Many people believe that a business idea has to be unique, special or clever to succeed. In reality though, as Robert Reiss once remarked, most of the time succeeding in business is like playing Scrabble. You add your little bit on top of what already exists and get the points for all of it. You might even get a triple word score.

There's nothing wrong with taking what's already out there and just making it better. In many situations a product or service only needs to be a few percent better to be chosen by a customer almost every time.

The more experience I get the more I realize that too much cleverness can be worse than too little. Very thorough, detailed analysis and a precise, unique feature set provide a comforting illusion of certainty, but every entrepreneur will tell you it doesn't work that way. There's an old Yiddish proverb to that effect — "If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans."

The sooner we can swap conjecture for data the better, which usually means spending less time on up-front analysis, and getting something into people’s hands sooner so we can see what works and what doesn't.

You can do very well as a competent scrabble player in business. Often better than a chess grandmaster whose endless strategizing over-complicates everything.

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