What makes a candle romantic?
Who decides what color table cloths go in a Michelin-star restaurant?
Why are restaurants the only form of entertainment that allow the host to lie about whether they’re actually ready for your reserved seat at 7:00 pm, or the attendee to lie about how many are in their party, or whether they’ll show up at all?
Nick Kokonas - founder of Open Table - suggests the best answer an entrepreneur can give to these, and most questions is, “I don’t know.”
Principle: Nobody knows anything.
One of the most fundamental tenets of building a business is differentiation: we want to be different from our competition.
But our competition is doing so many things well, it’s hard not to duplicate and improve.
Honestly, that’s not a bad way to win. But it’s a race to margin, not to dominance.
Instead of asking what your competition is doing, ask, “why does anyone do this? Where does it come from?”
That’s called first-principles thinking, and it’s the gold standard for ideation. When you can get to the bottom of the issue or common practice, you can change, iterate, and differentiate in a way that is worthy of a customer’s attention.
Tactics
Look for reasons to ask why in your business.
Why do unboxing videos still work?
Why is email not a higher priority when it converts so effectively and consistently?
Why do we default to .99 pricing - does it really work?
Why are order confirmation emails all the same with no brand personality?
Why do we accept high return/refund rates instead of redesigning our product based on what sucked?
Why do we default to a sister SKU instead of making the one already working 20% better?
Why do we put 50% effort into desktop site development when 97% of orders come from mobile?
Why are our product photos studio quality when UCG content is selling like hot cakes?
If you copy/paste this list into chatgpt, and say, “continue,” you’ll get a solid list of things you should question.
Habits
Take a weekly look at one component of your work flow (site dev, ads, marketing strategy, product, outreach, nurture, etc.), and question the guts out of it.
Schedule it for Wednesday at 4:00 - time to get enough work done in the week the way you currently do it, and time enough tomorrow and Friday to experiment a bit.
Make a list of every question you can come up with in 30 minutes, then spend the second half of the hour diving deeper into the why behind the ones that seem most ripe for disruption.
God speed,
Mike
Today’s inspiration: Nick Kokonas on Tim Ferriss