Feras Alhlou made $65 million but nearly lost it by launching a service nobody wanted. He spent six months and serious money on a new line, hired experts, and got nowhere. Competitors were failing at the same thing. The lesson: don't copy what others do without checking if the market actually needs it.
What was your biggest loss in business? This one time, this is after we were doing well, actually, we were well in 7 figures, we were profitable, we wanted to set up a new service line. So we hired someone who's an expert in that service line, we hired a marketing person, we set up a budget. And then for 6 months, we did not get any traction. We were following the competition in a way, we saw our competitors putting a lot of money into this one service. And we were trying to mimic what they were doing. And later we found out that the competitors were also losing money because nobody needed that service at the time. So following your competitors blindly is a bad thing. Yeah, I'm all for doing a lot of research and understanding the marketplace and understanding what the competitors are doing, but don't mimic your competitors blindly because they might be going into a dead end and you don't want to follow them. So learn from others, but set your own path.
