Start a company even without uniqueness
I once wrote a post
Aisei Kobayashi said “most music is a rip-off,” and that’s true in a certain sense, https://www.clazytech.com/2013/12/95/
but I sometimes hear founders use “our uniqueness is weak…” as an excuse to give up on starting a company. Most of the time they’re a bit more assertive about it, asking “I feel like our uniqueness is weak, so how can we differentiate ourselves!?” I give advice tailored to each person’s business domain and technical challenges. The basics are – find things other companies and other people aren’t doing, and the reason why – break through that reason with a bold approach – if you can do it while drawing on your own strength, that’s a perfect score
That’s the gist of it. But depending on the business domain, there are cases where there’s no technical challenge at all, or where one isn’t particularly needed. For those cases, generally speaking,
“Uniqueness is something that emerges on its own, so you don’t need to think about it too hard.”
This is somewhat paradoxical. Even if you think “this is MY uniqueness!!!”, securing complete uniqueness is extremely difficult.
I also want to say: don’t overvalue “ideas” so much.
The post I quoted at the start makes the point well: in the end, having a head start or some natural talent at the beginning doesn’t matter that much. From experience, I’ve had cases where a business plan struck me as original and amazing when I first heard about it in Japan, only for closer inspection to reveal that companies in North America, Germany, Korea, and Israel had already published papers on it or shown prototypes at trade shows. (Sometimes a major Japanese company had already built a prototype of the same idea too. In the end it was just my own ignorance — there was no originality there at all.)
Uniqueness is genuinely hard to pin down.
But I can say something positive here. When you jump into a challenging domain, every day is a storm of problems. You’re forced to make choices every day, every hour, and a single wrong choice can put the company’s survival on the line — but that’s exactly where a clear “chance for differentiation” is born. How many competitors would make the exact same choice in the exact same situation? Maybe there’s one that would, for a single choice. But across two, three, four choices, and the string of regrets and improvements that follow day after day, how many companies would end up taking the exact same path? I don’t know whether the choices were right. Neither do you. Neither does the competition. But without a doubt, something of you and something of your company will show up in that process. That, unmistakably, is uniqueness.
In the end, this is really about investors.
Investors need to gauge “the person.” Almost every early-stage startup has a business plan that’s garbage and a technical idea that’s garbage. On top of that, even the precious prototype is garbage. But the people who can find “something” in that mess have their own unique perspective. Those who invest only in later-stage, already-profitable companies tend to have a sharp eye for financial statements, while those who invest only at the early stage have an eye for “the person.” One angel investor once told me, “Kuzuryu-san, I’ve decided the type of person I invest in. It’s someone who never gives up.” He invests mostly in young entrepreneurs, usually first-time founders. There’s nothing that can really measure them. Their business plan, and whatever technology backs it up, is — frankly — extremely fragile. They will absolutely face two or three moments where they feel like they’re about to die, and if they can’t get through that, they’ll be dead within a year or so. Even if they get through that, next they’ll hit the challenge of growth, which will force them to overturn all the knowledge, values, and methods they had up to that point, and they’ll feel like giving up all over again. Getting through that too takes intelligence, character, charisma, all sorts of things, probably. But the most important thing, in his words, is “a heart that doesn’t give up.”
So, believe in yourself.
Especially for non-engineer founders, there’s often no research achievement or backing from a famous professor to lean on. But believe in yourself. Investors might say all kinds of things: “not enough uniqueness,” “you don’t understand the trend,” “not edgy enough.” But believe in yourself. You might fail. You might not amount to anything. You might not be able to get back up afterward. But after a while, you might find yourself wanting to try again. Keep believing in yourself, continuously.
Starting a company might be one of the few times in life where you can pour in 100% commitment. I hope you enjoy it to the fullest.
Author Profile
 | Yuichiro “kuz” Kuzuryu Engineer / Executive Has fallen into all kinds of valleys of death, from launching new businesses at major Japanese corporations to Silicon Valley startups. CEO, Founder, ClayTech Inc. Director, EYS-STYLE Inc. Director, 144Lab Inc. Visiting Professor, Tohoku University Also serves as technical advisor to several other companies https://twitter.com/qzuryu https://www.facebook.com/qzuryu https://www.linkedin.com/in/yuichiro-kuzuryu-kuz-27b92838/ |
Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2019/09/229/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.