A few weeks ago I had one of those particularly interesting days – I happened across a site built by a much larger company that I’m familiar with that appears to be attempting to copy a large piece of what we’re doing at Whimseybox. When this happens, and it’s happened to us before although this one takes the cake, it kind of steals my breath away for a second. Then I get incredulous, then kind of angry and eventually a little amused (so! much! irony! in proclaiming the importance of creativity while exhibiting none whatsoever!)… and then I move on. My goal is to try to set a new course record for speed every time something like this happens, because any time spent worrying about what somebody else is doing is time not spent focused on what we’re doing. And we’re doing awesome stuff that deserves and requires all of our attention.
As I was thinking about this I kept coming back to a talk by Simon Sinek that I rewatched a few weeks ago called How Great Leaders Inspire Action. The idea of the talk is that successful people and businesses are driven by why they do what they do, which then impacts how they do it, and then lastly what they do. He repeats a few times “people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.” And while it’s relatively easy to copy an idea or a webpage design, I don’t think why is copyable. Even if I tell you what I believe (and I do right here on this blog regularly), that does not make them your beliefs. You may even agree, but you can’t wholesale adopt someone else’s beliefs and fully understand them, and I think that trickles down and shows up in the how and the whatyou do.
We believe that craft is not just for ‘girl scouts and grandmas’, it’s for everyone.
We believe that content, commerce and community are converging online and changing the way people discover, shop and connect.
We believe that we are in the middle of a creative renaissance of makers and crafters.
We believe that we are part of this community of makers.
We believe that we are uniquely positioned to build a technology business that contributes to the community, celebrates the work of its members, helps it grow and creates lasting change in the industry.
This is why we work so hard everyday, and this is how we decide what to work on.
I don’t know what the other company believes, but if I had to guess it starts with something like “We believe there’s money to be made here.” And they might be right (I hope they are), but if that’s the why at the core then I’m certain we’ll always be fundamentally different and it doesn’t matter how many of our ideas or designs they liberally take inspiration from.
The joy and exhilaration of working at a startup is that things move quickly, and there’s often a lot more in the works behind the scenes than what shows up online on a given day so it’s hard to keep up just by watching someone else. Many of the decisions we made while building the Whimseybox site were in preparation for launching Influencer. And today we’re making decisions that are setting us up for the next things, the ones we’re not ready to talk about yet.
Btw, you’ve heard about Influencer, right? I’ve written about it kind of a lot :) We’re empowering creative publishers everywhere to find a new way to monetize their DIY content and make it easy for their readers to find + buy supplies online. And we’re doing it better than anyone else can, because we’re building it in partnership with hundreds of our fellow creatives, many of whom we’ve gotten to know over the past 3 years and are happy to call our friends. It’s really exciting and there’s a lot going on, so I’m going to get back to work now.
A version of this post was originally published on Dismount Creative.
