Would you Buy your Own Product?
I wrote a guest post on JohnChow.com today about the great amount of copying that gets done in business. John caters mainly to bloggers so the bulk of my post was all about how there are so many copycat blogs out there which simply rehash content from other blogs, doing nothing new or different.
These blogs have no competitive advantage.
The same holds true in business, where new companies are constantly being created that do absolutely NOTHING significant differently than their competitors.
In my business experience I have done both. I have seen someone else’s success and tried to mimic it exactly, hoping to achieve the same results. I have also seen someone else’s success and created something SIMILAR, drawing on some of the elements of my competitor’s business, but also adding my own touch to the firm and having some differentiation.
(Please note by differentiation I don’t mean just doing something differently. I mean doing it better and more efficiently. No one cares if you can do something differently if it isn’t a more efficient or effective method.)
Which of these companies do you think fared better? As serial entrepreneur and former billionaire founder of Monster.com Andy McKelvey once said, in business timing is everything. If you copy someone else verbatim you won’t succeed because the time when whatever they did worked has come and gone. You have to adapt and do something that will work today.
While the post on JohnChow.com is very targeted to bloggers the overarching principles can apply to all entrepreneurs.
