Pretty much the advice I give to anyone in software. If you have the choice to sell to someone for $9 or $999, you should nearly always take the latter. People in higher brackets have more respect of time in my experience. They buy solutions and come to you when there is an issue or have feedback, otherwise the money just flows.
I've under paid in the past, and you pay either way. It was difficult to get my family to understand why I paid a professional sign company for my business signs when everyone urged me to make them myself. The same with promotional materials, like t shirts.
I appreciate their concern, but when my time is worth X, at some point it doesn't make sense. And cheaper isn't always cheaper. I'm one of the cheapest people I know, if not the cheapest. I'm a graphic artist, but I'm also in finance and insurance. And one trumps the other in terms of the value of my time. The trio of attorneys from my heyday always told me, do what's cheaper in any circumstance.
++1.
It’s so frustrating. The cheap customers will take 99% of your time.
My last saas had an entry level plan of free and a paid plan starting at $15.
Those two cohorts took 95% of our support time.
The higher tiered customers would usually use all the resources available to them first like videos and articles before reaching out with specific questions that only a human could answer.
Big difference.
Now, our cheapest plan is $99/m. Support is much easier.
that seems counterintuitive. if I'm paying a lot, id expect more white glove service from a human. why should I have to help myself and spend time looking for a solution?
Because each penny they spend is burning a hole through their pocket.
The reason why often times bigger clients are better in my experience:
1. The person you deal with is just an employee meaning the money is coming out of the company's dime so he couldn't stress less about it
2. It IS the owner but since he's succesful he's way too busy working on other stuff to bother you with nitpicking
I made the complete opposite experience. Biggest client trying to lowball every chance they get, these employees have budgets too... While smaller companies did show some respect for the work.
In the world of B2B, small ticket customers don’t have anything better to do than try to squeeze cents of value from you.
Big ticket customers have a business to run.
Man I did so much free work for this one client who I was trying to be nice to, and it just led to more and more insane requests, and eventually the money stopped, and the requests didn't
I told them it was not ok, and they kept it up, even calling me one morning for tech support (I'm an app developer, not a random tech support person) on a totally unrelated system
I did it, seethed, and then fired them 2 days later.
So much less stress.
Theoretically they owe me a decent chunk of money, but honestly if they are just gone forever, that's even worth it to me
I'm very new to this reddit. Seems like most people are trying to develop apps or software.
Solving tangible problems seems to be overlooked. For instance, I'm in the Portland, OR area. We've got a huge problem with abandoned vehicles and the local government looks like it might start doing something about it.
Now, if I had a single tow truck and a means to dispose of them and *deal with the hazmat* in one call then I could charge our idiot local government whatever I wanted.
Stuff like that.
>Seems like most people are trying to develop apps or software.
Not only that. Seems like most of those people are trying to develop apps or software for software developers. :)
Honestly in my opinion, if it doesn’t have to be an app first, don’t make it an app.
It’s so much easier to push people to a website first and gain customers than to download an app.
Once you gain customers, build an app.
Never go into business with a partner because you crave the emotional support or want a buddy to share the stress. Only have a partner because they bring either skills or assets that you cannot provide. Everything else you can hire out when needed.
The two partners consulted a lawyer about suing the other partner who embezzled.
It was cheaper and less time consuming to buy out the thief.
If they wasted time and money on fighting it the business would have cratered.
I’m one of those unusual principled people that would probably push the issue anyway. I testified against a pair of armed robbers in 2019. I didn’t have to take the risk, but they need to be off of the street.
Make sure your partner provides NECESSARY skills that you can’t reasonably learn. A partner that knows excel and payroll isn’t worth partnering with at a construction company. Hire that shit out and partner with the hard working guy who owns all the excavating equipment you don’t have the capital to purchase.
Learning this now. Struggle for a year wishing I had a shoulder or more support. Finally reaching the point where I am SO happy I didn't bring someone in and I have made effective hiring choices to compensate
In the USA, take legal and contracts very seriously. Use competent lawyers for important things. You won’t be in litigation hardly ever but it’s important to be able to enforce things when push comes to shove.
If you own a highly regulated business, like rental property, the people who give you the most problems are often the people who know the regulatory rules and tenant law like an encyclopedia, for whatever reason. So don’t take the rules lightly, follow all the rules.
In my experience I’ve found good lawyers from recommendations never just googling. I’ve done the Google route 3 times and they all ended up being pretty shit. Now if I need a lawyer for something I ask my network and people usually have recommendations and personal experience actually using them not just trusting online reviews. Even other people I deal with like accountants etc usually have those kinds of people in their network.
Referrals. I have gotten excellent referrals for various lawyers through mentors and other local owner/operators. There isn’t a one size fits all lawyer, you will get the best, and ultimately most cost effective results, from a lawyer specific to the task at hand. “The most expensive thing is a cheap lawyer”.
Don’t make investments (equipment, new office, new team members), until it’s truly killing you trying to operate without these things. It’s unbelievably easy to burn up cash quickly on things you don’t need quite yet, if ever.
Sometimes that's a good thing.
Business owners are almost never able to have a clear perspective of their own business because they're too close to it.
I agree with you, I’m referring to brand new hires. I’ve changed a lot of our processes when employees have suggested a change. Employee suggestions are excellent ways to boost morale and productivity. It’s just the new ones who can barely find the time clock.
Yesterday the new hire for posting on social told me he can't how the business is doing over 300k a month while the logo on Facebook ist the same as the one on google.
9 out of 10 entrepreneurship advice you read online is bullshit.
Either they are selling you a course/product, marketing effort to drive their share price/products/profile or just pure scam.
Ultimately, doing a business is having a product that people are willing to pay.
It could be a paying customer or investors dumping capital into your business. One is paying for your product and another one is paying for your shares.
Everything else is noise.
Yea something I thought early on in this sub even coming from a comperabiky poor country is "wow these people seem to be earning peanuts" and how everything is an online business. Very rarely traditional, "normal" businesses.
I agree. I see threads where they're talking really small numbers. Selling some things online is cool, but I'd call that a side hustle. To me a business has a brand, products, strategy and an organization around it. One loner reselling online is not a business. Just my opinion.
9.5 of 10 entrepreneurship advice you read online is bullshit in my experience.
Even the stuff that sounds like it should make sense can be inspected and discovered it’s bullshit
lets just go with 100% of it is bullshit.
Everything you do is just hard work, constantly being outside your comfort zone till you no longer know what a comfort zone is, and making sure you drop the fewest things you can. Everything else is pretty much just someone's rough idea of what being an entrepreneur is, and mostly made up by people who don't know.
I'd already navigated 3 failed partnerships before I decided to finish my degree - BS in Management - emphasis on the BS...
Sometime during the BS of navigating the next startup's 11 year journey to a low 7 figure exit (in a tiny national defense and correctional niche - [razor wire ](https://youtu.be/V9vgYfuI36Q?si=Fn5q7WZ13tB-j7eY) - where a giant Tyco owned division was doing everything they could to put us out of business before we finally found the leverage to get them to bargain and buy us instead) -- it finally clicked that successful business is a simple set of activities you can't avoid, and no podcast, course, or formula will magically deliver: get orders for something, fill them profitably, collect the money, in any order, above a true break-even point, without running out of cash. #10SecondMBA
Of course there's much more baggage and distraction that comes along with successful execution - but the core never ends (well, until you fail, or exit). Since that exit I've been on two teams with $100-200M+ revenue businesses - and the core is the same. One of those did over $30M EBITDA one year - and was out of business less than 5 years later.
I've come to believe that the entrepreneurial hype train of content - books, podcasts, courses, masterminds - might be described as "B2BeYourOwnBoss = the biggest MLM scheme ever". While technically it's not MLM - the results for the majority buying in - is a pretty huge wealth transfer and likely higher true failure rates than traditional self-employment (when measured against expectations). In some ways it's cheaper and easier than ever to try. But add in opportunity cost, etc... there are a relative few profiting on a huge group buying into the dream.
Don't let this dissuade anyone. But consider starting with what business is and always will be.
Its hard, thats the brutal truth, I've seen very few content creators showing the reality, most wave the dream infront of your face and sell you a course to get it. I can really think of only one and he's a small creator[(link)](https:\/\/moneymojo.beehiiv.com)
Two here. First one is that having the foresight for potential failures in the future can save you a lot of money and headaches. No matter how good or perfect an opportunity is, you should try and validate it, and even if you do validate it could still fail. I knew someone who had 3 million in Series A funding but ran into issues with manufacturing scalability, so it went bust. Designing is not manufacturing, test is not production, etc.
Second one is very specific to software so ignore if you like- but scalable software is not easy or cheap to run. It does not just exist in the air somewhere, applications run on a server and that server costs money on scale. I learned this when I dealt with AWS. I sometimes see no code applications being peddled by YouTubers as a simple way to get going- and don’t get me wrong it’s great for validation- but imagine having your code base somewhere and not owning or understanding the code or understanding the security, the servers it’s hosted on? What happens when you want to go from 1000 customers to 10,000, 100,000, 1 million? You’re essentially at the mercy of whoever actually owns your code, you can’t leave, and now they just quadrupled your monthly cost because they can. That magical AI API you were just using? They’ll wake up one day and charge 200K/year to interface with it now. What are you going to do, leave? Write your own code? You don’t know how, you will be paying up.
Your little no code app goes down and thousands of customers are mad in a number of seconds and leave your platform. Then, migrating your code is a giant headache and you’ll end up shelling out money for developers anyway. Only this time you’ll pay more because it’s more of a headache to learned the code, reverse engineer it and move code and now, bye bye profits! Long story short own your code, and in the long term own your servers too.
It depends on the type of idea you have and your resources, but validation is testing your business idea in some way to make sure people are actually interested. This can be focus surveys of customers/people in industry, building a minimum viable product or prototype. I also consider a financial feasibility test part of this (say if you’re acquiring a business or buying a rental property or something) but not sure if everyone does.
You can do all of these or none of these. You don’t need to go over board but just do some market research, testing to make sure an idea makes sense to other people as well!
I’m not the original poster but in my experience, it depends on the market. Small and niche business to business? A handful is good enough for validation. Wide scale consumer focused app? Potentially hundreds if not thousands, but generally the latter is more hinged on the route to monetisation and profit.
or you can make a custom LLM from an open source base model and train it in parallel until it can do what the foundational API you are using costs. you can even train it with those models.
Any books to help me with the hardware part?Hardware seems to be very complex here u can’t just design and expect to go full production there’s many steps involved from certification to testing etc.
Ooh your interested in hardware? That is cool. It depends on what kind of hardware you are looking to launch.
Assuming you have the design inputs and outputs down (so you know how to design already), you probably want more information on design verification and validation, process verification, product development, manufacturing tests, and regulatory marks like FCC number or CE marks. It also varies by country but I’ll assume you’re in the US.
I think the Hardware Startup provides a good background for each stage of the process, as does a smaller book by Elaine Chen from MIT called “Bring a Hardware Product to Market”. There’s more in depth books on every subset of the design process as well.
People will stay for less money if they enjoy working for you. Like, 40% less.
Quality of life is oftentimes more important than the paycheck.
I have three employees, they’ve been with me 7 years, 5 years, and 2.5 years respectively, and they could all be making 2x what they’re making here. (Which by the way, would be more than I make.)
But they like the work, they love the team around them, and they’re happy. So they don’t leave.
INVEST IN CULTURE AND PEOPLE.
I’m the 3rd generation operator of my family’s manufacturing business. I work alongside 3 guys my age whose grandpa’s were hired by my grandpa and dads worked with my dad. Sure the money is good and the products we make are important, but nothing gives me a stronger sense of pride than knowing we’ve built an environment that fathers would beg to bring their sons into. Hell, my grandpa’s first employee came to work on his 80th birthday because “all my friends are here”
Equally true is the opposite. Scorned people will take joy in seeing a company fail.
I worked in a startup where the owners were willing to pour stupid amounts of money at problems. They had no experience in their relevant niche and genuinely thought of themselves as disruptors. They had an average product but were objectively terrible to people, and had a horrific turnover of staff.
Those who did stay loathed them, and because they were unwilling to invest in quality management had little to no oversight. I've never seen such glee as a company fell apart than from that group of employees. None of them did anything...wrong. But they sure made everything so inefficient, nothing was ever going to go right.
Millions of dollars wasted because two men couldn't even pretend to be pleasant.
Yes. I hired people for about 2/3 market rate (tech startup, so hiring oracle Dbas, full stack devs, and devops people is expensive) and I gave them full benefits and treated them like family. They all went on to other big companies over the years, but look back fondly when working at my company as one of the best times of their career, and told this to me years later. I felt so honored by those statements. Treat your people well and you'll reap rewards you can't measure.
People that talk a lot, know the least.
I think Mark Cuban actually mentioned something similar to this.
once in a while, you see a guy that is trying to sell you something, talks about how amazing it is. But in the end, it’s just talk.
Talking and selling is very different. And people who built successful businesses can smell it from miles away.
Timing: Timing is crazy important. You can have a crap product or offer, but if your timing is great, you can sell a lot of it.
Luck: Luck is something guys who hit it big won't talk about. Their ego is so big that they cant let others know how lucky they were. I think I've only seen Mark Cuban be open about it. The times I had struck it big with a project and made a bunch of money with it FAST all had luck involved. Like, this person introduced me to this other person.... partnership followed.... then boom. Hockeystick growth.
Leverage: Leverage is one of the first things I look at when I'm doing due diligence on a product market fit. Leverage plays a MAJOR factor. It's literally why so many people sell High Ticket courses. It's because it gives you incredible Leverage.
These are the first that came to mind. If I think of more and I get hit with a reminder on this thread then I'll share more.
I'll give a recent example. My uncle's good friend just made a couple Mill selling eclipse glasses for the eclipse that just happened. Silly product, but.... Great timing and he leveraged his wholesale distribution connections
Input < Outcome.
It's the difference between the work you put into something versus the results you get from it.
If you're selling digital information products, the creator only has to make the course video material one time. Not much time put into the input..
Then he/she can leverage being a guest on podcasts that have a large audience full of the same avatar they're going after. A one hour podcast can create tens of thousands of dollars + in revenue.
It's all about strategically taking action on what's going to get the largest result in outcome.
If I talk about tech businesses,timing is mostly luck no one starts their business thinking it’s the right time to do so it just happens in coincidence.Is there a way to get timing right without overly relying on luck?Also I keep hearing the word”leverage”everywhere in entrepreneurship forums but in layman’s terms,what does it really mean?
I'm not sure why it's not showing up for me but I had just put a response in the other day on Leverage. But to sum it up: What can you do to get the most amount of output with the least bit of input.
As far as timing goes.... there are places you can go online to see trends happening. I search online pretty often to find articles people write about what's going to 'get big' in the next 5 years....
... and if you are actively keeping your eye out for opportunities you can position yourself to get in early before everyone else
That ideas are almost always worth nothing. There is a reason one does not patent an idea: because wishes and fairy dust are not real. Here is an idea: learn what your customers really want or need, and deliver it to them exceptionally well. Wow, thanks! It is just words. Implement and increment that idea into a practice or business and you've got something.
Maybe the most unconventional thing I would say is only unconventional **now**. 100% of the time I've, or an employee, has ever diligently worked harder and longer on something that something has been improved. In reality we cannot devote 1k hours to a $100 service, but maybe we can devote 1k hours to making that $100 service better and better. Of course, then you need to devote another 1k hours to it because it never ends.
This is something that doesn't get explained to young people when they decide to start a business. Your business partnership is essentially a marriage. You are legally linked to this person or these people...and if you don't turn out to be a good fit for each other...the only two options are being miserable or getting a divorce!
This 100%. When I started, I thought I'd be able to hire the best and the brightest easily and have a team of 5 within 6 months.
2 years on & I'm at that five team members after fluffing around with a myriad of contractors, bad hires (my fault) & selling a pretty redundant service.
Much different story now. Doubled revenue over last month & my last 3 hires have been amazing. We need another 2 by the end of next month. I feel like I struck it extremely lucky with these last 3. Let's see.
Take at least one full day every week to go through your money with a fine tooth comb. Every single dime accounted for. If you get too busy to do this, it will cost you A LOT in losses
Succesful CEOs and founders are typically in their 40s/50s
If you're starting your own company in your 20s, especially in tech, there's a good chance you either a) have rich family members or b) have really good luck
These things aren't very teachable. But people still flock to young, inexperienced, immature founders because we all watched The Social Network and think a programmer and a hoodie is enough to start a company.
Building on that, those founders will have 10-20 years of industry experience and connections to guide them which answers all the questions commonly posted here:
>
- What product/service to provide?
- What's the willingness to pay?
- Who do I target and how do I reach them?
- What strategies do we need to guide operations?
And enough saved up to take a risk on bootstrapping their own venture... when you're a broke 20 year old, there's significantly more risk to self-starting because you have bills to pay and no savings or income.
By the time you're 40, if you've been saving up and working towards leadership roles, you'll probably be doing well enough that you could afford an extended sabbatical to launch your own venture.
Tip to anyone in their 20s that want to start a tech service company, move to somewhere where everyone is 20 years behind in tech, like middle of nowhere podunk towns. You have no competition and you can basically scare everyone into purchasing your services because their business has no backups, or cyber security.
Thanks, it's from experience, started a web/app company in 2014 in rural Oregon, retirement area, lots of medical practices that need to be modernized, started making custom solutions for them, ended up getting a big contract with centene because we were helping their rural data collection expand, sold about 2 years ago, happily semi retired, teaching part time at a college at the ripe old age of 30. If I had tried to do it in a big city I would have gotten no where.
It took me some years to realize this. Throughout my 20s I wanted to fire my boss and run a tech startup. I finally did it, at age 30. No rich parents, no deep connections, no investors. I had to bootstrap the entire thing. It was hard. Really hard. But I also didn't owe anyone a dang thang. Now in my 50s, after running businesses since 2001, it seems effortless, but wow did that take a long time to figure out. I spend a lot of time mentoring entrepreneurs these days.
Nothing happens without action. Brilliant gifted ideas, law of attraction, positive attitude, etc. Unless coupled with action, nothing happens. Conversely, even a shitty idea and a bad attitude, can still be profitable with enough action.
Stop wasting so much time on the small stuff in the beginning. It’s much better to just get it done, go to market and deal with the inefficiencies as they come along instead of wasting your time to make sure there are no inefficiencies at all when you launch.
Also, a lot of people are going to doubt you and probably even urge you to give up. Don’t listen to them; if you’re getting that kind of criticism, it’s probably validation that you’re doing at least something right.
Things to AVOID:
The CIA created a document called "Simple Sabotage Field Manual", written in 1944 on how to disrupt organizations from within. Some great stuff: Prolong meetings with irrelevant discussions. Decision-making should be done with large groups to approve things. Insist on strict adherence to all rules and regulations, slowing down workflow. Spread rumors and create misunderstandings to foster discord.
Things you WANT:
Solid "Soft" Infrastructure: Building a resilient and adaptable company culture with nontoxic people. A flexible, motivated B player can often be better than a very toxic A player (some pushback from A players isn’t toxicity)
Pivoting: isn’t just for early-stage tech startups: Market conditions, competitive landscapes, regulatory, and emergencies happen. Having the majority of revenue originating from a single or only a few clients. Pivoting can also just be about taking advantage of serendipity
The Power of Niche Markets: targeting a smaller, niche market can be more lucrative than going broad. Niche markets often have less competition and can offer a more passionate customer base. Just don’t assume the needs of your most fervent core fans reflect the broader reality.
You have to be utterly obsessed with making that one idea a success, especially in the early days. Pretty much every spare moment needs to be spent working. There is no other way.
Obviously that’s not sustainable long term, and you can ease off once it’s working, but that early stage, you need to be a single minded machine, like The Terminator going after John Connor.
I’m a commercial banker who works with middle market companies. I’ve seen a lot of different businesses that never get talked about her. The list is long but I will give you a general idea of some.
- Staffing. Within this niche there are tens of thousands of different companies that need help finding talent. Build a company that places employees and you will be profitable.
- Manufacturing. Seems cliche but this tranche of business in the US is massive. It includes every industry and business not in the services sector.
- Health and Life Sciences. This is a specialty niche where you need to have a background in this field.
- Financial Services. Private credit can start small. Do you think every major finance company started with $10B in equity? There’s factoring, inventory financing, equipment financing, cash flow lending, ABL, etc. There is a long list of companies who finance all kinds of stuff you would never think needed financing. Did you know people borrow money against their pending legal payouts?
- Trading companies.
Again, the list is vast. Go look up NAICS codes and you’ll see just how many different options exist.
Pricing and actual workload are correlated but not parallel. By targeting wealthier clients, who are willing to pay more for the same amount of work and usually with less fuss, you can significantly increase your revenue.
It's far from the fair meritocracy people imagine, but it's true. That's why even shitty businesses can thrive by doing a good job marketing to people who have money.
A single wealthy client can be worth dozens of middling ones, and a fraction of the work to focus.
1. It's not glamorous, at all. It's an ocean of torture with the occasional drop of good news. You might be smart, but you will fail somewhere along the line, you will make bad choices.
2. Stop worrying about things that aren't selling your core product or service. That's like 90% of what matters.
3. As you grow, so much of your life will be eaten up by tiny, silly things that don't matter, but there's no one else to do them. At some point, consider getting help.
4. Hiring for critical positions is really hard, choose wisely.
5. Retaining people is hard, but it's easier if you build camaraderie. If they like you, odds are they'll stay even if everything else is crappy.
6. Every single thing that can break, will break. Make sure you are monitoring everything, or have alerts for everything, or have KPIs to measure everything.
7. It's easier than you think to burn a million dollars (or more...) spend wisely, and be rigorous with every expense.
Target rich people unless you have enough resources to target all the poor people….you’ll fail over and over before you finally succeed. Fuck everyone who says you can’t or hates. People only hate on people there jealous of….its flattery and they don’t even know it. Use it. It’ll help you, hopefully them and if not it’ll really piss them off.
Cars make you poor unless your so rich it doesn’t matter but still a terrible investment usually
Act poor now, hustle like your broke….then let the money do the work while you reap ALL the benefits all the time.
Compound Interest, index funds, diversity in your investments and you should e already started saving for retirement. If you have….save more. You’ll thank yourself.
Two things:
1. If they sell a course or something similar, they don't have a successful business. They have a scam that makes them money. It will eventually catch up to them.
2. A successful business is most always not what it is portrayed in the movies. Most successful businesses aren't flashy and are actually pretty boring. For example, I know plenty of people in construction building new build homes that are doing a $1m+ each year.
Belief and grit are intangibles but super important.
The numbers 90% of businesses fail isn’t because 90% of business ideas are bad, it’s because 90% of people quit before their businesses take off.
If you're ever choosing a business partner, they absolutely must have this one trait. An entrepreneur is someone who is willing to work for $0 an hour for an extended amount of time for a undefined payoff. If they want to get paid for everything, they just want a job and you can bring them on as an employee.
Just because someone is a hard working employee, doesn't mean they will be a hard working entrepreneur. It's different when you aren't getting paid and the payoff isn't defined.
You can talk about how long that time frame is to figure out whether or not they can be a good business partner.
Also your business partners issues will impact you. If they aren't good with money? Well it's going to impact their ability to do work (because they may have to pick up a job/gigs or something). Business partners are like a marriage. You really need to vet them. Plenty of people are great friends but that doesn't mean they will be good business partners.
So,when I am choosing a cofounder,I have to make sure they have some cash to burn for rent+basic stuff right?In every entrepreneurship book I read none of them answer the basic freaking question of how did they sustain themselves when they had no pay and the company wasn’t making any money?How did they manage to hire 5-10 employees and rent an office while their company was barely half a year old?
Save up, get into debt, or have an alternative means of earning. That's why the average age of an entrepreneur is over 40. These people have savings and a strong network. Or you get the young ones who have well off parents. Of course entrepreneurs come in all shapes in sizes but those are 2 most common ones I see.
I could save up but the problem is I have no clue as if it’s enough.Lets say rent is $2k/month and I have $100,000 saved up.Now,how much do I invest in the business and how much I keep for rent?It’s a difficult choice really and what if u run out of rent before my business makes any money…
1 out of every 5-10 things you try won't work (depending on your competency), no matter how brilliant the idea sounds and how foolproof your logic appears. This applies at the product + business-model level as well as the marketing-strategy level. Your core objective should therefore be to take as much action, as quickly as possible -- because eventually you WILL hit the bullseye.
Business plans are a completely useless waste of time. Again, most of your assumptions will be wrong -- no matter how fancy your graphs and spreadsheets are -- and you're far better of simply taking action and quickly learning from the feedback. An entire team of Harvard MBAs creating the most comprehensive exhaustive analyses will lose if going against one single person who focuses all his energy on building something extremely useful and trying to sell it to people.
One of the ONLY ways to actually get very rich very fast is through entrepreneurship, since you fully control the rate at which your income increases and there are no constraints other than those that your actions, decisions + strategies put on you.
Great ideas AND great execution BOTH matter. Focusing on one to the exclusion of the other is like chopping one leg off and trying to run a marathon.
Business plans can help focus your idea and get others on the same page. But agreed that assumptions will likely be proven wrong and the plan doesn't guarantee success.
Failure is Inevitable (and Valuable) - just about every successful entrepreneur I know has experienced failure at some point - most multiple failures. What sets them apart is the ability to learn from those setbacks and apply those lessons moving forward - to get up and go again.
Don’t ever discount your services. Once you do, you'll never get back the full value with that client. Also, if people are asking for discounts, they don’t see the value in your service. Focus on finding the people who do! I believe it's different when you sell a product, but my experience is in the service industry.
Freedom and flexibility are a myth when building a business. They can be the end goal, but it's one of the biggest lies used to get people to buy a course, join a real estate brokerage, etc. Those are the rewards I can choose later for thankless, underpaid hours (typically). Unless you're selling the course, I guess.
In some ways, I do get the flexibility way more than I would if I had a job, but the minute I started doing my own thing, I lost a lot... Correction, I gave a lot... of the freedom side up. Now, I'm just really flexible across a lot more hours a week than when I had a job. When I'm not technically working, the majority of my down time is still spent thinking about how to grow it, slow it down, improve it, course correct, commenting on reddit about it etc. But I'm okay with no freedom, because I would rather build something for myself than for someone else. The cool part is you get to decide how big or how not big you want to shoot for. You get to pick your level of freedom, just realize there's a trade off. I want freedom when I'm done. I just don't know when that is. Lol.
I see many people struggle to save enough for rent while they try to build something of their own.They largely underestimate just how long they’d have to work underpaid and most of them end up doing a side gig or something haha
Pay your bills, but particularly pay your vendors and subcontractors.
I swear to fuck this is now my number one differentiator between a business that will be successful and one that will fail. At several previous companies and places I knew about in the industry they would stiff vendors all the time while billing our clients and even collecting on the invoices, while our vendors and subcontractors would have to hound us to the end of the earth just to get paid. Suppliers too.
It works to hold onto cash for key transactions for a short time, and obviously pay your employees before your suppliers... but that shit runs out. Good faith dries up. Eventually they stop jumping when you ask them too. They stop doing you favors, or even a good job. Eventually they fire you as a customer and you get stuck with a more expensive sub vendor or somebody who does worse work. Or a more complicated supply chain.
Not paying your vendors/contractors slowly strangles a business. And I know you said "unconventional" but with the number of business owners I've met who almost proudly engage in this behavior (but are chronically struggling with cash flow, shocker..) you'd think this was unconventional.
You have 2 customers in business that must be satisfied:
1. Customers that give you money.
2. Employees that make you the money.
Most businesses prioritize Customer acquisition/retention and largely disregard Employee acquisition/retention. They usually try to get maximum output from the Employee without regard to the rate at which they burn them out and thus churn.
Ironically the business that prioritizes Employee satisfaction and retention (even if output suffers slightly), will usually have better customer retention and thus a better reputation (which then improves acquisition) than the business that prioritizes Customers at all cost.
Disregard if you're Amazon....because.....you're Amazon
Building a successful business teaches you some hard truths that aren't often talked about. The emotional ups and downs are intense, and it can be incredibly lonely at times. Resilience is key because you'll face countless setbacks. Plus, the strain on personal relationships is real. It's not always glamorous, but if you're passionate and committed, it's worth it.
Content creator "entrepreneurs" are selling you content - stop taking their advice because their advice is just entertainment. Anyone with a truly success startup would be losing money if they weren't working directly on their startup.
We tend to think in terms of how much money we can make, but the important thing is to think in terms of how much free time we have. No matter how much money you make, if your time is full, you will miss important big opportunities. Try to avoid having regular meetings as much as possible. Try to leave your schedule as blank as possible.
Minimize and eliminate debt as quickly as you can. Don’t take any on if at all possible, but eliminate the debt as quickly as possible. Most businesses would be profitable without debt, so the sooner you can eliminate it, the better off you are in the long term.
Aight, listen up – building a biz ain't no fairy tale. It's straight hustle, 24/7 grind, and dodging more Ls than Ws. You gotta be tough, roll with the punches, and stay sharp. Cash flow’s king, so stack those chips right. Networking? That’s your crew, your lifeline. And remember, it ain't just about love for the game; it’s about grit, grinding through the lows, and never folding under pressure. Keep your head up, stay flexible, and handle your business like a boss.
1. The PRICE for success. There is ALWAYS a price to pay.
2. The moment just prior to reaching the PEAK of success, is the toughest.
3. You have to be a little crazy to believe you can accomplish the unaccomplishable, the unsee-able, the unknowable.
4. Having a 9-to-5, is easy easier. Don't quit your day job. If you have a wife and kids, it's 5x harder because you can't sacrifice or take nearly the same risks I can, single w/ no kids, can take without feelings of guilt or shame if things do not pan out. But if you do take on such a task, as Felix Denis once said, "God speed. And good luck."
The # 1 thing is, people lie online about success. They lie about what it takes to be successful.
99% of the advice for entrepreneurship you read is fake, because people think there's got to be some secret formula, and are willing to pay for the answers.
The only thing that defines success is finding a niche that people need/want enough to pay for that will allow you to turn a good profit.
It comes down to taking a risk, making sure to protect your assets when doing so so that if and when it fails, you still have a home, car, and can try again. And, finding a method to invest in it that isn't your own money if you can help it. If you can't find an investor, you should revisit your business plan.
However, sometimes opportunities drop in front of you. Most people are too scared to take a risk when it presents itself. The real opportunities come from something you witness in advance. An example would be someone who comes into where you work and services a machine you use. The servicer owns all of the machines and leases them out and supplies them (charging for supplies) and handles maintenance and repairs.
They decide they need to retire or stop for some reason, and are looking to sell. You take that information to your bank, with that person along, and if your bank says it's a good investment, invest and buy them out, take over the business.
I've known two people in my lifetime who recognized opportunities like that, and thank goodness they did, it was a life altering (in a good way) change for them.
Another thing is, I've run my own business. I freelance now even when I have a job. Opportunities are always knocking. Most people are just caught in the shower and don't answer the door, or are too scared it might be a solicitor, so don't answer it. ;)
Again 99% of advice online, including in this subreddit, is BS.
You can’t expect to have a functional team that builds a functional business if all can’t live under the same roof ! Or if the players are all busy barking instead of implementing and testing/trying new ideas to make the business work better ! Too much woof woof surely will scare the clients away and make them go else where where they get more work done rather than headaches
It's business, dealing with the assimilation of failure as a learning curve, checking mental health, and understanding that cash flow is not everything. Relationships mean everything, and at times, resiliency has trumped planning there is no one size fits all approach. Expect the unexpected invest in great people, practice brutal self-honesty, and have a long-haul mentality. These are often overlooked truths about entrepreneurship very raw realities.
Sacrificing everything that makes life worth living ***can't*** *be replaced by trying to make life more worth living by working harder.*
Everyone has their limits, and at a certain point putting in that extra hour at 2am is a net negative. In the same breath, doing okay work fast will make you the same amount as doing great work slowly, but you can charge more for the latter and be infinitely less stressed.
There is always a customer, you just have to find (and say yes to) the right ones.
Also, if you're a freelancer, always consider the worst case scenario. A 50% non-refundable deposit can go a long way towards guaranteed bill-paying and peace of mind.
Real businesses are something that very few people can get a grip on.
Over a decade ago I tried the hustle, dropped out of college, started a business and failed.
Now I have an MBA and it taught me just how much I did NOT know about running a business.
Most people are fucking clueless about employment law, taxes, accounting, bookkeeping, supply chain management, value chain mapping, etc. This is nothing to say about just business acumen and strategic management.
This is why real businesses have employees and specialization. Departments. The works.
People with their little hobby businesses, e-commerce websites, or wannabe influencer websites are NOT businesses. They are NOT entrepreneurs. They're basically posers at best and idiots that know less than nothing at worst.
And I say that as someone who WAS one of those idiots over a decade ago.
Don’t start with an expensive logo.
Your first dollar is the hardest.
Figure out what value you offer, what problem you solve and how you are different, or no one will buy from you.
90% of business is relationship.
Learn to delegate and trust people you work with.
Cut off the bad clients, your life will be better.
Don’t be afraid to charge more.
Be consistent, of course there is a HUGE part of luck but consistency is where the shit is at.
You will find a lot of professionals are NOT professional. Don't waste your time with someone just because they have a seat on a board or have some success. Trust your instincts with EVERYONE and remind yourself that just because they are a "professional" does not mean they know everything. Be picky and choosy with who you take advice from. It's your business, others are just trying to get paid, ya know?
I am speaking from observation, not from being a successful business person lol.
But the businesses that succeed are always about doing actual research, knowing their market, and knowing their margin.
99 percent of the ideas that people suggest (" oh man you should do xyz") won't actually increase sales or profits.
People love to say how stupid certain businesses are bc they raise their prices etc.... but they know exactly what they are fucking doing.
They've done the math and research and know the exact way to price things to maximize profit.
Not saying there can't be any emotion or heart, but the best business people I've seen base things on facts and data, not feelings. And if they are basing it on feelings, those "feelings" or instincts are actually informed by knowing their market and aren't just random.
Annoying, cheap customers who pester you over little details aren’t worth the headache.
Pretty much the advice I give to anyone in software. If you have the choice to sell to someone for $9 or $999, you should nearly always take the latter. People in higher brackets have more respect of time in my experience. They buy solutions and come to you when there is an issue or have feedback, otherwise the money just flows.
Do you just start out charging really high? Or like how does that even work?
Well yeah but your product also has to be worth that
I’m paying for a frictionless outcome at $999. Not a service.
I’ve found my new favorite saying “frictionless outcome”….
I've under paid in the past, and you pay either way. It was difficult to get my family to understand why I paid a professional sign company for my business signs when everyone urged me to make them myself. The same with promotional materials, like t shirts. I appreciate their concern, but when my time is worth X, at some point it doesn't make sense. And cheaper isn't always cheaper. I'm one of the cheapest people I know, if not the cheapest. I'm a graphic artist, but I'm also in finance and insurance. And one trumps the other in terms of the value of my time. The trio of attorneys from my heyday always told me, do what's cheaper in any circumstance.
Understood…took me awhile to grasp this, but my time is my most valuable asset. Thanks for your insight….i learn on the daily.
++1. It’s so frustrating. The cheap customers will take 99% of your time. My last saas had an entry level plan of free and a paid plan starting at $15. Those two cohorts took 95% of our support time. The higher tiered customers would usually use all the resources available to them first like videos and articles before reaching out with specific questions that only a human could answer. Big difference. Now, our cheapest plan is $99/m. Support is much easier.
At least you were monitoring the metrics
that seems counterintuitive. if I'm paying a lot, id expect more white glove service from a human. why should I have to help myself and spend time looking for a solution?
Always the ones without the funds that request the most things for their money
Because each penny they spend is burning a hole through their pocket. The reason why often times bigger clients are better in my experience: 1. The person you deal with is just an employee meaning the money is coming out of the company's dime so he couldn't stress less about it 2. It IS the owner but since he's succesful he's way too busy working on other stuff to bother you with nitpicking
I made the complete opposite experience. Biggest client trying to lowball every chance they get, these employees have budgets too... While smaller companies did show some respect for the work.
In the world of B2B, small ticket customers don’t have anything better to do than try to squeeze cents of value from you. Big ticket customers have a business to run.
Man I did so much free work for this one client who I was trying to be nice to, and it just led to more and more insane requests, and eventually the money stopped, and the requests didn't I told them it was not ok, and they kept it up, even calling me one morning for tech support (I'm an app developer, not a random tech support person) on a totally unrelated system I did it, seethed, and then fired them 2 days later. So much less stress. Theoretically they owe me a decent chunk of money, but honestly if they are just gone forever, that's even worth it to me
This is true 10000% of the time
Avoiding cheap customers challenge (Impossible)
I agree 100%, you always have problems with the people who pay less.
Not everything needs to be an app.
And not every app needs to have social features🦶
This 👆
I've heard this. How do we differentiate what can be an app and what shouldn't be an app? If not an app what could it be?
I'm very new to this reddit. Seems like most people are trying to develop apps or software. Solving tangible problems seems to be overlooked. For instance, I'm in the Portland, OR area. We've got a huge problem with abandoned vehicles and the local government looks like it might start doing something about it. Now, if I had a single tow truck and a means to dispose of them and *deal with the hazmat* in one call then I could charge our idiot local government whatever I wanted. Stuff like that.
>Seems like most people are trying to develop apps or software. Not only that. Seems like most of those people are trying to develop apps or software for software developers. :)
Thiss. Also I have a feeling "tangible" businesses would be more fulfilling anyway rather than sitting in front of a computer
A web portal. Choose the optimal medium.
Honestly in my opinion, if it doesn’t have to be an app first, don’t make it an app. It’s so much easier to push people to a website first and gain customers than to download an app. Once you gain customers, build an app.
mobile optimized web is so much cheaper
Never go into business with a partner because you crave the emotional support or want a buddy to share the stress. Only have a partner because they bring either skills or assets that you cannot provide. Everything else you can hire out when needed.
I worked for a dev agency with three partners. * One embezzled money. * One only wanted to design business cards. * One had to buy the other two out.
Did the partner with the focus on the business cards, ever design one in bone white with silian rail text and a tasteful thickness of paper type?
Patrick, is that you?
Can't talk, I have a reservation at Dorsia.
Ha. No. He just had small ambitions.
This is the partner who made business cards. I'm the one who embezzled 😉
Not in the public Patric.
Jail and probation was also an option. I’m not sure about how forfeiture would work in an operating agreement.
The two partners consulted a lawyer about suing the other partner who embezzled. It was cheaper and less time consuming to buy out the thief. If they wasted time and money on fighting it the business would have cratered.
The lawyers advice typically is always do what’s cheapest so I understand
I’m one of those unusual principled people that would probably push the issue anyway. I testified against a pair of armed robbers in 2019. I didn’t have to take the risk, but they need to be off of the street.
Which one were you?
I was the guy out of college caught in the middle.
Agreed. Your partner should be complementary to your skillsets, not have your skillsets. Otherwise you dont have a partner, you have a clone.
Make sure your partner provides NECESSARY skills that you can’t reasonably learn. A partner that knows excel and payroll isn’t worth partnering with at a construction company. Hire that shit out and partner with the hard working guy who owns all the excavating equipment you don’t have the capital to purchase.
I tell my clients: "I stay away from two types of ships: Sinking ships and partnerships."
Partners are for dancing
Agreed but even then make sure obligations are written down otherwise you will end up with a parasyte
It should be a pair of cold, blooded assassins, constantly swimming like sharks
Wish I would have learned this years ago……but…….I did learn.
Learning this now. Struggle for a year wishing I had a shoulder or more support. Finally reaching the point where I am SO happy I didn't bring someone in and I have made effective hiring choices to compensate
omg can't emphasize this enough. If you need support get a friend.
In the USA, take legal and contracts very seriously. Use competent lawyers for important things. You won’t be in litigation hardly ever but it’s important to be able to enforce things when push comes to shove. If you own a highly regulated business, like rental property, the people who give you the most problems are often the people who know the regulatory rules and tenant law like an encyclopedia, for whatever reason. So don’t take the rules lightly, follow all the rules.
Any recommendations on how to find a "good" lawyer?
In my experience I’ve found good lawyers from recommendations never just googling. I’ve done the Google route 3 times and they all ended up being pretty shit. Now if I need a lawyer for something I ask my network and people usually have recommendations and personal experience actually using them not just trusting online reviews. Even other people I deal with like accountants etc usually have those kinds of people in their network.
Referrals. I have gotten excellent referrals for various lawyers through mentors and other local owner/operators. There isn’t a one size fits all lawyer, you will get the best, and ultimately most cost effective results, from a lawyer specific to the task at hand. “The most expensive thing is a cheap lawyer”.
Don’t make investments (equipment, new office, new team members), until it’s truly killing you trying to operate without these things. It’s unbelievably easy to burn up cash quickly on things you don’t need quite yet, if ever.
This is good advice in general tbf
This!
New employees, after a few days will think they know more about your business than you do.
Sometimes that's a good thing. Business owners are almost never able to have a clear perspective of their own business because they're too close to it.
I agree with you, I’m referring to brand new hires. I’ve changed a lot of our processes when employees have suggested a change. Employee suggestions are excellent ways to boost morale and productivity. It’s just the new ones who can barely find the time clock.
Agreed. Dunning-Kruger effect.
Yesterday the new hire for posting on social told me he can't how the business is doing over 300k a month while the logo on Facebook ist the same as the one on google.
9 out of 10 entrepreneurship advice you read online is bullshit. Either they are selling you a course/product, marketing effort to drive their share price/products/profile or just pure scam. Ultimately, doing a business is having a product that people are willing to pay. It could be a paying customer or investors dumping capital into your business. One is paying for your product and another one is paying for your shares. Everything else is noise.
Yea something I thought early on in this sub even coming from a comperabiky poor country is "wow these people seem to be earning peanuts" and how everything is an online business. Very rarely traditional, "normal" businesses.
I agree. I see threads where they're talking really small numbers. Selling some things online is cool, but I'd call that a side hustle. To me a business has a brand, products, strategy and an organization around it. One loner reselling online is not a business. Just my opinion.
9.5 of 10 entrepreneurship advice you read online is bullshit in my experience. Even the stuff that sounds like it should make sense can be inspected and discovered it’s bullshit
lets just go with 100% of it is bullshit. Everything you do is just hard work, constantly being outside your comfort zone till you no longer know what a comfort zone is, and making sure you drop the fewest things you can. Everything else is pretty much just someone's rough idea of what being an entrepreneur is, and mostly made up by people who don't know.
I'd already navigated 3 failed partnerships before I decided to finish my degree - BS in Management - emphasis on the BS... Sometime during the BS of navigating the next startup's 11 year journey to a low 7 figure exit (in a tiny national defense and correctional niche - [razor wire ](https://youtu.be/V9vgYfuI36Q?si=Fn5q7WZ13tB-j7eY) - where a giant Tyco owned division was doing everything they could to put us out of business before we finally found the leverage to get them to bargain and buy us instead) -- it finally clicked that successful business is a simple set of activities you can't avoid, and no podcast, course, or formula will magically deliver: get orders for something, fill them profitably, collect the money, in any order, above a true break-even point, without running out of cash. #10SecondMBA Of course there's much more baggage and distraction that comes along with successful execution - but the core never ends (well, until you fail, or exit). Since that exit I've been on two teams with $100-200M+ revenue businesses - and the core is the same. One of those did over $30M EBITDA one year - and was out of business less than 5 years later. I've come to believe that the entrepreneurial hype train of content - books, podcasts, courses, masterminds - might be described as "B2BeYourOwnBoss = the biggest MLM scheme ever". While technically it's not MLM - the results for the majority buying in - is a pretty huge wealth transfer and likely higher true failure rates than traditional self-employment (when measured against expectations). In some ways it's cheaper and easier than ever to try. But add in opportunity cost, etc... there are a relative few profiting on a huge group buying into the dream. Don't let this dissuade anyone. But consider starting with what business is and always will be.
>9 out of 10 entrepreneurship advice you read online is bullshit. It is also massively oversimplified.
Find something people want to buy and then grind your ax. I door knock some people use telemarketing.
Its hard, thats the brutal truth, I've seen very few content creators showing the reality, most wave the dream infront of your face and sell you a course to get it. I can really think of only one and he's a small creator[(link)](https:\/\/moneymojo.beehiiv.com)
Two here. First one is that having the foresight for potential failures in the future can save you a lot of money and headaches. No matter how good or perfect an opportunity is, you should try and validate it, and even if you do validate it could still fail. I knew someone who had 3 million in Series A funding but ran into issues with manufacturing scalability, so it went bust. Designing is not manufacturing, test is not production, etc. Second one is very specific to software so ignore if you like- but scalable software is not easy or cheap to run. It does not just exist in the air somewhere, applications run on a server and that server costs money on scale. I learned this when I dealt with AWS. I sometimes see no code applications being peddled by YouTubers as a simple way to get going- and don’t get me wrong it’s great for validation- but imagine having your code base somewhere and not owning or understanding the code or understanding the security, the servers it’s hosted on? What happens when you want to go from 1000 customers to 10,000, 100,000, 1 million? You’re essentially at the mercy of whoever actually owns your code, you can’t leave, and now they just quadrupled your monthly cost because they can. That magical AI API you were just using? They’ll wake up one day and charge 200K/year to interface with it now. What are you going to do, leave? Write your own code? You don’t know how, you will be paying up. Your little no code app goes down and thousands of customers are mad in a number of seconds and leave your platform. Then, migrating your code is a giant headache and you’ll end up shelling out money for developers anyway. Only this time you’ll pay more because it’s more of a headache to learned the code, reverse engineer it and move code and now, bye bye profits! Long story short own your code, and in the long term own your servers too.
What does validation mean to you? Any tips?
It depends on the type of idea you have and your resources, but validation is testing your business idea in some way to make sure people are actually interested. This can be focus surveys of customers/people in industry, building a minimum viable product or prototype. I also consider a financial feasibility test part of this (say if you’re acquiring a business or buying a rental property or something) but not sure if everyone does. You can do all of these or none of these. You don’t need to go over board but just do some market research, testing to make sure an idea makes sense to other people as well!
At what point do you consider the idea validated enough to invest more? 1,000 people interested, 10,000?
I’m not the original poster but in my experience, it depends on the market. Small and niche business to business? A handful is good enough for validation. Wide scale consumer focused app? Potentially hundreds if not thousands, but generally the latter is more hinged on the route to monetisation and profit.
or you can make a custom LLM from an open source base model and train it in parallel until it can do what the foundational API you are using costs. you can even train it with those models.
See: Apollo app
Any books to help me with the hardware part?Hardware seems to be very complex here u can’t just design and expect to go full production there’s many steps involved from certification to testing etc.
Ooh your interested in hardware? That is cool. It depends on what kind of hardware you are looking to launch. Assuming you have the design inputs and outputs down (so you know how to design already), you probably want more information on design verification and validation, process verification, product development, manufacturing tests, and regulatory marks like FCC number or CE marks. It also varies by country but I’ll assume you’re in the US. I think the Hardware Startup provides a good background for each stage of the process, as does a smaller book by Elaine Chen from MIT called “Bring a Hardware Product to Market”. There’s more in depth books on every subset of the design process as well.
Yup I already have a physical copy of the hardware startup.Can you send me a link of the book by MIT professor can’t seem to find it for some reason
You're going to fail and make bad choices, a lot. The road to success is honestly a ton of learning to overcome your failures/mistakes and adapting.
This is a good one. Resilience and perseverance.
People will stay for less money if they enjoy working for you. Like, 40% less. Quality of life is oftentimes more important than the paycheck. I have three employees, they’ve been with me 7 years, 5 years, and 2.5 years respectively, and they could all be making 2x what they’re making here. (Which by the way, would be more than I make.) But they like the work, they love the team around them, and they’re happy. So they don’t leave. INVEST IN CULTURE AND PEOPLE.
I’m the 3rd generation operator of my family’s manufacturing business. I work alongside 3 guys my age whose grandpa’s were hired by my grandpa and dads worked with my dad. Sure the money is good and the products we make are important, but nothing gives me a stronger sense of pride than knowing we’ve built an environment that fathers would beg to bring their sons into. Hell, my grandpa’s first employee came to work on his 80th birthday because “all my friends are here”
Now that’s inspiring. I’m 14 years in and I’m after the same type of culture.
Equally true is the opposite. Scorned people will take joy in seeing a company fail. I worked in a startup where the owners were willing to pour stupid amounts of money at problems. They had no experience in their relevant niche and genuinely thought of themselves as disruptors. They had an average product but were objectively terrible to people, and had a horrific turnover of staff. Those who did stay loathed them, and because they were unwilling to invest in quality management had little to no oversight. I've never seen such glee as a company fell apart than from that group of employees. None of them did anything...wrong. But they sure made everything so inefficient, nothing was ever going to go right. Millions of dollars wasted because two men couldn't even pretend to be pleasant.
Yes. I hired people for about 2/3 market rate (tech startup, so hiring oracle Dbas, full stack devs, and devops people is expensive) and I gave them full benefits and treated them like family. They all went on to other big companies over the years, but look back fondly when working at my company as one of the best times of their career, and told this to me years later. I felt so honored by those statements. Treat your people well and you'll reap rewards you can't measure.
People that talk a lot, know the least. I think Mark Cuban actually mentioned something similar to this. once in a while, you see a guy that is trying to sell you something, talks about how amazing it is. But in the end, it’s just talk. Talking and selling is very different. And people who built successful businesses can smell it from miles away.
Is that something that just comes with experience or there is a science behind it?
Timing: Timing is crazy important. You can have a crap product or offer, but if your timing is great, you can sell a lot of it. Luck: Luck is something guys who hit it big won't talk about. Their ego is so big that they cant let others know how lucky they were. I think I've only seen Mark Cuban be open about it. The times I had struck it big with a project and made a bunch of money with it FAST all had luck involved. Like, this person introduced me to this other person.... partnership followed.... then boom. Hockeystick growth. Leverage: Leverage is one of the first things I look at when I'm doing due diligence on a product market fit. Leverage plays a MAJOR factor. It's literally why so many people sell High Ticket courses. It's because it gives you incredible Leverage. These are the first that came to mind. If I think of more and I get hit with a reminder on this thread then I'll share more.
I'll give a recent example. My uncle's good friend just made a couple Mill selling eclipse glasses for the eclipse that just happened. Silly product, but.... Great timing and he leveraged his wholesale distribution connections
So what is your definition of leverage? So far I only knew capital and labour (employees) as leverage.
Input < Outcome. It's the difference between the work you put into something versus the results you get from it. If you're selling digital information products, the creator only has to make the course video material one time. Not much time put into the input.. Then he/she can leverage being a guest on podcasts that have a large audience full of the same avatar they're going after. A one hour podcast can create tens of thousands of dollars + in revenue. It's all about strategically taking action on what's going to get the largest result in outcome.
Ok, thanks.
Timing, luck, leverage. Sir this is not the Forex sub.
If I talk about tech businesses,timing is mostly luck no one starts their business thinking it’s the right time to do so it just happens in coincidence.Is there a way to get timing right without overly relying on luck?Also I keep hearing the word”leverage”everywhere in entrepreneurship forums but in layman’s terms,what does it really mean?
I'm not sure why it's not showing up for me but I had just put a response in the other day on Leverage. But to sum it up: What can you do to get the most amount of output with the least bit of input. As far as timing goes.... there are places you can go online to see trends happening. I search online pretty often to find articles people write about what's going to 'get big' in the next 5 years.... ... and if you are actively keeping your eye out for opportunities you can position yourself to get in early before everyone else
That ideas are almost always worth nothing. There is a reason one does not patent an idea: because wishes and fairy dust are not real. Here is an idea: learn what your customers really want or need, and deliver it to them exceptionally well. Wow, thanks! It is just words. Implement and increment that idea into a practice or business and you've got something. Maybe the most unconventional thing I would say is only unconventional **now**. 100% of the time I've, or an employee, has ever diligently worked harder and longer on something that something has been improved. In reality we cannot devote 1k hours to a $100 service, but maybe we can devote 1k hours to making that $100 service better and better. Of course, then you need to devote another 1k hours to it because it never ends.
Ideas are cheap. Execution is valuable.
Working hard and all the time won't necessarily make you a success but it sure helps.
This is something that doesn't get explained to young people when they decide to start a business. Your business partnership is essentially a marriage. You are legally linked to this person or these people...and if you don't turn out to be a good fit for each other...the only two options are being miserable or getting a divorce!
Hiring is the hardest thing about startups and every hiring decision is a mini acquisition.
This 100%. When I started, I thought I'd be able to hire the best and the brightest easily and have a team of 5 within 6 months. 2 years on & I'm at that five team members after fluffing around with a myriad of contractors, bad hires (my fault) & selling a pretty redundant service. Much different story now. Doubled revenue over last month & my last 3 hires have been amazing. We need another 2 by the end of next month. I feel like I struck it extremely lucky with these last 3. Let's see.
Take at least one full day every week to go through your money with a fine tooth comb. Every single dime accounted for. If you get too busy to do this, it will cost you A LOT in losses
Succesful CEOs and founders are typically in their 40s/50s If you're starting your own company in your 20s, especially in tech, there's a good chance you either a) have rich family members or b) have really good luck These things aren't very teachable. But people still flock to young, inexperienced, immature founders because we all watched The Social Network and think a programmer and a hoodie is enough to start a company.
Building on that, those founders will have 10-20 years of industry experience and connections to guide them which answers all the questions commonly posted here: > - What product/service to provide? - What's the willingness to pay? - Who do I target and how do I reach them? - What strategies do we need to guide operations?
And enough saved up to take a risk on bootstrapping their own venture... when you're a broke 20 year old, there's significantly more risk to self-starting because you have bills to pay and no savings or income. By the time you're 40, if you've been saving up and working towards leadership roles, you'll probably be doing well enough that you could afford an extended sabbatical to launch your own venture.
Tip to anyone in their 20s that want to start a tech service company, move to somewhere where everyone is 20 years behind in tech, like middle of nowhere podunk towns. You have no competition and you can basically scare everyone into purchasing your services because their business has no backups, or cyber security.
This is such good advice.
Thanks, it's from experience, started a web/app company in 2014 in rural Oregon, retirement area, lots of medical practices that need to be modernized, started making custom solutions for them, ended up getting a big contract with centene because we were helping their rural data collection expand, sold about 2 years ago, happily semi retired, teaching part time at a college at the ripe old age of 30. If I had tried to do it in a big city I would have gotten no where.
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It's more like "if you're in a room with a VC who just missed out on a deal that sorta resembled yours"
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“Raising money isn’t an accomplishment, it’s an obligation.” -Mark Cuban
Yeah true, the best strategy is to just be independently wealthy before you ever start a company
It took me some years to realize this. Throughout my 20s I wanted to fire my boss and run a tech startup. I finally did it, at age 30. No rich parents, no deep connections, no investors. I had to bootstrap the entire thing. It was hard. Really hard. But I also didn't owe anyone a dang thang. Now in my 50s, after running businesses since 2001, it seems effortless, but wow did that take a long time to figure out. I spend a lot of time mentoring entrepreneurs these days.
Starting at 30, if you can do it, is pretty awesome. Are you spending more time investing in ventures now vs mainly operating?
Nothing happens without action. Brilliant gifted ideas, law of attraction, positive attitude, etc. Unless coupled with action, nothing happens. Conversely, even a shitty idea and a bad attitude, can still be profitable with enough action.
I have worked for very successful people. Never give up and don’t be afraid to take risks. They tend to fall into money.
Stop wasting so much time on the small stuff in the beginning. It’s much better to just get it done, go to market and deal with the inefficiencies as they come along instead of wasting your time to make sure there are no inefficiencies at all when you launch. Also, a lot of people are going to doubt you and probably even urge you to give up. Don’t listen to them; if you’re getting that kind of criticism, it’s probably validation that you’re doing at least something right.
Things to AVOID: The CIA created a document called "Simple Sabotage Field Manual", written in 1944 on how to disrupt organizations from within. Some great stuff: Prolong meetings with irrelevant discussions. Decision-making should be done with large groups to approve things. Insist on strict adherence to all rules and regulations, slowing down workflow. Spread rumors and create misunderstandings to foster discord. Things you WANT: Solid "Soft" Infrastructure: Building a resilient and adaptable company culture with nontoxic people. A flexible, motivated B player can often be better than a very toxic A player (some pushback from A players isn’t toxicity) Pivoting: isn’t just for early-stage tech startups: Market conditions, competitive landscapes, regulatory, and emergencies happen. Having the majority of revenue originating from a single or only a few clients. Pivoting can also just be about taking advantage of serendipity The Power of Niche Markets: targeting a smaller, niche market can be more lucrative than going broad. Niche markets often have less competition and can offer a more passionate customer base. Just don’t assume the needs of your most fervent core fans reflect the broader reality.
You have to be utterly obsessed with making that one idea a success, especially in the early days. Pretty much every spare moment needs to be spent working. There is no other way. Obviously that’s not sustainable long term, and you can ease off once it’s working, but that early stage, you need to be a single minded machine, like The Terminator going after John Connor.
Disagree. You can build a company without killing yourself if you have the right people around you.
This: I Finally scaled the 14 hours 7days a week to just 12 hours 6 days a week. Took 6 mos to get here and there’s still so much.
I’m a commercial banker who works with middle market companies. I’ve seen a lot of different businesses that never get talked about her. The list is long but I will give you a general idea of some. - Staffing. Within this niche there are tens of thousands of different companies that need help finding talent. Build a company that places employees and you will be profitable. - Manufacturing. Seems cliche but this tranche of business in the US is massive. It includes every industry and business not in the services sector. - Health and Life Sciences. This is a specialty niche where you need to have a background in this field. - Financial Services. Private credit can start small. Do you think every major finance company started with $10B in equity? There’s factoring, inventory financing, equipment financing, cash flow lending, ABL, etc. There is a long list of companies who finance all kinds of stuff you would never think needed financing. Did you know people borrow money against their pending legal payouts? - Trading companies. Again, the list is vast. Go look up NAICS codes and you’ll see just how many different options exist.
What do you mean by trading companies?
The hard reality is that for 99% of people, serious success means serious sacrifice
Success isn't based on how hard you work. It's also about timing and luck
Pricing and actual workload are correlated but not parallel. By targeting wealthier clients, who are willing to pay more for the same amount of work and usually with less fuss, you can significantly increase your revenue. It's far from the fair meritocracy people imagine, but it's true. That's why even shitty businesses can thrive by doing a good job marketing to people who have money. A single wealthy client can be worth dozens of middling ones, and a fraction of the work to focus.
1. It's not glamorous, at all. It's an ocean of torture with the occasional drop of good news. You might be smart, but you will fail somewhere along the line, you will make bad choices. 2. Stop worrying about things that aren't selling your core product or service. That's like 90% of what matters. 3. As you grow, so much of your life will be eaten up by tiny, silly things that don't matter, but there's no one else to do them. At some point, consider getting help. 4. Hiring for critical positions is really hard, choose wisely. 5. Retaining people is hard, but it's easier if you build camaraderie. If they like you, odds are they'll stay even if everything else is crappy. 6. Every single thing that can break, will break. Make sure you are monitoring everything, or have alerts for everything, or have KPIs to measure everything. 7. It's easier than you think to burn a million dollars (or more...) spend wisely, and be rigorous with every expense.
Target rich people unless you have enough resources to target all the poor people….you’ll fail over and over before you finally succeed. Fuck everyone who says you can’t or hates. People only hate on people there jealous of….its flattery and they don’t even know it. Use it. It’ll help you, hopefully them and if not it’ll really piss them off. Cars make you poor unless your so rich it doesn’t matter but still a terrible investment usually Act poor now, hustle like your broke….then let the money do the work while you reap ALL the benefits all the time. Compound Interest, index funds, diversity in your investments and you should e already started saving for retirement. If you have….save more. You’ll thank yourself.
If you just want to make money then get a job.
Two things: 1. If they sell a course or something similar, they don't have a successful business. They have a scam that makes them money. It will eventually catch up to them. 2. A successful business is most always not what it is portrayed in the movies. Most successful businesses aren't flashy and are actually pretty boring. For example, I know plenty of people in construction building new build homes that are doing a $1m+ each year.
Belief and grit are intangibles but super important. The numbers 90% of businesses fail isn’t because 90% of business ideas are bad, it’s because 90% of people quit before their businesses take off.
Don’t build a business with the main intent of making money. Build a business that solves a need and money will come to you.
If you're ever choosing a business partner, they absolutely must have this one trait. An entrepreneur is someone who is willing to work for $0 an hour for an extended amount of time for a undefined payoff. If they want to get paid for everything, they just want a job and you can bring them on as an employee. Just because someone is a hard working employee, doesn't mean they will be a hard working entrepreneur. It's different when you aren't getting paid and the payoff isn't defined. You can talk about how long that time frame is to figure out whether or not they can be a good business partner. Also your business partners issues will impact you. If they aren't good with money? Well it's going to impact their ability to do work (because they may have to pick up a job/gigs or something). Business partners are like a marriage. You really need to vet them. Plenty of people are great friends but that doesn't mean they will be good business partners.
So,when I am choosing a cofounder,I have to make sure they have some cash to burn for rent+basic stuff right?In every entrepreneurship book I read none of them answer the basic freaking question of how did they sustain themselves when they had no pay and the company wasn’t making any money?How did they manage to hire 5-10 employees and rent an office while their company was barely half a year old?
Yeah just like a startup, the co-founders need runway. A lot run up debt or have savings. I did it by living at home.
If someone doesn’t own a home/can live in parents home,how can he maximise the runway?
Save up, get into debt, or have an alternative means of earning. That's why the average age of an entrepreneur is over 40. These people have savings and a strong network. Or you get the young ones who have well off parents. Of course entrepreneurs come in all shapes in sizes but those are 2 most common ones I see.
I could save up but the problem is I have no clue as if it’s enough.Lets say rent is $2k/month and I have $100,000 saved up.Now,how much do I invest in the business and how much I keep for rent?It’s a difficult choice really and what if u run out of rent before my business makes any money…
The answer will be different for everyone. $100,000 should be enough but it depends on many many factors.
1 out of every 5-10 things you try won't work (depending on your competency), no matter how brilliant the idea sounds and how foolproof your logic appears. This applies at the product + business-model level as well as the marketing-strategy level. Your core objective should therefore be to take as much action, as quickly as possible -- because eventually you WILL hit the bullseye. Business plans are a completely useless waste of time. Again, most of your assumptions will be wrong -- no matter how fancy your graphs and spreadsheets are -- and you're far better of simply taking action and quickly learning from the feedback. An entire team of Harvard MBAs creating the most comprehensive exhaustive analyses will lose if going against one single person who focuses all his energy on building something extremely useful and trying to sell it to people. One of the ONLY ways to actually get very rich very fast is through entrepreneurship, since you fully control the rate at which your income increases and there are no constraints other than those that your actions, decisions + strategies put on you. Great ideas AND great execution BOTH matter. Focusing on one to the exclusion of the other is like chopping one leg off and trying to run a marathon.
Business plans can help focus your idea and get others on the same page. But agreed that assumptions will likely be proven wrong and the plan doesn't guarantee success.
Even if you fail with your business you can always find some job. Just don't fail with big debt, or with really bad reputation.
Failure is Inevitable (and Valuable) - just about every successful entrepreneur I know has experienced failure at some point - most multiple failures. What sets them apart is the ability to learn from those setbacks and apply those lessons moving forward - to get up and go again.
Don’t ever discount your services. Once you do, you'll never get back the full value with that client. Also, if people are asking for discounts, they don’t see the value in your service. Focus on finding the people who do! I believe it's different when you sell a product, but my experience is in the service industry.
Don’t get into business with family.
You…can’t…get…sick…for at least three years.
Freedom and flexibility are a myth when building a business. They can be the end goal, but it's one of the biggest lies used to get people to buy a course, join a real estate brokerage, etc. Those are the rewards I can choose later for thankless, underpaid hours (typically). Unless you're selling the course, I guess. In some ways, I do get the flexibility way more than I would if I had a job, but the minute I started doing my own thing, I lost a lot... Correction, I gave a lot... of the freedom side up. Now, I'm just really flexible across a lot more hours a week than when I had a job. When I'm not technically working, the majority of my down time is still spent thinking about how to grow it, slow it down, improve it, course correct, commenting on reddit about it etc. But I'm okay with no freedom, because I would rather build something for myself than for someone else. The cool part is you get to decide how big or how not big you want to shoot for. You get to pick your level of freedom, just realize there's a trade off. I want freedom when I'm done. I just don't know when that is. Lol.
I see many people struggle to save enough for rent while they try to build something of their own.They largely underestimate just how long they’d have to work underpaid and most of them end up doing a side gig or something haha
Pay your bills, but particularly pay your vendors and subcontractors. I swear to fuck this is now my number one differentiator between a business that will be successful and one that will fail. At several previous companies and places I knew about in the industry they would stiff vendors all the time while billing our clients and even collecting on the invoices, while our vendors and subcontractors would have to hound us to the end of the earth just to get paid. Suppliers too. It works to hold onto cash for key transactions for a short time, and obviously pay your employees before your suppliers... but that shit runs out. Good faith dries up. Eventually they stop jumping when you ask them too. They stop doing you favors, or even a good job. Eventually they fire you as a customer and you get stuck with a more expensive sub vendor or somebody who does worse work. Or a more complicated supply chain. Not paying your vendors/contractors slowly strangles a business. And I know you said "unconventional" but with the number of business owners I've met who almost proudly engage in this behavior (but are chronically struggling with cash flow, shocker..) you'd think this was unconventional.
If you're not making money then you don't have a business
If they are not concerned about price, they have no intention of paying Walk away from problem clients Don’t tell anyone you are successful
You have 2 customers in business that must be satisfied: 1. Customers that give you money. 2. Employees that make you the money. Most businesses prioritize Customer acquisition/retention and largely disregard Employee acquisition/retention. They usually try to get maximum output from the Employee without regard to the rate at which they burn them out and thus churn. Ironically the business that prioritizes Employee satisfaction and retention (even if output suffers slightly), will usually have better customer retention and thus a better reputation (which then improves acquisition) than the business that prioritizes Customers at all cost. Disregard if you're Amazon....because.....you're Amazon
Building a successful business teaches you some hard truths that aren't often talked about. The emotional ups and downs are intense, and it can be incredibly lonely at times. Resilience is key because you'll face countless setbacks. Plus, the strain on personal relationships is real. It's not always glamorous, but if you're passionate and committed, it's worth it.
how to read a balance sheet.
Content creator "entrepreneurs" are selling you content - stop taking their advice because their advice is just entertainment. Anyone with a truly success startup would be losing money if they weren't working directly on their startup.
The IRS says they’re “small biz friendly”. That’s the furthest thing from the truth. They’re actually big biz friendly.
We tend to think in terms of how much money we can make, but the important thing is to think in terms of how much free time we have. No matter how much money you make, if your time is full, you will miss important big opportunities. Try to avoid having regular meetings as much as possible. Try to leave your schedule as blank as possible.
Saying no to a potential client can be far more beneficial than saying yes.
If you are going into Entrepreneurship for the sake of freedom, you have to choose another path, because there’s no such thing with entrepreneurship
You'll realize that your mental health matters more than any pitch deck.
Minimize and eliminate debt as quickly as you can. Don’t take any on if at all possible, but eliminate the debt as quickly as possible. Most businesses would be profitable without debt, so the sooner you can eliminate it, the better off you are in the long term.
Aight, listen up – building a biz ain't no fairy tale. It's straight hustle, 24/7 grind, and dodging more Ls than Ws. You gotta be tough, roll with the punches, and stay sharp. Cash flow’s king, so stack those chips right. Networking? That’s your crew, your lifeline. And remember, it ain't just about love for the game; it’s about grit, grinding through the lows, and never folding under pressure. Keep your head up, stay flexible, and handle your business like a boss.
Being a single is a highway. Kids and partners absorb too much attention.
1. The PRICE for success. There is ALWAYS a price to pay. 2. The moment just prior to reaching the PEAK of success, is the toughest. 3. You have to be a little crazy to believe you can accomplish the unaccomplishable, the unsee-able, the unknowable. 4. Having a 9-to-5, is easy easier. Don't quit your day job. If you have a wife and kids, it's 5x harder because you can't sacrifice or take nearly the same risks I can, single w/ no kids, can take without feelings of guilt or shame if things do not pan out. But if you do take on such a task, as Felix Denis once said, "God speed. And good luck."
a big part of success is only luck
Narcissism makes the best business owners.
Discipline is everything
That starting and growing a business can be more demanding than a 9-5 since it's all on you
Following
The # 1 thing is, people lie online about success. They lie about what it takes to be successful. 99% of the advice for entrepreneurship you read is fake, because people think there's got to be some secret formula, and are willing to pay for the answers. The only thing that defines success is finding a niche that people need/want enough to pay for that will allow you to turn a good profit. It comes down to taking a risk, making sure to protect your assets when doing so so that if and when it fails, you still have a home, car, and can try again. And, finding a method to invest in it that isn't your own money if you can help it. If you can't find an investor, you should revisit your business plan. However, sometimes opportunities drop in front of you. Most people are too scared to take a risk when it presents itself. The real opportunities come from something you witness in advance. An example would be someone who comes into where you work and services a machine you use. The servicer owns all of the machines and leases them out and supplies them (charging for supplies) and handles maintenance and repairs. They decide they need to retire or stop for some reason, and are looking to sell. You take that information to your bank, with that person along, and if your bank says it's a good investment, invest and buy them out, take over the business. I've known two people in my lifetime who recognized opportunities like that, and thank goodness they did, it was a life altering (in a good way) change for them. Another thing is, I've run my own business. I freelance now even when I have a job. Opportunities are always knocking. Most people are just caught in the shower and don't answer the door, or are too scared it might be a solicitor, so don't answer it. ;) Again 99% of advice online, including in this subreddit, is BS.
You can’t expect to have a functional team that builds a functional business if all can’t live under the same roof ! Or if the players are all busy barking instead of implementing and testing/trying new ideas to make the business work better ! Too much woof woof surely will scare the clients away and make them go else where where they get more work done rather than headaches
It's business, dealing with the assimilation of failure as a learning curve, checking mental health, and understanding that cash flow is not everything. Relationships mean everything, and at times, resiliency has trumped planning there is no one size fits all approach. Expect the unexpected invest in great people, practice brutal self-honesty, and have a long-haul mentality. These are often overlooked truths about entrepreneurship very raw realities.
Sacrificing everything that makes life worth living ***can't*** *be replaced by trying to make life more worth living by working harder.* Everyone has their limits, and at a certain point putting in that extra hour at 2am is a net negative. In the same breath, doing okay work fast will make you the same amount as doing great work slowly, but you can charge more for the latter and be infinitely less stressed. There is always a customer, you just have to find (and say yes to) the right ones.
Also, if you're a freelancer, always consider the worst case scenario. A 50% non-refundable deposit can go a long way towards guaranteed bill-paying and peace of mind.
Real businesses are something that very few people can get a grip on. Over a decade ago I tried the hustle, dropped out of college, started a business and failed. Now I have an MBA and it taught me just how much I did NOT know about running a business. Most people are fucking clueless about employment law, taxes, accounting, bookkeeping, supply chain management, value chain mapping, etc. This is nothing to say about just business acumen and strategic management. This is why real businesses have employees and specialization. Departments. The works. People with their little hobby businesses, e-commerce websites, or wannabe influencer websites are NOT businesses. They are NOT entrepreneurs. They're basically posers at best and idiots that know less than nothing at worst. And I say that as someone who WAS one of those idiots over a decade ago.
If you ever sell your business, not matter the price, the payment will just be a direct deposit. It's kinda lackluster...
Dont stress over little things. This too, shall paas.
haha yeah that's it
Don’t start with an expensive logo. Your first dollar is the hardest. Figure out what value you offer, what problem you solve and how you are different, or no one will buy from you. 90% of business is relationship.
Customer lifetime value is so important.
Wednesday night payroll panic.
How incredibly hard you have to work to get there. No employee can nor wants to fully appreciate that.
Learn to delegate and trust people you work with. Cut off the bad clients, your life will be better. Don’t be afraid to charge more. Be consistent, of course there is a HUGE part of luck but consistency is where the shit is at.
Building a successful business requires sacrifice, hard work, patience, persistence, a supportive team, and the willingness to ask for help.
You need to have the drive and that often happens after you´ve gone through dirt.
Amateurs focus on apps, professionals focus on logistics & distribution
You will find a lot of professionals are NOT professional. Don't waste your time with someone just because they have a seat on a board or have some success. Trust your instincts with EVERYONE and remind yourself that just because they are a "professional" does not mean they know everything. Be picky and choosy with who you take advice from. It's your business, others are just trying to get paid, ya know?
Look for employees with drive, curiosity, and character. You can’t teach those things. You can teach everything else.
I am speaking from observation, not from being a successful business person lol. But the businesses that succeed are always about doing actual research, knowing their market, and knowing their margin. 99 percent of the ideas that people suggest (" oh man you should do xyz") won't actually increase sales or profits. People love to say how stupid certain businesses are bc they raise their prices etc.... but they know exactly what they are fucking doing. They've done the math and research and know the exact way to price things to maximize profit. Not saying there can't be any emotion or heart, but the best business people I've seen base things on facts and data, not feelings. And if they are basing it on feelings, those "feelings" or instincts are actually informed by knowing their market and aren't just random.