How You Can Build a Business That Lasts Forever
A personal brand isn’t what it used to be. Build a personal monopoly instead.
Warren Buffett loves moats. Peter Thiel loves monopolies. Moats and monopolies are qualities that make businesses difficult to compete with. The ultimate moat and monopoly is a brand.
Moats are differences between you and your competitors that can’t be replicated. These are things like brand, intellectual property, and people. Monopolies are complete (or near-complete) coverage of a market.
Coke can sell a cheap commodity at a premium price by slapping its brand on it. You can try creating New Cola, but consumers demand and pay up for Coke.
But, brands are hard to start. The best ones take decades to build like Coke and Apple or even span centuries like Harvard and Stanford.
You don’t magically get a moat or monopoly when you’re $1bn in revenue, it starts from day-1. Standing out from all the other people and products flooding our feeds lies within the intersection of your skills, knowledge, personality, and experiences.
How To Build One
So, how can you build a moat on day 1? Simple, make it personal. A personal monopoly is the unique intersection of your skills, knowledge, personality, and experiences that nobody else can compete with. It’s like a personal brand with a following — people who listen to you.
In the not so distant past, having a personal brand wasn’t all that great. You were reliant on middlemen like newspapers, TV networks, and radio stations for distribution. You were always at their beck and call with the possibility of having your contract renegotiated or kicked off the network altogether.
But with the advent of the internet: social networking, podcasting, vlogging, writing newsletters, etc. have kicked the traditional middle man to the curb.
Now Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube could kick you to the curb or TikTok could literally disappear tomorrow. You still have to capture your audience with something like an email list. You always want to “own” your connection with your audience.
Then it’s just you and your audience with nobody in the middle to mess with it.
Think about Sam Harris or Ben Thompson. Sam has had a subscription podcast since 2013, while Ben has had a subscription newsletter since 2014. Over the last 6 years, people have come to love their creative work and are willing to pay top dollar for it. They are Coke, Harvard, and Stanford in their respective niches of the internet.
There’s no middlemen, no TV network, or radio station. Just one person, a computer, and an internet connection that helps them make hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars per year. Forever, as long as they keep producing.
Fox, CNN, Spotify, and SiriusXM can’t create a knockoff and replace Sam Harris and Ben Thompson. Each has a unique voice. People love them and are loyal. You can’t replace them.
Sam Harris leverages his education in cognitive neuroscience to talk about meditation, belief, and the human mind with such authority. Ben Thompson built strategic products for companies like Apple and Microsoft before he started writing about tech strategy. Both Sam and Ben have an irreplaceable product — themselves.
Peter Thiel’s Definition
Peter Thiel defines a monopoly as the kind of company that’s so good at what it does that no other firm can offer a close substitute. That sounds awfully similar to the definition of a personal monopoly: the unique intersection of your skills, knowledge, personality, and experiences that nobody else can compete with.
The uniqueness of yourself, the content you create in your niche is your Personal Monopoly, and your audience is your moat. The internet enables any niche interest, as long as you’re the best at it, to scale out. The great news is that because every human is different, everyone is the best at something, being themselves.
You can escape competition through authenticity. Don’t imitate. Don’t copy. Be authentic and the less competition you’re going to have.
What’s interesting about Personal Monopoly moats is that they act as a universal insurance policy. When businesses fail, they go through a restructuring and either sell their assets and shut down, or go through a restructuring where the equity holders get f*cked and the debt gets refinanced.
The individual behind a Personal Monopoly could go bankrupt 5 times and still get to keep their audience. Personal Monopolies are practically untouchable. They are the Cokes, Apples, Harvards, and Stanfords of tomorrow.
Is it difficult?
Absolutely! But what’s interesting is that it’s essentially free with time and hard work.
Engineering a personal monopoly and building a moat has never been easier nor free before. This is incredible and completely unprecedented. The moat surrounding your personal monopoly will only get larger as the middlemen get more and more cut out (owned audiences newsletters vs rented audiences on YouTube and Instagram).
Suddenly, each person has different skill sets, different interests, different obsessions and it’s that diversity that becomes a Personal Monopoly. Everyone reading this can be creatively unique at their own thing. Before that didn’t matter but now with the internet, you can go out and find your audience and build your business and create a product or offer a service and build wealth and make people happy just by uniquely expressing yourself through the internet.
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