What Are You The Best In The World At?
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What are you the best in the world at? I don’t mean top 1%. I mean the best.
It’s an exercise I like to go through with proptech founders, because there’s two huge advantages to answering this question BEFORE you start a business.
1) If you’re the best in the world at something, your unique strengths will naturally make it easier to build a market leading business around it.
2) Investors LOVE to see when founders understand their unique advantages and incorporate it into their company strategy. Because it sends a clear message: “I was put on this planet to do this one thing that I’m better at than everyone else.”
How I Figured Out What I’m The Best In The World At
It took me almost 2 decades to answer this question. And you have to be confident to the point of arrogance in this exercise.
I started by answering a variation on the question: What unique experience do I have that I can confidently say nobody else on the planet has? You’ll realize that the more crazy combinations of experiences you put together, the more likely it is that you’re the only one in the world who has that set of experiences.
For me, I’m the only person in the world who’s run a tennis ecommerce site while side hustling as a strategy consultant, and then went on to work on over $100mm in NYC real estate developments loaded with proptech.
So it follows that if I were to start some kind of business that had a little e-commerce DNA, some strategy consulting, my real estate expertise, and my proptech expertise, I’d probably be THE BEST in the world at running it.
That business is The Proptech Scout.
OMG Another Proptech Consultant Plays Violin?!
But another part of the exercise is to minimize the number of qualifiers you need before you can confidently say you’re the best in the world at it. Because if you add too many qualifiers, there’s no market for your business.
One of those qualifiers is playing violin. While adding that to my list would make my experience even more distinct, it doesn’t actually add anything to my business or value prop. So I never mentioned it in professional settings.. until now.
Because last week I met with Vladimir Drogan, CEO of Roonyx.Tech (another proptech consultant), and we were discussing our unique value props. Later in the conversation he mentioned that he broke his pinky and has trouble playing violin. My jaw dropped. What are the chances that two proptech consultants play violin?
So we got together for a jam session and recorded clips of it. We’re leveraging our uniqueness to market our businesses in this post. Enjoy these clips of Bach’s Double Violin Concerto movements 1 and 2.
Derek is the founder of The Proptech Scout, as well as an NYC landlord and real estate developer. In a former career, he bootstrapped and exited an e-commerce business while side hustling as a strategy consultant.
