← The Foundr Podcast with Nathan Chan
The Foundr Podcast with Nathan Chan
592: (Solo) The Truth About Originality: What Great Founders Really Do
00:08:07
Most founders think they need a completely original idea to succeed. The truth? Great businesses are often built by borrowing brilliance — and putting your own spin on what already works. In this episode, I break down the concept of “good artists copy, great artists steal,” and show you how to apply it in your business. From how I grew Foundr’s Instagram to how I built and exited my ecommerce brand, Healthie, this approach has helped me create traction faster without reinventing the wheel.
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Transcript8 lines
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Hey, founder fam. I want to talk to you about something super exciting. We're officially partnered with Omnisend, the email marketing and SMS platform built specifically for e commerce founders. We've been recommending Omnisend to founder students.
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For a while now because it just works.
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Whether you're launching your first store or you're scaling to seven figures, it really helps you automate your marketing and get real results. Did you know on average, OMNISEND customers make $68 for every one, one dollar they spend, which is an insanely good return on investment. And because you're part of the founder community, you get 50% off your first three months with the code FOUNDER50. Just head to omnisend.com founder without the.
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E to get started.
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All right, now let's jump back into the show.
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B
Hey, guys, Nathan here. Welcome back to another founder to founder solo episode. These are bite sized episodes where I share all the things that I've been learning while building founder quick actionable takeaways that you can implement today to help you start or grow your brand. So today I wanna talk about this concept of good artists copy, great artists steal.
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C
Hear the stories, learn the proven methods and accelerate your growth and future through entrepreneurship. Welcome to the founder podcast with Nathan Chan.
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B
The concept is there's nothing wrong with getting inspiration from other companies, other brands, other influencers, other thought leaders on what's working right now and then drawing inspiration from it and then making it your own. You don't want to be a copycat because that's not fun, that's not cool and you're not going to get traction, but you can get inspiration from what's working, right? I love this concept. So you do not need to reinvent the wheel. It's not about what, it's about who, who has achieved what you want to achieve, what are they doing, how can you learn from them, how can you model? How can you draw inspiration and then make it your own? And that's how you can build a business faster. So this is a famous quote actually by Steve Jobs. Good artists copy, great artists steal. And there's a guy called Austin Kleon who wrote a whole book about this concept and I want to give you some examples on how powerful it's been for me and my journey. So a good example of this for me was when I was trying to grow the founder Instagram account. We had no marketing channels that were working. I was trying to build a magazine and I went on there and I was like, well, I don't know what content to post. And I was like, okay, well, what is Forbes doing? What is Fast Company doing? What is Fortune magazine doing? What are all these massive magazines doing? And then one thing I noticed, I was looking at their content, and then I was looking at what was getting the most likes and comments, and it ended up being these entrepreneurial quotes. I was like, okay, well, what would happen if I posted a few of these and I did a few other tricks and some other things that my friends share with me? And then like, our Instagram started to blow up and like, we started getting all these paid subscribers to the magazine. I'm like, wow, we are onto something. And that is the power of stealing, right? And I don't say you steal it directly and copy it. You gotta make it your own. I put my own little twist on it, right? So, so this is the thing that I find, right? Like, a lot of founders think they need to do everything their own way, and they need to have a completely original business idea that doesn't exist in the world. They, you know, want to build their marketing a hundred percent from scratch. They want to develop custom strategies that no one's done before. But the real truth is the fastest way to grow is to find someone who's already done what you're trying to do and just study the hell out of it or learn from them. You know, one of my mentors, Mitch, it's not what, but who, right? Who was doing it. And that's the key. So I want to also acknowledge that this is a polarizing opinion. Some people will say, you know, you shouldn't steal people's ideas, you shouldn't model it. But fundamentally, this is what a lot of companies do, and they just don't admit it, right? This is the thing, right? You, like, you look at Uber, right? And then you look at Lyft. Let's be honest here, Lyft copied Uber, right? And they are still an incredible company, incredible brand. They copied them, right? And they modeled what they were doing and they, you know, they, they stole exactly what they're doing and they made it their own. And I think that's the key takeaway here. You don't want to copy, you just want to model. And I know it's polarizing, but it's how you can unblock yourself and how you can move forward. So another example of this concept in action, of how I've used it, is for health. Ish, right? So my time marked water bottle brand, there were a lot of other water bottles out there. And I tell you what, we popularized the concept of having time marked indicators on the bottle. So it reminded you when to drink. So we know that you need to drink 2 liters of water a day at least. So there was two sides of the bottle. One side was the first half of the day, the second side was the other half of the day and we reminded you when to drink. Now we weren't the first company to come up with the idea of having time indicators on a water bottle. We just put popularized the concept. We made the design look really, really, really cool. We really showed and highlighted how powerful this concept was. And we made a fashionable accessory for people that are into health and fitness and wellbeing. And that's all we did, right? So we didn't come up with the idea from scratch. I didn't just somehow just go, okay, this is the business, this is what I'm going to do. I looked at all sorts of different business ideas, I looked at all sorts of products and then that's how we came up with the idea and we popularized, we made the design better. So what we did as well when it comes to the marketing for health, we looked at how the biggest direct to consumer e commerce brands were marketing their products. We looked at how they structured their product pages, we looked at what kind of content creators and influencers they were partnering with, how they communicated with customers through email. We took these proven elements and then made it our own, put our own little spin on it and then that's how we started to get traction. We didn't guess, we re engineered what worked and we borrowed brilliance. So the big takeaway here guys is don't be afraid to borrow from what's working. Don't be afraid to get inspiration from what's working. Canva was really just a simple version of Adobe Tools. In the beginning, Airbnb learned from Craigslist and focused really on just trust and UX UI design. Dollar shave Club didn't invent razors, they just repackaged the experience. So you don't need a revolutionary idea, you don't need some crazy marketing strategy. You just need to go out there and look at what's working. Remember, good artist copy, great artists steal. So the action item for this episode is look at the top three brands that are competitors, they don't have to be competitors or the top three brands that you admire. And then sign up to their email list, follow em on social media, look at their website, look at what they're doing and look at where you can draw inspiration and ask yourself what makes this experience work. How am I feeling as a customer and how can I apply this in my own way for my business? That's because great founders don't guess, they reverse engineer. So guys, if you're feeling stuck, I hope you found this valuable. And if you would like more help to learn from some of the greatest e commerce founders out there, we have an incredible all access membership platform called Founder plus where we help you start and grow your e commerce business. And with step by step blueprints, an amazing community, incredible live workshops and all the templates and tools that you need so you can sign up to founderplus. Com membership for a 14 day $1 trial. All right guys, I hope you enjoyed this episode and I'll see you on another one soon.