Roger Bannister

Research like writing a song: steal patterns, then deconstruct

Sam's research method: treat finding businesses like songwriting by spotting patterns and stealing interesting riffs, then running anything that catches his eye through SimilarWeb, Ahrefs, Wikipedia, annual reports and app-store reviews to fully deconstruct how it works. His logic mirrors the 4-minute mile: things get easier to do once you know they're possible.

“it's my theory that the The reason why no one broke the 4-minute mile, and then in the '60s, I think it was, Roger Bannister broke the 4-minute mile and 5 other people did it that year, is it's a lot easier to accomplish things when you know what's possible. So my logic is whenever I see anything that catches my eye, I put it in SimilarWeb, I put it in Ahrefs, which is a software for search analytics. I look at the reviews on iTunes and I try to figure out how the business works because then I want to know what's possible.”

Steal thisRun every interesting business through SimilarWeb, Ahrefs, Wikipedia, annual reports and app-store reviews to reverse-engineer how it actually works.