Building
It is easy to start a business using the models that already exist. But if you truly want one to work, you have to invent your own game, with your own rules, built on your own strengths.
I have a theory about why some businesses work and most do not, and it is simple to say and hard to do: to succeed, you have to invent your own game. It is very easy to launch a startup using the models that already exist. Copy the template, follow the playbook, do what everyone in your category does. But if you actually want a business to work, you have to make up your own game, with your own rules.
Here is how that looked for us. When we built the marketing agency in the United States, the business model was, on paper, almost identical to what already existed. Create and launch marketing campaigns alongside our partners. Nothing new there. What was different was how we did it, and that difference is where strategy actually lives.
We had no experience creating marketing campaigns, and we were in the US, an enormous and brutal market. So we stopped and asked ourselves a very specific question. What are our actual strengths, and where is our leverage? Because we did not have much. Our competitors had some of the best copywriters I knew of. There was no way we were going to out-write them. But one thing we genuinely were good at was the technical side. We understood systems, and we could discover patterns.
So we said, fine. We will reverse-engineer every campaign these people have made, and we will build something at least as good. And if it does not work the first time, we will iterate until it does. That was the whole plan, and it was a strange one, because nobody was doing it. Everyone in the space was trying to copy each other, but nobody had taken reverse-engineering as far as we did. They were copying at the surface. We sat down and analyzed the logical structure of the campaigns so that we could rebuild them technically, from the inside out.
Something interesting happened in that process, something we did not plan. By dissecting the structure and understanding the patterns behind how those campaigns worked, we accidentally trained ourselves. We taught ourselves to be better copywriters and marketers than we had any right to be. What started as cold, technical analysis, with no soul in it, turned into an iterative learning loop that eventually produced campaigns better than the competitors we had started by copying. We began from them and ended somewhere they could not follow.
And notice the shape of it. The business model was almost the same as everyone else's, but with small variations that changed everything. That is how business often works. It can come down to tiny variations that shift the entire outcome, or at least a large part of it. When you look at business models in general and try to extract the pattern, the pattern is this: invent your own game. Because when you invent your own game, there is far less risk that you will spend your life copying other people. And copying, by definition, puts you behind them. Invent your own game and you get to write your own rules. If you have chosen the right game, if you have differentiated in the places that actually move a market, your odds of winning go way up.
There is a hidden reason the reverse-engineering worked, and it is worth naming, because it generalizes. We were not trying to copy the output. We were trying to understand the mechanism that produced the output. Copying an output leaves you one step behind forever, because you are always chasing the last thing someone else made. Understanding the mechanism puts you level with them, and then a little ahead, because once you own the mechanism you can run it faster and in directions they have not thought of. The people around us were copying finished campaigns. We were learning how campaigns are made. Those are completely different activities that happen to look similar from the outside.
So the business model itself matters less than how you build it. Two companies can run what looks like the same model and get completely different results, because the model is not the game. The game is the specific way you assemble your strengths against the specific gaps in the market. A model is a description. A game is a strategy. You can hand two founders the identical model on a page and watch one of them win and the other disappear, because the winner turned it into a game built around what only they could do.
And the game you invent is not fixed forever, which is worth saying so you do not treat your first winning version as sacred. The specific game that lets you win today is tuned to today's market, today's competitors, today's tools, and all of those move. So inventing your own game is not a one-time act of creativity, it is an ongoing posture, a willingness to keep re-inventing the rules as the field shifts under you. The founder who invents a brilliant game once and then defends it unchanged eventually finds themselves the incumbent whose rules a hungrier newcomer is happily ignoring. Keep the posture, not just the first version of the game.
Which brings me to the second half of this, and it is the harder half. To invent your own game, you have to bet on your strengths without being ashamed of your weaknesses. Do not get upset about the gaps, the missing skills on your team, the roles you cannot fill, the fact that maybe you are a solo founder with no resources. Do not fixate on the deficiencies. Concentrate instead on the cards you were actually dealt.
I keep coming back to a card game as the metaphor, and I will probably use it again, because it fits. In life, you are dealt cards. It is not quite poker, because you get to keep all of them. The more cards you can hold, the better you can figure out which of them to play in a given situation. Building a business model is the same. You look at your hand and you work out what your real assets are, and how to use them. Sometimes there is a card in your hand you never even counted as an advantage, a skill you dismissed as unimportant, and it turns out to be the one that wins the round, if you play it in a context where it gives you an edge.
Think of a football team. You might have a player who is weak in midfield but makes magic happen in attack. The mistake is to force that player into the role the template says they should fill and then be disappointed. The move is to build the game around where they are dangerous. It is exactly the same with a company. Our copywriting was weak, so we did not try to win on copywriting. We were strong technically, so we built a game where technical pattern-recognition and speed were the deciding factors, and we made the competition play on our field instead of theirs.
This is why I distrust off-the-shelf business models so much. Not because they are wrong, but because they were designed for someone else's hand. The standard model is standard precisely because everyone can run it, which means it rarely wins. It has no leverage baked in for you specifically. When you adopt it wholesale, you are agreeing to compete on the exact dimensions where the incumbents are already strongest, using tools that fit their hand and not yours. You have signed up to play their game, on their field, by their rules, and then you wonder why you keep losing.
There is a courage element in this that people underestimate. Inventing your own game means, for a while, doing something nobody around you is doing, and that is uncomfortable. When we decided to reverse-engineer campaigns technically, there was no one to reassure us it would work, because no one else was doing it. Everyone else was copying, which at least has the comfort of company. The lonely path is the one where differentiation actually lives, because if the path were crowded it would not be differentiation. So part of betting on your strengths is accepting that the bet will feel isolating right up until it works.
Here is the strangest part, and I only understood it in hindsight. Not knowing the standard system was a blessing. If we had come in trained, credentialed, fluent in how the industry said things were done, we would have done things the way they were done, and we would have lost, because doing it the standard way put us behind people who had been doing it that way for years. Our ignorance forced us to build from our own strengths instead of the accepted template, and that improvisation, born purely of not knowing better, became the whole advantage. I am not romanticizing inexperience. I am saying that the fresh eyes which cannot see the standard path are sometimes the only eyes that can see a new one.
The disadvantages are not just tolerable, they are often the source of the whole thing. We had no money, no experienced writers, and no reputation, and it forced us to build a faster, more iterative machine than the people who had all three. The lack was the reason we invented something new. If we had been comfortable, we would have copied, and copying would have kept us permanently one step behind. Comfortable companies reach for the template because they can afford to. Desperate companies invent, because the template would kill them. That is why so many of the best games are invented by the people with the worst hands.
There is a strategic reason this works that goes beyond morale, and it is about where competition happens. When you copy, you agree to compete on the incumbent's chosen dimensions, and on those dimensions they have years of accumulated advantage. When you invent your own game, you move the competition to dimensions you chose, where your advantage is largest and theirs is smallest. We could not win on copywriting, so we refused to let the fight happen there. We moved it to technical pattern-recognition and speed, and on that field the best copywriters in the industry had no answer. You do not beat a stronger opponent by playing their game better. You beat them by changing which game is being played.
And the small variations are not small in effect, only in appearance. Our model looked nearly identical to everyone else's from the outside, the same service, the same category, the same customers. The differences were internal, in how we contacted partners, how we built campaigns, how fast we iterated, who did what. Those internal differences were invisible to observers and decisive in results. This is why you cannot judge a business by whether its model looks original. Two identical-looking models can produce opposite outcomes, because the game is played in the details of execution, not in the description on the pitch deck.
Inventing your own game is not a slogan about being original for its own sake. It is a practical response to a real constraint: you cannot win a game whose rules were written to favor someone else. So write your own. Pick the dimensions where your strengths matter most, differentiate exactly there, and make everyone else come play on your field. Small variations, chosen well, are the whole difference between a business that works and one that spends its short life a step behind the people it was trying to imitate.