Ask IH: How do you reply to the question "What do you know that others don’t?"?

I'm not an investor, but I think of this one in terms of a specific, high-impact customer insight, which naturally influences how your build your product:

e.g. "Everyone is trying to replace the old tools, but these customers actually like using tools like excel, so we're building our workflow to fit around that stuff and change as little as possible."

Or a non-obvious and valuable market insight, which is often a result of having lots of personal experience in an industry:

e.g. "I worked on shipyard docks unloading fruit shipments for 10 years. Some of the stuff is ordered in advance, but roughly $X million worth is auctioned off each morning in a messy, slow, verbal auction, and another $X million worth goes unsold -- per city per day."

It also might be easier to think in terms of non-answers, which might be what the question is really about (i.e. trying to detect naivety instead of to detect brilliance). Non-answers include stuff like:

• We're smart/skilled (unless you're a top-of-your-field scientist and are building heavy tech)
• We're fast (unless you already have breakthrough traction)
• We're first (unless you've already hit scale and have monopoly effects)
• We're the only ones who see it (unless it's an insight like above)

Etc etc. If a funded fast-follower can throw a few million at the problem to replicate your supposed advantage, then it's not really an advantage at all. You're looking for an answer that money can't buy.

I mean, by definition, any rote answer someone tells you here is not something that only you know. The ideal answer to this question is something you actually know that we don't.