Many years ago while I was a student, I asked a student entrepreneur about how he was able to get his designs looking so good that he was arguably the best design house in school.
He let me in on a secret: his designs were not original but a mash-up of borrowed elements. According to him, “many people want to be better than Apple when they are yet to meet Apple’s standards, so they fail”.
A decade after, this truism by Ope Awo who would later go on to found Jobberman, a leading job site in the country, still rings true.
I do not attribute even my most original ideas to the eureka moment itself.
They have been a synthesis of my experiences, what I have seen, heard about and borrowed experiences gleaned from mentors, books and informational videos.
When I am tempted to feel guilty about repurposing other people’s material, I remember that some of the hottest words in industry such as “best practices”, “knowledge sharing”, “benchmarking”, “localization” and “reverse engineering” essentially mean copying.
Copying the best in your field is not only allowed (within legal limits), it is actually an open secret for leapfrogging innovation as a company, an individual or a nation.
At Gradely, one of our core aspirations is to be a world-class company which means we continuously benchmark our product and culture with the very best not only in the country but in the world.
However unique our business model of unbundling school instruction, learning resources and the home tutor, it has parallels in other successful models, products and companies globally. But it’s a mistake to think that copying is easy – it is not.
Despite the fact that Jumia is a copycat e-commerce model from the West, we have seen them through tears, blood, sweat (with some helping of a pile of cash) build Africa’s first $1 billion dollar startup while many of their competitors faltered, sometimes for being too original.
“Good Artists Copy, Great artistes Steal”
Finding the right idea to copy is hard work especially in an age characterized by information explosion. It feels like you can get all their life advice from Twitter alone.
But internalizing an idea, that is the toughest work of all. You have to deconstruct it, find elements you like and can incorporate, and then you take it further and do something new with it.
For example, I know that Jeff Bezos lets his employees do a long memo in prose form before every meeting but when I tried it in my company, it didn’t work. So we evolved to a system of one-page Powerpoint dashboard for each unit which we use today.
Startups can be more self-aware and data-driven about how much they compare with the best locally and internationally. When you choose a standard high enough, you find that you are chasing hard behind it for a while.
However, this chase will transform you. Gradely’s story of its launch as a homework tool for schools in early September 2019 and how it has evolved 10 months after to a full-suite personalized educational content offering for parents and a full-featured LMS for schools is a case study on whether Lean Startup methodology really works in Nigeria.
We have learned the huge gulf between an MVP and an actual workable, robust-enough product that can be rolled out to the mass market.
If we knew the gulf would be so large, maybe we would have spent more time building the product first. But even that is debatable given how much user feedback has shaped what we have now.
In conclusion, the kernel of this idea is not only applicable to us as individuals or to our high-growth startups but also to our nation-state.
We can do a better job of copying as a nation, whether it’s finding the right ways to implement COVID-19 lockdown easing policies or just governance of our critical institutions in general.
Government officials who travel a lot cannot say that they do not know how to replicate good roads.
Seeing so many potholes is a pet peeve of mine and I know that one quick google search reveals how self-healing asphalt used to build roads can last up to three or more decades; and even though they cost more upfront, they save us money over time.
Disruptive ASUU strikes that cost students years of education have cures that have been applied to success in many other places, including India’s IITs.
To actively ignore innovation is a mentally stressful thing to do for an enlightened person. Whether as a people or as companies we are not reverse engineering enough and therefore, we are not successful enough.
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