Shameless Cloning
You do not need original ideas to make money — copy proven models wholesale and don't change the working part.
Find a great proven business (Chipotle) or investor (Buffett) and copy it directly into a market gap where "there should be three but only one exists." Don't try to improve the core mechanism — differentiation arrives automatically because you are a different operator from the founder. Imitate before you iterate, iterate before you innovate.
- The change comes automatically because you are different from the founder — don't force it.
- List every product/service you already pay for; those are proven businesses worth cloning.
- Look for offering gaps: categories where one winner exists but the market could hold several.
Pabrai loved Chipotle's extreme-customization model and noted that 25 years on no one had cloned it, despite obvious offering gaps where "there should be three of them but only one exists." The clone instruction: keep the customization core identical, let your own differences emerge naturally.
Pabrai cloned Buffett's entire investing method ("everything is based on him") and pointed to Chipotle's customization model as the thing worth copying, not the fine-dining restaurant its founder actually wanted to build.