Two people decide to start their side business. Let’s call them Dave and Jason.
Dave’s business starts by offering one service to one type of customer. He finds five people willing to pay for it and they do the work themselves
Jason exits the gate with three services, multiple pricing options, separate landing pages and a handful of marketing channels. He plans for multiple instant sales right from the outset.
Jason’s business looks more serious.
And it’s created way more ways to be wrong.
This is the lesson I want you to leave with:
When you start out, your main problem is uncertainty. You don’t yet know exactly who’ll buy, what they’ll pay, how long delivery will take, what customers will complain about, or what they’ll ask for next.
Your ‘job one’ is to reduce that uncertainty as cheaply and quickly as possible.
Every extra offer creates another question
A brand new business has plenty to learn:
Who actually buys?
Which problem bothers them enough to spend money fixing it?
Which part of your offer matters most?
What price works?
How long does delivery take?
Which parts of the process cause trouble?
Where do customers find you?
If you offer just one service, you begin answering those questions.
If you launch many services and price points at once, you multiply them tenfold. That’s a lot of spinning plates to deal with.
Example: Sales are weaker than expected. Perhaps:
The customer is wrong.
The price is wrong.
One service nails it and the others just confuse people.
Your messaging is misdirected.
You spread your attention so thin you never join the dots.
Complexity creates noise. Simplicity lets you figure it out, one incremental change at a time.
Your first few months should produce information. You’re discovering what deserves more time, money and attention, so you can do more of it and less of everything else.
Five customers teach you plenty
Five paying customers sound unimpressive beside the humblebrag numbers people publish online.
And five paying customers will teach you a great deal.
Listen to the questions customers ask before buying. Notice what they misunderstand. Record how long each job actually takes. Compare what you expected to spend with what you spent. Look at what customers value enough to mention afterwards.
Record it all.
Very quickly, you’ll find most of the wrong assumptions you made when you started. You have the information you need to make your corrections and get back on track.
You don’t learn this stuff by designing your business on paper. That’s a starting point for sure, but it’s real-world experience that wins.
Real customers produce real evidence.
Small makes mistakes cheaper
Your early decisions will include mistakes, guaranteed. Keeping the business small at the beginning limits what those mistakes cost you.
If your price is too low, you have underpriced five jobs rather than fifty.
If the service takes twice as long, you change the process before the queue of customers depends on it.
If nobody wants the offer, you change it without abandoning the up-front work, software, or sales system.
Same goes for marketing. Test one channel before trying six. Learn what gets a response before paying Meta and Google to automate it.
Every commitment makes changing direction harder.
Cash spent before you understand the business is especially expensive because you are spending it to support assumptions rather than proven demand.
Earn the right to add complexity
Starting small doesn’t mean staying small. It means you add complexity when the business gives you the reasons to do so:
Add another service when customers ask for something adjacent to the first.
Add another sales channel when the current one gives you enough evidence to justify the spend.
Add systems when manual work is expensive enough to automate.
Add capacity when demand exceeds what you can deliver.
Each addition solves a problem you’ve grown into.
This is a smart way to think about growth. You stop building for the business you hope will exist and incrementally improve what customers already said they want.
Start with one thing
Choose one customer type.
Choose one problem worth solving.
Create one offer.
Find a small number of real buyers and deliver it.
Pay attention to what happens. What took too long? What cost more than expected? What did customers value? What did they ignore? What did they ask for next?
Change what needs to change and when it’s time, decide what deserves to be added.
Make the business earn each new layer of complexity.
