How to Build What Others Can’t Copy

What Spotify, Airbnb and others got right (and you can too).

Previously on Giuseppe’s Glimpse: In the last episode, we looked at how great experiences raise expectations across industries — and why your real competition is every best experience your customers have ever had. Missed it? Catch up here! ✨

Buongiorno everyone! 👋

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been reflecting on how quickly things start to feel… ordinary.

A new product launches. A clever idea catches attention. A company breaks through with something fresh. And then, almost immediately, others follow. Variations pop up. Competitors adjust. The unique becomes standard. The original becomes template. 📉

That’s not necessarily bad. It’s how markets work. But it does raise an important question:

How do you stay ahead in a market full of lookalikes? 🤔

Because every so often, you encounter companies — or people — that manage to stay different. Not because they have something others don’t, but because they combine what they have in a way no one else can easily replicate.

That’s where true competitive advantage lives. And that’s what I want to explore today.

Same ingredients, different recipe.

Look at some of the companies we admire most. 🌟

Spotify didn’t invent music. Airbnb didn’t invent hospitality. Shopify didn’t invent retail.

What they did was assemble things that already existed — technology, customer insights, design, data, ecosystems — into something that hadn’t been arranged that way before. 🔀

Not because they had access to secret resources, but because they found combinations others didn’t see.

This is where real differentiation happens: not in the ingredients, but in the recipe. 🧑‍🍳

Most companies today have access to similar tools: cloud infrastructure, AI models, global talent, APIs, capital. What makes a business hard to copy isn’t owning better tools, but composing them into something others can’t easily replicate.

Why copying is easy — and useless

It’s natural to look sideways at competitors. 👀

We track who’s doing what. We borrow ideas. We try to "close gaps."

But imitation, by definition, leaves you one step behind.

By the time you copy a feature, your competitor has likely moved on. The best you can hope for is parity. The worst is irrelevance. 🚫

Real advantage doesn’t come from copying what’s visible. It comes from combining what’s not so easily observed: your particular mix of knowledge, relationships, cultural DNA, operational habits, customer insights, and hard-won experience.

The more you copy others, the more you flatten your own edge. The more you combine your unique assets, the more distinct — and defensible — you become. ⚔️

How to build something that can’t be copy-pasted

The strongest advantages don’t scale easily across companies, because they depend on how the parts fit together, not on any one piece. 🧩

So where do you start? Three questions help guide the work:

1. What do you see more clearly than others?
   Your deep customer understanding? Your market nuances? Your cultural strengths? Your trusted relationships? Often, your most valuable assets aren’t obvious from the outside. 🔎

2. Where can you borrow without becoming generic?
   APIs, platforms, freelancers, and partners can speed you up — but only if you integrate them into your system with intention, not dependence. ⚡

3. What holds it all together?
   The real moat is often in how people, processes, technology, and values interact. A system works because of how it's been assembled, not because of any single blockbuster asset. ⚙️

When you design around these layers, you create something that’s hard to explain, harder to copy, and even harder to replace.

This applies to you, too

This logic isn’t just for companies — it applies to individuals as well. 👤

AI can write, code, analyze, and optimize at speeds we can’t match. But it can’t replicate your unique collection of experiences, relationships, perspectives, and intuition.

Your edge isn’t having more skills than others. Your edge is the way your skills, your story, your point of view, and your network combine into something no one else brings to the table. ✨

Ask yourself:

What mix do I bring that’s hard to find anywhere else?

How can I deliberately shape that mix into something valuable — and difficult to copy? 🔐

In the end, the real advantage is when what you’ve built fits you so well, it simply doesn’t fit anyone else.

Stay curious! 🙌

-gs

P.S. Special thanks to Paolo De Cesare, Chairman of Grandi Stazioni Retail, for the food for thought that inspired this edition. 🙏

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