When you are planning a new business, how different do you think it…

When you are planning a new business, how different do you think it will be from everyone else? From 0 to 10. And then, when you actually build it, how different is it in reality?

I was thinking about this today.

When I was at school, I always dreamed about working with computers and building businesses. And when I looked at other companies, I could always see what they were doing wrong. I was thinking: “If I had this business, I would do it completely differently.” Then I started my own businesses. And over time I realised something slightly painful. Very often, I am doing exactly the same things as everyone else.

At the moment we are brainstorming with a company selling phone cases. At the beginning, we talked about how different the business should be. What competitors are missing. What problems we can solve. What we can do better. Then we created a few website mockups. This screenshot is one of them. It is not a real website. And when I looked at it, I thought: This is actually not very different at all. It looks like many other online stores.

And maybe this is one of the hardest things in business. It is very easy to see what other people should do differently. It is much harder to build something genuinely different yourself.

So I’m curious.

From 0 to 10, how different is your business from your competitors? And what is one thing you actually do differently, not just say differently?