Ideas · 6 min read

What if you did the opposite? The contrarian's guide to business model thinking

Here is a game I play whenever someone shows me a business model. I look at the core assumption — the thing the whole thing is built on — and I ask: what would the business look like if that assumption were wrong?

Not wrong in a catastrophic way. Wrong in an interesting way. What if you charged customers instead of offering it free? What if you offered it free instead of charging? What if the customer was also the product? What if the product was also the distribution?

Most industries run on inherited assumptions. Things are done a certain way not because that way is optimal but because that is how they have always been done and nobody has stopped to ask why. The assumptions become invisible. They stop being choices and start being facts.

The contrarian move is to make them visible again. To treat every industry norm as a question rather than a given. Not to be contrarian for its own sake — that is just posturing — but because the interesting business opportunities almost always live in the gap between how things are done and how they could be done.

Airbnb asked: what if the accommodation was also a community? Uber asked: what if every car was a taxi? Substack asked: what if the writer kept the relationship with the reader instead of the publication? Each of these is a simple inversion of an industry assumption that everyone else had stopped seeing.

The exercise is this: write down the five core assumptions of your industry. The things everyone does. The things nobody questions. Then invert each one and ask what a business built on that inversion would look like.

Most of the inversions will be terrible. That is fine — terrible ideas are part of the process. But one of them, maybe two, will have something interesting in it. A direction. A question worth pursuing.

I am not saying every business should be contrarian. Most good businesses are built on execution, not inversion. But if you are stuck, if you are competing in a crowded space and can't find your angle, the opposite is always worth a look.

What does everyone in your industry do? Now ask: what if you did the opposite?