bMightie

Your quiet seasons can still count, not all progress is visible 🩵🌸✨🌱

Starting a business can look like swapping employment for more freedom and control. What many new founders underestimate is just how different the working conditions are in real life versus what they mentally prepared for 🤯 You gain autonomy, but you may also lose the manager, salary, established reputation, colleagues, structure, and customers that previously made doing your job much easier. 👇 Inside this week’s Before Takeoff - bit.ly/bt-what-new-founders-…, I break down: → Why the business can keep occupying your brain long after you stop working → Why freedom creates a surprising amount of self-management → How little time you may actually spend doing the thing you started the business to do → Why early entrepreneurship involves repeated social exposure through selling, following up, asking, networking and being visible → How small samples of customer activity can make progress feel much better or worse than it actually is → Why the feedback loop between good work and business results can take much longer than expected → Why your personal capacity becomes part of the business model → Why getting more customers can temporarily make founder life harder rather than easier 🌟 Understanding the demands of entrepreneur life early gives you a better chance of building a business you can realistically sustain long enough for it to take off. 👉 ✈️ Subscribe to Before Takeoff for weekly founder intelligence for the solo and bootstrapped journey from day zero to takeoff: beforetakeoff.substack.com

Wishing you more abundance 🩵🌸✨🌱

When swamped with customer requests from everywhere, it's helpful to - look at who the feedback is coming from, - whether they fit your ideal customer profile, and - how likely they are to actually buy from you. 🌟 The priority goes to the ideal customer profile and likelihood to buy. 👉 Pay attention too to whether similar requests keep repeating across different customer profiles, as this shows universal appeal for those requests. Otherwise, you can end up trying to serve everyone and every request that can get increasingly difficult to manage or scale 🤯✨

At a higher price point, customers tend to become more cautious, involve more people in the decision-making process, and look for stronger proof and reassurance before committing ✨ 🌟 So your messaging has to address all those concerns, plus the views of different decision-makers. 👉 Customers may also start placing greater value on things like brand reputation, elevation to their status if they buy from you, and the overall customer and product experience, rather than just product excellence.

Every gain has a trade off. Choose your hard 🌱✨🩵🌸

Give yourself permission to rest 🌱✨🌸🩵

Employees-turned-entrepreneurs are often used to measuring progress by how much work they've completed. As a founder, you can be extremely busy and productive, but still make very little progress, if all that effort isn't bringing your business closer to winning customers or generating more revenue 🤯✨

In the early days, the founder is often the main salesperson for the business. If they can't close sales, there is no business, no matter how great the product is 🤯✨

May your day be filled with peace and lightness 🌸✨🩵🌱

One awkward milestone in an early business is realising that not all revenue is equally useful anymore. The custom project or unusual customer you would once have jumped at may now take time and capacity away from the customers, offers and processes you are trying to make repeatable. As the business develops, a good sale starts to mean more than “someone is willing to pay.” It also needs to fit the direction you are building towards. Sometimes saying no to available revenue is part of protecting the business you actually want to grow. 👉 Follow @bMightie for more founder intelligence for idea to early revenue businesses to build and grow with better clarity and confidence for takeoff.

It's vital to assess what we're scaling before diving in, more of what's not quite working, will only be amplified at a larger scale ✨

Especially for founders from a technical or specialist background, customer acquisition can be one of the earliest hurdles. Expert-turned-founders are inclined to overindex on product excellence, and end up learning too late that "build and they'll come" is a myth in most cases 🤯✨

Good things can still happen, keep the faith 🌸🌱✨🩵l

New founders often learned too late that they need to start building visibility early, because it takes time for - customers to understand their offer, and - become familiar with their business before eventually considering buying from them 🌟

Founders may find it hard to define their best Ideal Customer Profile in the early days. 🌟 But starting with identifying the non-ideal profiles can be a way to reduce the selection into something sharper and more refined to work with.

Give yourself more credit, remember how strong you are 🌸🫶✨🩵

It is easy to spend months fixing something that was never the real bottleneck.  More marketing will not help much if customers do not trust the offer. Better software will not fix delivery if the underlying process keeps changing. Before adding another tool, campaign or system, trace where progress is actually breaking down.  The highest-leverage move is usually the one that improves the current constraint, not the most sophisticated solution available. 👉 Follow @bMightie for more founder intelligence for idea to early revenue businesses to build and grow with better clarity and confidence for takeoff.

👉 Until the deal is closed and cash is in the bank, there are often other signs of increasing commitment or interest from the client, such as - the willingness to bring in another decision maker to the conversation, - spending time on a demo call or webinar, - asking questions around the delivery or cancellation, etc.

Oftentimes experts-turned-entrepreneurs dive head into building their product, only to realise at launch that - access to their target market is extremely hard or - expensive as a new solo-led business without the backing of the large corporation they left. As it can take 9, 18 to 36 months to build that access, founders often have to find a way to last the distance financially or pivot 🤯✨