How To Get Off the Startup Trend Bandwagon

Are you building your own business or cloning someone else’s?

Let me ask you a philosophical question: Why did you start your own company in the first place?

I really want you to think about the answer. Too many entrepreneurs don’t, and when they realize that they’re building their business from someone else’s blueprints, they lack either the fortitude or the experience to reverse course. So their startup dream ends up becoming a retread, a wanna-be, just another player in a trendy game of whatever is hot this quarter.

This mistake is not a weakness of ego, inexperience, or greed. It’s actually more of a well-intentioned slip, one that leads an entrepreneur to go from leaning on a metaphor to explain what they’re trying to accomplish to falling into a trap of their own making and actually living that metaphor.

I’ve been building companies a long time, and it took me too much of that time to realize the value of mission and positioning. I thought they were just buzzwords. I was wrong.

Let’s use those lessons to keep you out of that trap.

Trends rise up when something traditionally difficult suddenly becomes easy

Damn, but there are a lot of two-sided marketplace startups everywhere.

I’ve been building 2SMs in one form or another since I first started my own company some 20 years ago. Back then, I didn’t even set out to build a marketplace, it just naturally formed around my original idea. It was very successful, so I built another one, then another one.

I learned lesson after lesson and made mistake after mistake. But as time wore on and technology got better, the building part got easier and easier. I didn’t have to build my own eCommerce engine anymore, then I stopped having to ask the customer for their location, and now I’m about to embark on a new 2SM that I should be able to get into MVP without having to write a single line of code.

So now that it’s become much easier to stand up a two-sided marketplace, it’s no shocker that 2SMs are springing up everywhere — transacting all kinds of niche services for all sorts of vendors across…