The Epsilon Method

The big downside of making unoriginal products is that you can only gain traction by relentless marketing. And that&#x27;s how you end up A&#x2F;B testing twitter thread titles like this guy. But who wants to waste their time writing clickbait insight-porn twitter threads? (Or, excuse me, struggle porn).<p>This is all so depressing.

&quot;In there I found Nat Eliason’s fantastic headline: No More “Struggle Porn” which gave me the idea to title my essay No More “Insight Porn”. In a final step, I went through my essay and replaced “pseudo-actionable advice” everywhere with “insight porn” so the new headline would make sense. Note that I didn’t steal Nat’s headline or anything. I got inspired by it and tailored to my own needs. This is what the Epsilon Method is all about, not blatantly copying other people’s work.&quot;<p>Feels like the epsilon method is to copy but an infinitesimally small amount short of blatant copying.

FTA:<p>&gt; Here, we simply copy an existing and functioning machine and then focus on modifying one or maybe two of the moving parts.<p>Here &quot;machine&quot; is understood to be &quot;business model&quot;.<p>This is in response to &quot;moonshot&quot; (or &quot;unicorn&quot;?) ideas&#x2F;business models:<p>&gt; That’s the problem with zero to one ideas. You have to be lucky enough to find a functioning combination before you run out of time and money.

TL:DR: Your safest bet starting a new business is providing an incremental improvement to an existing good or service.<p>&gt;The idea is to copy something that’s clearly working with some small but sufficiently significant changes.<p>&gt;Instead of trying to go from zero to one, we’re going from one to one plus epsilon, where epsilon represents our small change.