“The ever impressive, the long contained, the often imitated, but never duplicated, Genie of the Lamp.” — Genie, Aladdin (1992)
A founder I like sent me a screenshot at eleven on a Tuesday night. A brand six months old. A revenue number that shouldn’t be possible yet. A retention rate that made me read it twice.
My first thought was not congratulations. My first thought was, I could build that in a weekend. Better name. More of this, less of that. Better in every way that doesn’t matter.
I have the kind of attention that sorts the world into two piles, fascinating and doesn’t exist. It makes you fast at noticing and useless at sitting with a spreadsheet that has stopped surprising you. Good at starts, bad at middles.
Envy is what happens when the middle gets boring and someone else’s start is in your feed.
It never announces itself as envy. It arrives dressed as market intelligence. Your brain does not say I want that. It says the category is validated. It says we could do it cleaner, without the legacy decisions they’re stuck with. Envy masquerades as strategy, and the disguise is good enough that your team will nod along.
“Hmm, clever. I could make it better.” That is the sound of talking yourself into it. The honest version is, I wish I’d thought of that.
For most of my career that impulse was survivable because it was slow. Wanting someone else’s idea and shipping a version of it were separated by a formulator who wouldn’t call back, a co-packer with a twelve-week minimum, a developer who stopped answering, a year of your life. Envy died of exhaustion somewhere around month three.
The friction was not an obstacle. The friction was protection.
That protection is gone. I can have the name, the logo, the site, the copy, the supplier list and the ad variants by dinner, and most of it will be good enough. So can you. So can the eleven other people who saw that screenshot. Wanting it and shipping it used to be quarters apart. It’s a weekend now.
Which means the only thing between a founder and the worst decision of their year is judgment.
In 2011 I watched Groupon become the fastest growing company anyone had seen, and it made complete sense to me. Local deals, for women, the audience we already had at POPSUGAR. I could argue it in one sentence, so I did, to anyone who would sit still.
We built it. We hired against it. We ran it for two years and quietly stopped.
We had the audience. We had the sales team. What we never had was a reason.
You can copy what someone built. You can’t copy why they built it.
The best products I know are answers to questions their founders could not stop asking. Not a market gap. A grievance.
Grüns exists because Chad was disgusted by what taking care of yourself required. Eight pills and a powder that tasted like a lawn.1
I get the Grüns of something every week. Grüns for energy. Grüns for longevity, for sleep, for menopause, for dogs. Some of them will work, because distribution wins and price wins and timing wins. They saw a number and went looking for a grievance.
The format can be borrowed. Ultra sells a nicotine-free pouch, which is Zyn’s format exactly.2 But the grievance came first. Eric wanted the ritual without the nicotine, exactly what I wanted as a daily Zyn user who hated what came with it. The pouch was just the shape the answer took. More than half his customers have never used a pouch at all.
I hear the derivative in a pitch about ninety seconds in. The founder describes the market beautifully. Growth rate, white space, competitive set. What they can’t describe is the moment. There wasn’t one.
There was a jolt, the same one I felt looking at that screenshot, and they mistook it for conviction.
And acting on that jolt gets cheaper every quarter. The clone gets faster, prettier, closer to the original than it has any right to be. None of that helps at the first hard fork, when the original stops telling you what to do and you have to know why you built it.
So I’ve stopped treating envy as a signal to act and started treating it as a signal to look. What you covet tells you what you value, which tells you where your own attention has been starving.
That screenshot wasn’t telling me to build a competitor. It was telling me I’d let something in my own work get boring, and that I’d been avoiding it.
The weekend is free. The two years after it are not. And if you’re building one right now because you saw the number, you already know it. The tools won’t stop you. Your team will nod. Your deck will look immaculate. Two years from now you’ll be explaining to your investors why the original still wins, and the honest answer will be that it was never yours to want.
The genie will build anything you ask for. He still can’t tell you what to want.
Grüns is a Sugar Capital portfolio company, acquired by Unilever. Unilever Ventures is a limited partner in Sugar Capital Fund III.
Ultra is a Sugar Capital portfolio company.
"Envy is what happens when the middle gets boring and someone else’s start is in your feed."
"You can copy what someone built. You can’t copy why they built it."
Great truths. Great piece. Thanks!
This perfectly encapsulates a feeling I experience at least once a week. I don't think I've ever seen someone put it down on paper.