Everything I do comes down to principles, and the first one is this: go after the painful problem.
Not what you are building. Not what you are passionate about. Not what excites you. It is the headache people have that they will pay you to take away.
And it is not every headache. Some headaches people can live with. They will keep those, they will manage them, and you will struggle to sell them a cure. The headache you want is the one sitting at the back of their mind, the one they are desperate to throw away. That is the one worth solving. In one recent engagement, the client said it plainly: they wanted two entire workstreams taken completely off their hands so they could face their other headaches. That is the signal. That is what you build for.
#Execution, confidence, and the package
After the problem comes execution.
That same client asked for a bill on the back of a concept and a recommendation. That tells you something: we had already gotten enough right for them to want to pay immediately. But between the problem and the payment sits your delivery. Within three to five minutes of meeting, they knew they were in the right hands. That comfort came from guidance: this is how this is done, this is how that is done. That confidence is everything, because people do not know you.
And confidence cuts across everything. People check you online. They check your dressing, your write-ups, your posts, how you talk. They check everything. Does it inspire the confidence of someone who could hand you a billion-dollar programme, someone who wants to connect you to a deal of that size? Anything that does not give the impression of a serious person to do serious business with has to go. They have not met you before. It is pure perception, backed by the way you communicate what you know.
Third is the package. The quality of the documents. The clarity. The daily follow up. Every day their worry is being dealt with, because we keep providing incremental value, we keep showing progress, even before we have found anything yet. That is what moved them to say, we need to pay these people.
And underneath all of it is speed. It is not that others cannot do what you do. Can you do it fast? Can you plant that quick impression, that quick value, so the client can go and face their other headaches? The proposal is out the next day. You meet the next day. They see how fast you move and the quality you move with. And the outcome is money. I am not sure they even read the proposal or the price. They pulled out a phone and sent an invoice, five figures, just like that. That opening number turned out to be the floor, not the ceiling: the retainer that followed clears it every single month, and the first two months alone came to a multiple of it. For a first venture, that is not bad at all.
#Aim for profit, be a stallion
Winning the work is only half of it. What you aim the work at is the other half, and that half is a defence I have had to make to more than one person.
Plenty of people spend money. They have merchandise, they sponsor events, they are always doing something. That does not make them profitable. Making revenue is one thing. Spending money is another. Neither is the point. The point, the last and highest aim, is profit. Are you actually going to be profitable?
You should be profitable from day one, even in a year one scenario. It is far better to be profitable in your first year than to reach billionaire revenue with no cash you can actually take home. Because when you look closely, very few companies are truly profitable. Firms fold after three or four years. Even the ones that last seven years, only a handful are genuinely making money. Paying salaries does not mean profit. Funding does not mean profit.
A founder I have sat with makes the point better than any lecture could. Their company ran for years with hundreds of staff and a payroll, even on a conservative estimate, of tens of thousands of dollars going out every single month, with no venture capital propping it up. A local-currency business, earning at home. Not shiny. But strong. That is the kind of business I want to teach.
You do not have to be the Chinese-style startup. You do not have to be worth a billion dollars in paper money.
Be a stallion, not a unicorn. The unicorn is shiny. The stallion is strong.
I would rather be genuinely worth $20 million than carry a $500 million valuation that is only paper. If you are making a real million in profit from a business small enough to be invisible, that settles me. Let me be worth it truly, no matter how small.
#The founder life is not what they show you
Everything above gets paid for somewhere, and this is the part the shiny pictures leave out. It is not as glamorous as you think.
The life hands you stretches of four days where you barely sleep. You go, you grab something quick to eat, you come back within a few hours, and you are still going. It collects from your body as surely as it collects from your calendar. It is not as easy as it appears.
Look at the real ones. One founder I know had no fancy setup at all, just a small screen and his laptop, nothing else. Because anything you add to your desk that does not make extra money, for you or for your investors, is a waste. That is the life. If travelling will not make you extra money, if attending an event will not make you extra money, why go? Everything bends towards the same question: does this make more money? I have watched a website stay down for a year or two and nobody move to fix it, because it was not adding to what was being earned.
Meanwhile the noise never stops. Two or three times a day, a message pops up: this is broken, that is broken, can you call, can you call. Everybody living inside the next problem. But the people posting the shiny pictures rarely show you that part.
And yet our ecosystem keeps projecting a false picture of what it means to build. The cool workspace. The big curved screen. The mechanical keyboard. The nice wallpaper behind the desk. The flights, the vacations, the content. As if that is what building looks like.
It is not. Unless you are living off investor money, and even then it is real investor money, with real investors calling you every night. You will not have the energy for the theatre. And the ethic does not change with the title: run a startup, run a practice, work for yourself, it is the same discipline. The work is the work. Chase the headache, execute fast, earn real profit, and let the results speak louder than the wallpaper.