Originality is overrated. Obsession isn't. [#68]

“Every idea is either too difficult, too small or too crowded. There isn’t a single exception.” – Patrick de Castro Neuhaus

Entrepreneurship has this wonderful allure: 

• “Build your own business”
• “Live on your own terms” 
• “Make more money than you ever could in your full-time job”
• “Sell your company, ride off into the sunset”

All of this is true – in theory, building a startup can be a wonderful vehicle to achieve all that. It would indeed be an extraordinary life. 

In order to live that extraordinary life, you need to do extraordinary things. 

Just claiming you’ll “start a business” won’t cut it. 

Sometimes, people ask me what I think of their startup idea. They’ve discovered a creative, new, unique angle to an existing product. 

“Nobody has ever done this before.” 

If nobody has ever done it before, then the two most likely explanations are: (a) there isn’t a market for it, or (b) it’s impossible to build. If it’s possible to build and there is a market, rest assured, someone else is already doing it. 

Many aspiring entrepreneurs think like an artist: doing something unique, something new. What makes artists great is originality, innovation, imagination, creativity. 

Entrepreneurship has nothing to do with artistic creativity. It’s about understanding an opportunity and exploring it better than anybody else. 

It doesn’t matter whether your idea is unique – usually, a company doing this exact same thing is just a Google search away. It’s an execution game. 

And that’s beautiful. 

Because it liberates you from the daunting search for an “idea”. 

All the sudden, you don’t need to find something that nobody has ever done before. 

Instead, you identify a problem and just solve it better than everybody else. 

After university, I joined two friends of mine as late co-founder for their startup, Linguedo. The business? 

Bringing nurses from abroad to Germany and teaching them German. 

What a f**king innovative business model.

There are literally hundreds, if not thousands of agencies out there who do the exact same thing. The most typical response to me cold calling a hospital would be “get the f**k outta here, you’re the 7th person to call about this today”. 

And yet, we managed to sign some of Germany’s most renowned hospitals, have at this point placed >400 nurses and other medical workers at these hospitals, and consistently remained profitable. 

How did we do it? We executed better than anybody else. 

You see, the existing market had two problems: 

[1] Language Skills

“Just because it says “B2” on the certificate, doesn’t mean the candidate actually speaks German at a B2 level.” This was a common complaint from hiring managers at hospitals. 

Understandable. Most agencies would just send their candidates to language schools (such as the Goethe Institut), which is fine if you just want to pass an exam. 

But the classroom model of language learning doesn’t prepare you for the real world. It teaches you how to read and write a language, maybe even makes you good at listening comprehension. But speaking? Impossible to get a lot of reps of speaking in a classroom with 20 others. 

So these students leave the classroom, can read well, write letters, and pass grammar exercises. 

All of these skills are fairly useless in a hospital setting, where it’s all about spoken communication. 

Matthias, my co-founder, had set out before to build a completely different model of language learning. We used this course to teach how to speak well, and did the entire language course in-house.

Which also meant that at some point, more than 50% of our payroll was going towards language teaching. Which is insane for a recruiting company. 

But the outcome was that every single hospital we placed people at wanted to work with us again. 

This is why the company is called Linguedo: creating opportunities through language and education. 

And then, there was execution. 

[2] Professionalism 

The problem in German hospitals is immense: every hospital I know is constantly hiring for new nurses. It’s one of the most sought-after professions in Germany. 

So it’s only natural that a lot of people think: “huh, I know a few nurses in Poland, maybe I can just send them to a language school and help them find a job in Germany”.

Recruiting seems like an easy business model: you connect the right people to the right job, and charge a ton of money. 

That’s precisely how 90% of the agencies in the market operate: usually a few people doing the bare minimum, leading to frustration with both the hospitals and the people that they brought to Germany. 

At Linguedo, we focus on what’s right for the human – even if that’s a bad business decision. Like: 

• Throwing in a few extra modules (that we paid for) in the Bavarian dialect for candidates going to a rural hospital in Bavaria, where nobody speaks accent-free German
• Letting a candidate participate for 15 months (normally, candidates take 8 months), even though every month meant we were losing money – but in her case, it was the morally right thing to do
• Dropping everything and helping a candidate carrying up her fridge when she was moving into her apartment 
• Negotiating with the German border police during COVID to convince them our candidates can come into the country to man additional ICU beds (while having set up an entire quarantine setup in an abandoned hospital building beforehand, together with the hospital they were going to work at)

Most agencies wouldn’t go this far. 

We did. Because in a crowded market, executing better than anyone else is the way to stand out. 

Entrepreneurship is about understanding an opportunity and exploring it better than anyone else. 

For this to work, you need to go deep, but you also need to be broad. 

Domain expertise can be dangerous: you might be able to see a lot of problems, but the best solution may be outside of that domain. So don’t be afraid to dive into something new – your knowledge from other endeavors will come in handy. 

(This is why I believe generalists make the best founders.) 

Often, the truly differentiating aspects of a business lie adjacent to the current models (as in Linguedo’s case, where our “language hacking” skills made the difference in medical recruiting). 

Most of all, you need to fall in love with the problem. Exploring something better than anyone else will be tough if you don’t like the problem you’re solving. Building a great company takes time and consistent effort. Hard to put that forward if you are lukewarm about your problem. 

“You achieve extraordinary things by doing ordinary things for an extraordinary amount of time”. – Shane Parrish

In summary: 

1. Find a problem that you enjoy solving
2. Find different angles for solving it from your past experience in adjacent professions
3. Work on it for a long amount of time 

And boom – you have a business.  

Question for you to reflect on: 

What’s a problem that you’d be passionate about solving? What keeps you from building a business around it? 

That's it.

Great day to have a day today.

LFG. 🔥

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