There is so much good business advice floating in the internet soup that I rarely bother to add my rubbish to the heap. But! If I'm picking my top-3 finalists for "most influential ideas" that have shaped my 15 years of running several businesses, one is "play games with an unfair advantage."


Others articulate what "play games with an unfair advantage" means better than I would, so if this is an unfamiliar idea to you, plz Google it. All I have to add to the conversation is an example case.


In 2007, I started an online marketplace business that rose above the usual noise because we offered a lot of functionality nobody else did, and that mixed very favorably with the anti-eBay zeitgeist of the era (yay good timing). The unfair advantage that business had was that we could launch novel ecommerce ideas that eBay or Amazon couldn't or wouldn't keep up with (example 1, example 2, example 3). But ecommerce is not a game that's won by having the best tech. Great tech for a marketplace can be a 2x or 3x net improvement over the giants, but it can't be 10x. True marketplace dominance is achieved by pursuing scale by raising enough hundreds of millions to buy advertising/market share (alternate path).




It is incumbent on each person to have the self-awareness to figure out the thing of value that makes them unique. Same for a business. Most businesses are a collection of people with similar goals, and the awareness to figure out what they can do better than the customer's existing options.


The collection of people that make up Alloy.dev do not-one-but-three! things better than the average bear: 1) Listen to customers 2) Listen to each other and 3) Improve functionality at speed.


Still, it's not a long-term unfair advantage to work in a domain the members are ambivalent about. The other half of "long-term unfair advantage" is to notice the topics persistently interesting to you. Hopefully you're drawn to something weirder than crypto/fashion, because the weirder the interest, the greater the opportunity to make progress.


For almost 10 years of owning my business, I failed to play games where we had an unfair advantage. It still ended up a positive experience, but if we could have more quickly recognized what our specific advantage was, and where our attention naturally bent toward, we might have a lot bigger (and more tech-debt ridden!) company by now.