Once you have a paying customer, congrats — you’re not a startup anymore, now you’re a business.
Having a paying customer means you have found initial product market fit, so it’s time to try to repeat this business model and get more customers.
In many cases you are not able to get more customers, as it turns out your product / service was only relevant for that one single customer.
When this happens you return to the searching phase and viola – you’re a startup again!
I have tried to build a business a few times. Each project was killed for one reason or another. Most times because I couldn’t make it past the searching phase. In other cases I learned a ton, and decided I didn’t want to do that anymore.
- online farmers market
- short story app
- workout tracker app
- a podcast (hosted and produced 26 episodes though!)
- a content account that grew to 60K followers
- selling stuff on ebay and amazon
- making websites
- newsletter (might consider re-visiting this one)
- re-selling college textbooks
- dropshipping water sports products
- lawn mowing business (started at 12 years old, to this day the only successful business I’ve started)
In all the above business attempts I found that getting your first few customers is the is so much more challenging than scaling.
But in many ways, searching is rewarding in and of itself.
I don’t have my own real business yet, but perhaps one day.
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