Hey {{first_name}},
On my dog walk this morning, I had Diary of a CEO on.
Chris Koerner was the guest.
The “king of side hustles”.
What stuck with me was not the 80+ businesses he’s started.
It was how boring his advice really is.
In a good way.
He said that when he has an idea for a business, and he finds someone already doing it…
He doesn’t get disheartened and give up.
He sees it as proof of concept and that a market exists.
Then he uses that to get insights.
He goes to the Wayback Machine to look at how their website has evolved
He then cross-references this using SimilarWeb to see how traffic changed when the changes were made.
His hypothesis…
If the business is still alive and growing, he assumes the current version is the stress-tested one.
Then he said something like:
“I do not need to be different. I just need to do what already works, then tweak it over time.”
If your competitor has already paid money and spent time finding out what does and what does not work.
They have paid for the mistakes.
And learnt their lessons.
But here is the crucial bit in all of this.
This is still just a hypothesis.
It’s not a fact.
It’s not guaranteed to work for you.
It’s based on their site, their offers, their flows…
They’re all the output of years of their testing, failures and context you don’t see.
Use competitors’ changes as shortcuts for things that could work.
You need to turn those ideas into your own clear hypotheses.
Then you need to test them in a structured way.
That’s how you build a roadmap that isn’t “let’s just copy what they’re doing”.
Chat soon,
Peter
P.S. If you missed it yesterday, here’s a link to The 2026 Shopify Optimisation Planner.