The Case for Investigation, Not Imitation
Lead or follow?
The current startup landscape reminds me of animated movies. After you’ve watched a few different ones, you realize the storylines tend to follow the same basic roadmap. While this makes for a pleasant entertainment outing, it’s often a fairly predictable experience that you forget soon after leaving the theatre. Sometimes the characters and story are so strong that the formula works, but more often than not it simply falls flat.
Similar to these recurring storylines, entrepreneurs frequently follow formulas used by companies they admire. This seems contradictory to the idea that every company is (or should be) unique; it also stifles the creative essence of entrepreneurship. Why indiscriminately follow a path that worked for someone else? It might work or it might not. Instead, why not dig deeper and build a company based on your own unique ideas, evidence, and market opportunity?

Base your chosen path of business on insights gathered from your investigation.
Prior to committing to a particular path for a business, it’s imperative to dive into an opportunity space with a keen focus on who would be using your product or service and what their actual needs are. Gathering real-world insight helps determine what path(s) should be taken based on your specific mission and business goals. After you complete your investigation, you may find out after all that the best course of action is to follow the same direction as another company, albeit with your own angle. But because you arrived at this conclusion based on insights gathered during your investigation, you’ll have a much higher degree of certainty regarding what path to travel.
Knowledge about your customer should be your north star.
We live in a world where information is ubiquitous but commonly siloed. While it’s tempting to collect information from behind our devices instead of from human-to-human interactions, this method tends to produce myopic and biased data that skews our perception. In contrast, when we invest the time to uncover the realities of our users, logical courses of action and direction emerge. Rather than aiming to be the [successful company] of [industry vertical], your goal should be to use the acquired in-depth understanding of your users — their needs, their habits, and their aspirations — as your north star for everything from value positioning to growth strategy.
Don’t apply your learnings just to the creation of products and services.
Gathering human-based evidence isn’t just for your clients — learnings from discovery can be harnessed to shape internal priorities and decisions as well.
Why?
Because applying evidence and understanding to building the foundation of your company is as important as doing so for the products or services you offer.
Be it culture, process, internal alignment, or marketing message, the ability to uncover needs and champion a strategic approach to provide data-driven solutions to problems is what distinguishes some of the most successful companies from the countless ones playing follow-the-leader.
So which direction makes the most sense in the long run? Forging a new path for your business based on the discovery of your own unique insights or hitching a ride in someone else’s bus of investigation and direction?
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Mighty is a strategic design company helping teams build products that positively impact how people experience the world around them. Our people-first approach produces solutions that are not only beautiful, but focused on captivating your customers, driving adoption, and scaling profitability.
