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Why you should copy what works:
For several years, I judged college entrepreneurship pitch competitions where students took turns giving five-minute presentations on their new business ideas.
I’ve since stopped doing this because it pisses me off, and they stopped inviting me back.
Like pretty much everyone else these days, the college kids who enter these competitions think entrepreneurship means totally re-inventing the wheel and flipping a business model on its head.
They have little to no experience, but they proudly announce that they’re going to change an entire market or a consumer's behavior and get them to buy and do things they have never done before.
It doesn’t make any sense!
“Hold on,” I’d tell them. “We have industries that are working and thriving right now. We have companies that are providing this product or service RIGHT NOW that are making phenomenal money and you want to change everything about the way they are doing business? Why?”
The replies were cringeworthy, but every single student and most of my fellow judges still looked at me like I had 3 heads when I called out the students for this thinking.
Most had been trained and manipulated to think they needed large moats and innovation or disruption to succeed.
Who the hell is this guy?
They thought when I spoke. Why would we do something boring and simple like copying others who are already winning the game today?
So they ignored me or pushed back. “That’s not what this whole thing is about, Nick!” one student said.
"Okay, so what is this about?” I responded.
“It’s about inventing something totally new and disruptive. It's about changing the world” he shot back.
“No it isn’t!” I couldn’t help myself here.
"Entrepreneurship is about making money. It doesn’t matter how new and disruptive your idea or plan is. All that matters is providing value to a customer, making money, and building a sustainable company. Success in business is not rocket science."
Needless to say, my answer didn’t go over very well.
My advice:
When you are starting a company you do NOT want to spend months rethinking a business model or intentionally trying to do everything differently just so you can say you that "innovated."
Your job is to figure out how to make money by studying what is working TODAY.
From there, you just need to implement the tactics and strategies that are working for others, stay consistent, and do the common things uncommonly well.
You have to master the fundamentals first and get to at least $1M+ in ebitda before you try to innovate or add anything new. That’s it.
Also, I’m not against innovation, but I believe that innovation is the long lost cousin of simply copying and modifying what is working for others today.
I innovate in my companies all the time but not in groundbreaking, revolutionary, or out of the box ways.
I generally get inspired by things that are working for my other businesses, for my competitors, or for companies in other industries altogether.
I take a little bit of this from that operator, or an insight that someone says on Twitter or something I saw a competitor do and apply it to my business with a slightly new spin that makes sense for us and voila!
My business grows.
That's why I think most businesses are what I call "franken businesses" where the founders or CEOs take all of the best bits and pieces from other companies they've studied or read about or transacted with over time and then they apply those learnings to their own firms to improve.
They learn a bit about marketing from company A and sales from company B, and ops from company C, and management best practices from company D and they combine all of these insights and apply them to their own businesses.
And they do this because it works.
This is how businesses are built in the real world.
The reality is: A business is a collection of tactics and strategies that were inspired by other businesses winning in the market today.
Not much of it is actually new. Someone else did it first.
So your goal is to build a franken-business.
It's okay to be inspired by what actually works.
It's okay to be inspired by company A, B, or C. It shouldn't be taboo to say that you do sales like other rockstar companies or you run Meta ads because millions of other businesses do the same to drive demand.
Remember you don’t get extra points for playing the entrepreneurship game on hard mode.
You don't get extra points for re-inventing the wheel especially when you have no customers or cashflow at all.
There are tens of millions of businesses worldwide that make phenomenal money each year and power the economy without much innovation at all.
Very few of them are new idea businesses.
Most are sweaty startups or traditional companies in legacy industries.
They are all franken-businesses in one way or another and they all copy off what has worked for others in their industry or adjacent fields.
Success in business is not rocket science. Don't treat it like it is.
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A few tweets from this week:
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Onward and upward,
Nick Huber
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