I remember when my brother started his shea butter exportation business and how he started making profit from it and slowly people started copying what he was doing without even asking him of how he became profitable or the strategy behind it, safe to say that their busniness failed. The copycat entrepreneurship is I believe a staple of our social fabric. For instance you can start selling pastries today, waking up at 4:00 AM to grind the corn, straining the silk, and sitting by the roadside in the morning dew and your neighbors will pass you by without a second glance. To them, you are just another person struggling to get by, but the moment that business yields a tangible reward, like a new car or a fresh coat of paint on your house, the narrative shifts. Suddenly, pastries isn't just a breakfast staple, it's a "gold mine." Within two weeks, the street is lined with kiosks selling the same thing, as everyone rushes to replicate your result without ever understanding your process.
And in another context I remember as story I read somewhere about the cautionary tale of "Mr. Chop One, Chop Two". He was the local success story, the man whose chin-chin(a local delicacy) was supposedly so profitable it funded a bike and a foundation for a house. He became the "proof" the villagers needed to believe that small-scale snacks were the path to wealth. They didn't ask about his secret recipe or his distribution network, they only looked at his assets. One day, a woman from the village was going to the market when thieves attacked her. They took her money and tried to escape on their bike, but the woman who was quite strong grabbed the bike, held one of them from behind, and started shouting, ‘Thief! Thief!’ Some guys that were nearby rushed out, caught the men, and unmasked them, only to discover it was Mr. Chop One, Chop Two. When he was unmasked as a highway robber, the village didn't just lose a businessman; they lost a mirage. They realized that the "cash flow" they tried to mimic was actually blood money.
This story highlights a profound truth about the business landscape, there is almost always a "secret" behind rapid, unexplained success, sometimes it’s a secret of extreme discipline and hidden grit, and other times, it’s far more sinister. In hindsight the thing is that most people fear risk more than they fear failure. They are paralyzed by uncertainty, waiting for someone else to pave the road and prove it’s safe. They wait for proof before they find courage, by the time the proof is visible, is when the bicycle is bought or the house is built the market is already reaching a saturation point.
Those who rush in late aren't entrepreneurs, they are chasers of shadows. They enter the fray only to find that the profit margins are slim and the work is harder than it looked from the outside. To an extent you can relate this to the crypto world and maybe even Hive ecosystem, I still feel it has a lot of potential. But then again a thing to note is that most successful business were not original ideas, they cloned the ideas and templates from others. The thing is to innovate and add things to a template that works. As they say imitation is the best form of flattery!!
