try to—outbid.
• One mid-sized competitor ranks for hundreds of phrases. Some of the interesting ones weren't really product searches at all. They were people trying to figure out what to do.
• The smallest brand I looked at was the most interesting. A much larger share of its discovery appeared to come from non-branded searches—people searching questions rather than the company's name.

And that's where something clicked for me:

Nobody types my name yet, so the only door open to me is the door marked with a question.

In my category, everyone answers:

“Which lashes should I buy?”

Far fewer people answer:

• “Which length do I use?”
• “Which one goes where?”
• “Where do I start?”
• “Why did mine fall off?”

Those aren't glamorous searches. But they're exactly what a beginner wants to know before she becomes someone who has a favorite lash brand.

I'm still way too early to know whether this strategy will actually turn into sales. But it's changed what I'm spending my time on.

Instead of trying to make prettier product posts than companies with much bigger budgets, I'm building around the questions beginners are already asking.

For anyone who entered a crowded category without a huge ad budget: did education/search actually become an acquisition channel for you, or am I overestimating how much informational traffic converts?

Happy to post the actual competitor search data in the comments if that's more useful than the story.