Eaton et al. (2011) underline that firms with similar production costs, entry costs and demand export to different countries. In this theoretical article, I provide a rationale for this feature of the data. I demonstrate that similar firms exporting differently can be explained by a baseline trade-off between attractiveness and competition that is present in any model with monopolistic competition. I then show that this trade-off also generates valuable theoretical features including distance-related mark-ups, third country effect and equivalence with random utility models.