“the article” for your first business: a no-nonsense guide to getting started

Like everything in life, successful businesses have to have some rules or strategies that they used to grow. I took the first step to help myself understand better how they operate and how they succeed. In this article I will share my findings and my conclusions about this important topic.

Successful businesses are based on the cause and effect rule. If you follow the principles and you are willing to experiment, mathematically it is impossible to fail.

Grab a huge cup of coffee, close the other tabs, and fasten your seatbelt.

While I was researching this topic I found that there should be tools or best practices when it comes to starting a business or improving one. It is important to mention that these principles apply to small and bigger businesses, so the scale does not really matter. I was looking for success stories about how they built their venture and luckily there were some connections between them.

Below I summarized most of the ideas in a chronological order, so these principles and concepts build on top of each other. I hope this will also make sense for you, because it certainly does for me.

For the first part I will assume that you have an idea, but if you do not, in the practical example there will be some guidelines. Also, if you think you are not prepared, I will include one section about what skills you should have. ?

What is business design?

Before we even start with to do’s, the importance of business design should be addressed. People are obsessed with this topic for a reason, they think this will be one of the most important skills in the future.

While the world is changing fast, one thing will always remain the same, customers. They are the core of any business, they will keep us alive and make the operation successful.

Businesses are like functions in a software. Every function might have their inputs, some operation depending on the input and an output at the end. Every part of the company is just a collection of functions that we have to optimize as we do our software.

What is a business then? A business is a system for commercial, professional or industrial activity. A business takes inputs, does some activities, creates outputs, and sells them.

Selling something can be challenging, but should not always be the case. This is where business design becomes handy. Business designers are always thinking about the customer. They approach people and problems from a particular perspective, one informed by design-specific tools like ideation, prototyping, and validation. They use human-centered tools, skills, and a mindset to search for, design, and execute new value propositions and business models based on what they’ve learned. Designers do this continually, iterating constantly to uncover opportunities within the fog of uncertainty.

Why did I even start with this topic? Every business that aims for success has to sell something to make money and to be able to put bread on the table. By understanding what your customer wants you will be able to create a product that solves problems or gives huge gains, you will be able to create ads and market your product easier, you will be able to increase profits, and most importantly, you might be able to change your customers life. Ask questions, listen and watch, your customers will lead you in the right direction, this will make you a business designer.

Every business should start with understanding their customers.

Every design journey starts somewhere. Perhaps that somewhere is a brand-new company searching for its sustainable (money-making) business model. Or maybe the journey is being taken by an existing business looking for new directions so it can stay competitive and grow.

That being said, let’s discuss what steps and phases are common when starting a new venture and what are the challenges that you might face during the process.

Phases of a business

For a long time I did not see what comes after what and I could not understand the ideal flow of a business. But when you invest some time and research the topic, you will face what the steps are, and they are not even hidden.

I have mentioned earlier what a business designer does. They have ideas, then they make prototypes, and at the end they try to validate them somehow. We will have to do the same first.

When trying to improve a business or starting a new one, paper/software will still be one of our best friends. Using them we will be able to visualize our ideas and solutions. Most of the time businesses that make sense on paper will work in real life as well.

Let’s start our journey.

Customer Development Model (CDM)

When I first read about this I was like “one more useless topic”, but I had to quickly change my mind. The concept is developed by Steve Blank, who is one of the imagineers of the LEAN methodology.

Customer Development Model is an iterative and flexible framework designed to navigate the uncertainties of launching a startup or entering a new market.

It has some advantages over traditional business plans. Traditional business planning assumes that demand for a product already exists, the CDM on the other hand, recognizes that most new businesses operate under conditions of extreme uncertainty. It provides a structured process to test assumptions, validate hypotheses, and adapt strategies before scaling.

At its core, the CDM challenges entrepreneurs to treat their initial business ideas, market assumptions, and product features as hypotheses rather than facts. These hypotheses must be systematically tested through real-world interactions with potential customers. Instead of relying solely on internal projections or theoretical market research, businesses following the CDM engage in a continuous learning and discovery loop to refine their value proposition, product-market fit, and go-to-market strategy.

The CDM consists of four key stages:

1. Customer Discovery (Phase 1: Learning) – The goal of this phase is to identify a real problem worth solving. Startups engage with potential customers through interviews, surveys, and prototypes to validate whether their assumptions about pain points and market needs are accurate. The focus is on understanding the problem, not selling a solution.
2. Customer Validation (Phase 2: Building) – Once a problem is confirmed, the next step is testing whether the startup’s solution truly resonates with customers. This stage ensures that the company can develop a repeatable and scalable sales process, refining its product, pricing, and messaging through early adopters. If customer interest and willingness to pay are weak, it’s a signal to pivot (think more) or refine the approach.
3. Customer Creation (Phase 3: Scaling) – With a validated business model, startups can now focus on expanding their market reach. This phase involves scaling marketing and sales efforts to attract a larger audience, ensuring that customer acquisition is efficient and sustainable.
4. Company Building – At this stage, the startup transitions from an experimental, learning-driven organization into a structured company with defined teams, processes, and departments. The informal, founder-led approach shifts to a scalable operational model, ensuring long-term growth and stability.

By following this process, entrepreneurs can minimize the risk of premature scaling, which is one of the most common reasons businesses fail. It will drain all of your resources, money, time and energy, without any success, don’t do that.

Instead of building a fully developed product before understanding customer needs, the CDM ensures that startups remain agile, adjusting their approach based on validated learning.

Before we jump into the first phase, I would like you to give an example of what happens if you do not use this.

False positive businesses

I am sure that you already heard some stories about businesses that are just good enough to make a living for the owner, and maybe for their employees. But they are always living on the edge, they are trapped and cannot change anything in their processes or workflow, because they are one month away from bankruptcy. Because of the necessity and lack of funds they will always remain on the same level and will not reach the final state.

This always comes down to two things:

1. Most of the time they jump over one of the phases in the process, they might get angel investments or some funds that are not from real, living customers, so they might fool themselves that they are on the good track because they made some money. That is not a good start in my opinion. If you want to fool the market, you will always be wrong.

The best businesses can work on a small scale, but also can be scaled to the stars.

2. Lack of willingness to learn from others who already did what you want. There is nothing new in the realm of starting businesses, they are already solved, but learning is required to be able to use them. In my eyes, this is what differentiates a successful venture from a failing one, the preparation of the owner. Here are the things you might have when starting out.

Phase 1 – Learning

In my city I have seen several failing businesses. People usually try to create a new fast food restaurant or a clothing store, but after a few months a fraction of them are still operating. I believe this is a very common scenario in the world, but it will always come down to one missing point.

These businesses oversee the first phase. They do not address the problems that customers have. There are already great restaurants and the hunger of the people is already solved, I would not recommend being in the line of the failing ones. If you can serve something else than the others do, or in a different format, then you might be on a good track.

To understand what customers want, there are multiple great tools to help us.

Value proposition

Understanding your unique value proposition is a thing that you would never regret. It can help you visualize and understand your customers, so product development, marketing, creating ads would become an easy job.

Value proposition defines the unique value a company offers to its customers, explaining why they should choose its products or services over competitors. Describes how you create value for your customers and how you solve their problems. It communicates clear benefits, helping customers understand how the product or service solves their problems or improves their life. It aligns internal teams around a common goal, ensuring marketing, sales, and product development efforts are focused on delivering the promised value.

By addressing customer needs effectively, it can increase sales, retention, and referrals.

Many existing, established businesses, especially non-startup businesses, focus solely on getting products to market while reducing costs and increasing margins. In these businesses, strategy is executed in a linear way: prepare; execute. What’s often missing in this story is the customer.

There is a well known canvas for this concept. We will go through it as you should logically fill it in and at the end I will show you how I would do it.

Thinking about these quadrants will always be on your side. Observing customers to understand them will give you fresh insights into their needs. What we can see on the right side are our customers. What they want to solve and what obstacles might they have, and at the end what would make them feel they succeed? On the left side we see our offer of a solution for our customer’s problem. By honestly filling in this canvas can help us understand what we are even trying to do.

Minimum viable segment

When working with the value proposition canvas, we want to find a segment of customers with the same needs, that would be our minimum viable segment. Not every person can be your customer, and it is totally fine, anyways you don’t want to waste your time on customers that do not fit in your plan or segment. A good start is to identify them as:

• Are they individuals, small businesses or enterprises?
• Who are they in terms of age, gender, location or income level?
• What are their daily habits?
• What are their interests, motivations?

We will start with assumptions that we think might work, later we will validate our ideas anyways. Reality is different from what you assume, so validation will still be important. Of course there are multiple ways how the canvas can be filled in, but we will stick to the default one, starting from the customer and his/her jobs.

Customer Jobs

Customer jobs are the tasks, problems, or goals that customers aim to accomplish. What are your customers trying to get done?

Customers hire products and services to help them get a job done in a particular way

You might have faced a situation where you had to find the best solution for your problem. Once I wanted to learn how my camera works. That is a Sony camera and somebody made a course on how to use it in different environments. Of course I was interested because my job was to be able to use my camera as well as possible. So the guy clearly found a good problem and there is a hungry audience for it, big win.

Identifying customer jobs is not always straightforward. But for better understanding we can differentiate between multiple types of jobs:

1. Functional Tasks that customers try to perform or complete, problems they try to solve, or needs they try to satisfy. For example: mow the lawn, eat healthy, write a report.
2. Social How customers want to be perceived by others: look trendy, be perceived as competent.
3. Emotional A specific emotional state customers seek: feel secure.
4. Supporting Supporting jobs in the context of purchasing and consuming value: reservation, delivery.

I am sure you can find multiple jobs, but we have to focus on as little as possible. There is no such company of product that can address multiple high-value jobs. Your goal should be to find a job that is worth solving. Later of course you can have multiple solutions for different jobs, but in that case you already know what you are doing.

Jobs will last, but products don’t. Just think about the music listening industry. The job is to listen and enjoy music. At the beginning we had CD players and they are totally switched up with online streaming.

If you understand the job that the customer is trying to solve, it becomes clear how to improve the product, how to market it and how to make money with it.

But keep in mind if your problem that you address is always at the bottom of your customers list, you are not in a good position. There are few properties that identify a job that is high value.

1. Urgent or Important I am sure that you have problems that are not yet solved, but it is not so urgent for you. It will be good to be solved in 5 years, but now it is still bearable. If you want to improve or start a business that is based around a non urgent job, it will be hard to solve that. You will always have to do sales and convince the customer that they should solve it now. That will be hard and expensive.
2. Unavoidable There will always be jobs that are self explanatory that need to be solved. One of my favorites is learning, it will forever be fundamental. But there are jobs that are so unavoidable like paying taxes, accounting, and death. You cannot influence them, but you can come up with new solutions.
3. Underserved A job is underserved when existing solutions are inadequate, difficult to use, or not accessible to a large portion of the market. Before cloud storage, people had to carry USB drives everywhere. The job of storing and accessing files from anywhere was underserved.
4. Unworkable or Expensive to Ignore If the consequences are costly or painful the job might be worth solving. What happens if the job is not being solved, who gets fired? Having security risk or broken business processes is for sure of this type.

Your equation for a high-value job is really simple at the end.

A high-value job is urgent, unavoidable, underserved, and costly to ignore.

Once we’ve identified a high-value job, the next step is understanding what customers gain when it’s successfully completed.

Gains

Gains describe what success looks like for the customer. They describe the positive outcomes customers expect or desire when completing a job successfully. They indicate how customers measure success and the benefits they seek.

Based on our selected job we can identify what success looks like. There is a useful pyramid we can use for it.

People are fundamentally interested in 4 things:

• more money
• more status
• being more attractive
• health

If your solution improves financial well-being, social status, personal well-being, or daily convenience, you are addressing strong customer motivations. Anyways, your goal is to have as many gains as possible, this is hard to identify.

Of course we cannot offer every gain that the customers might want. Not all gains are equally important. We categorize them based on their impact on the customer’s experience:

• Required Gain (Must-Have) – A phone must be able to make calls.
• Expected Gain (Basic Needs) – A laptop should have a good battery life.
• Desired Gain (Nice-to-Have) – A phone with a high refresh rate screen.
• Unexpected Gain (Delightful Surprise) – A phone automatically adjusting its sound settings based on the environment.

By listing required and expected gains, we can identify where customers experience frustrations (pains) when these gains are not met.

Pains

Identifying customer pains involves understanding what failure looks like for them—whether it’s wasted time, financial loss, or an unmet need. This includes undesired outcomes, persistent problems, and dislikes that frustrate customers in their attempts to achieve a goal. Obstacles preventing them from getting the job done efficiently, such as lack of resources, complexity, or inefficiencies, are critical to note.

Additionally, the risks and fears they face—whether it’s potential failure, financial uncertainty, or loss of reputation—help shape a more precise understanding of their struggles. To effectively fill out pains, it’s useful to analyze each job the customer needs to complete and systematically list the challenges, frustrations, and risks associated with each step.

A customer’s pain is a problem, frustration, or obstacle that prevents the customer from achieving their desired outcome (gain). To validate if our customer profile accurately reflects real-world pains, we can use different research methods:

1. Data Detective

Analyze existing data sources and reports. I like to use amazon books, reddit and different forums. There I can find my potential customers and I can make some assumptions on their writings.

✅ Pros:

• Uses desk research (e.g., surveys, industry reports, analytics).
• Provides a solid foundation for further research.

❌ Cons:

• Data is static and may come from different contexts than our actual customers.
• Does not capture real-time behavior or emotions.

2. Journalist

Conduct customer interviews and surveys. Ask about past experiences instead of hypothetical situations. It can be really helpful if you know people who are struggling with something that you want to solve.

❌ Instead of: “Would you use X?”

✅ Ask: “When was the last time you did X?”

✅ Pros:

• Quick and inexpensive way to gather insights.

❌ Cons:

• People’s actual behavior often differs from what they say in interviews.
• Customers often don’t know what they truly want.

3. Impersonator

Experience the customer’s journey firsthand (e.g., using your own product/service like a new user would).

✅ Pros:

• Reveals unexpected issues and pain points.

❌ Cons:

• Limited to what you notice, may not capture all perspectives.

4. Scientist

Run experiments (A/B testing, prototypes, MVP launches). These topics are most of the time quite advanced solutions, but it is good to know about them.

✅ Pros:

• Data-driven insights rather than assumptions.
• Tests real user behavior under controlled conditions.

❌ Cons:

• Requires technical setup and iteration time.

Even after we are done with our research, talking to customers is still crucial, but asking the wrong questions can lead to misleading answers. People don’t always tell the truth—sometimes they say what they think you want to hear. To get real insights, you need to ask the right questions.

Ask your potential customer all the reasons they would not buy your product. Skip the pricing related ones.

Common Mistakes When Asking Customers

1. People will lie (unintentionally) if they think it’s what you want to hear.
2. Opinions are worthless – what people say they would do is different from what they actually do.
3. People know their problems but don’t always know the right solution.
4. Not all problems matter – just because something is inconvenient doesn’t mean it needs fixing.
5. Observing behavior is more valuable than asking – watching a customer in action reveals real inefficiencies.

A great tool to identify wrong questions is the The Mom Test. It is a framework from the book The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick. It helps you ask questions that lead to honest, useful, and actionable answers.

How It Works:

1. Don’t ask leading questions.
   ❌ “Would you use this product?”
   ✅ “Tell me about the last time you had this problem.”
2. Focus on past behavior, not opinions.
   ❌ “Do you think this would be useful?”
   ✅ “What tools do you use now? Why?”
3. Make them talk about their real experience.
   ❌ “Would you pay for this?”
   ✅ “How much are you currently spending on this problem?”

The key is to dig deeper into their experiences and behaviors, not just their opinions.

To this point we were discussing the right side of the value proposition canvas. Now let’s look into the left side.

Creating value for your customers

We must be aware that creating a good value proposition requires us to decide which tasks, problems, and gains we will focus on and which ones we will let go. There is no such product or service that addresses everything.

Solve one problem perfectly and the results will come.

The focus should not be on what products customers want, but on what jobs they are trying to get done.

”If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” – Henry Ford

Your solution that you might offer can be a product or service or groups of them. You have to know how the offer creates value. It is a good start if you can identify gain creators and pain relievers. The best is to express the benefits in money, percentages or time. But in general gain creators create, increase, improve, maximize something, while pain relievers eliminate, decrease, reduce, minimize, save, cut, free up resources.

Good offers can be good businesses, but for that you have to be aware of your customers. A good value is like vitamins or headache pills to your customers. Due to their nature, products that are low to no initial cost, give instant or continuous value and are simple to use are better.

How can we know if we found a worth of solving a problem and we can create a good offer for it? Let’s continue with finding the right fit.

Finding the Right Fit

A strong fit occurs when there is a clear connection between your value map (left side) and your customer profile (right side). This means that your products and services effectively address the jobs, pains, and gains that truly matter to your customers. When this happens, your solution creates real value by relieving pain and generating meaningful benefits.

Fit is achieved when customers get excited about your value proposition. This excitement happens when your solution tackles crucial customer tasks, alleviates pressing problems, and delivers essential benefits that customers truly care about. However, achieving and maintaining fit is challenging, that’s why value proposition design is so important.

Customers have high expectations and big desires when it comes to products and services, but they also understand that they can’t have everything. Instead of trying to satisfy every possible need, focus on the gains that matter most and create real impact in those areas.

Similarly, customers face many different problems, but no company can solve all of them. Instead of spreading resources too thin, concentrate on the most significant pain points, especially those that haven’t been properly addressed by existing solutions. By doing so, you can maximize your impact and create a compelling value proposition.

It is worth mentioning that if you can improve or do a better job than existing solutions that also can work, even better, there is a proven audience for it.

These three types of fit represent key milestones in developing a successful product and business. Let’s break them down:

1. Problem-Solution Fit

This is the foundation of any great product. At this stage, you have evidence that customers genuinely care about the jobs, pains, and gains you aim to address. You’ve validated that the problem exists and that your proposed solution is relevant.

• Definition: The initial stage where you identify a customer problem and confirm that your solution effectively addresses it.
• Focus: Ensuring that the problem is real and that your solution resonates with your target audience.
• Key Question: “Are we solving a meaningful problem for our customers?”

At this stage, your value proposition exists as a prototype, often just on paper or in an early test phase. The goal is to validate that the concept works before investing heavily in development.

2. Product-Market Fit

Once you’ve validated the problem and solution, the next step is gaining traction in the market. Product-market fit happens when customers actively use and adopt your product because it effectively solves their problem.

• Definition: Your product not only solves a problem but also meets the needs of a sizable market, with clear evidence of demand.
• Focus: Scaling the product and ensuring it provides consistent value to a growing customer base.
• Key Question: “Do customers love our product enough to recommend it to others?”

At this stage, customers aren’t just interested—they are engaged. They use your product regularly, give positive feedback, and refer others to it. You have early adopters, and your product is beginning to spread organically.

3. Business Model Fit

Having a great product isn’t enough—you need a sustainable and profitable business model. Business model fit happens when your value proposition is embedded in a scalable, repeatable, and financially viable framework.

• Definition: Ensuring that your business model is sustainable and profitable while continuing to deliver value.
• Focus: Aligning revenue streams, cost structures, and customer segments to create a viable business.
• Key Question: “Can we generate enough revenue to sustain and grow the business?”

At this stage, you’re looking at pricing strategies, cost management, and scaling operations. You’ve validated that customers are willing to pay for your product, and you have a clear plan to maintain and grow profitability over time.

Each of these stages builds upon the previous one. If you try to scale too early (before product-market fit), you risk wasting resources on a product that doesn’t fully meet customer needs. If you don’t establish a viable business model, even a great product can fail due to unsustainable costs or poor monetization strategies.

By systematically validating problem-solution fit, product-market fit, and business model fit, you ensure that your product, market, and business strategy are aligned for long-term success.

Example

Phase 2 – Building

Once you are done with your first iteration of the value proposition you are still in a very early stage, but it is a good start.

To this point we are aware of the possible jobs that our customers want to solve, and we have some product ideas that we would like to offer them. The next important thing to do is to validate if our assumptions were valid in real life without some huge investments. Nothing is worse than investing time and money into something that is not working, just in that case if you learn a lot of new things, but this is for another article.

Validation

One of the most important things when starting a new business or extending one is to validate that we are still on good track or not. We have to have some signs that our idea is worth investing resources and building.

If we do not validate our idea we can come to a conclusion that it is working in theory, but when it comes to making money with it, it does not sell. We don’t want that.

Investing 10 years into an idea without knowing if it would work is a huge mistake.

What might be the best way to validate it? I find the most useful way for validation is to sell 10 times. 10 sales cannot happen by accident. But really do me a favor that you do not try to fool yourself, there is nothing worse than that.

Making your first sales might sound hard to do, but if we do the necessary things it becomes easier. The main focus should be on the MVP.

Minimum viable product

The concept of minimum viable products (MVP) are not new. It is around for a while. But people made it hard to understand, but it should not be that way.

The thing is that we have to build/visualize a simple product that solves the problems that we identified using the value proposition canvas. Based on the canvas we should know what are the most important pains and gains to our customers and the first version of our product should solve that. No need for fancy features, just a simple solution that is capable of solving the issue, that is it. It can be even a video record or a Figma prototype that just shows what you want to build. That can be done in hours basically. If your solution is that good, that should sell. Of course a good sales copy will still be required.

Just start. Don’t try to build the final product. Don’t add features that don’t solve real problems.

For sure that is the best if our idea can be validated on a small scale, those are the best businesses. But for the first time keep it really simple, later you will improve it anyways. If it is working, than we could think about:

• Do we need more traffic?
• Should the offer be better?
• Should the marketing be changed?

The first 10 sales should happen via the MVP you built. When you have validated the idea and you have a clear fit that should be the sign that we can move on to the next big thing.

Business model

To this point we were speaking about how we would create value for our customers. Now it is time to describe how we would create value for the business. Your goal is to find a sustainable and scalable solution for your company to operate.

I am sure you heard about businesses that had really good products, but they still went bankrupt. They did not solve this step, so they were not able to make money. Every business has to make money, that is the reason why people start companies. Without this, you are just playing around, and the product will never become serious. That is the truth.

You do not want that to change the tires of a running bike. If you cannot find a sustainable way to run the business, it is still better to not do it. You won’t lose at least money and time. As for the value proposition, this applies that you should stick to reality and do not fool yourself. You will have several more ideas, but the execution is the key here.

People these days have an illusion that invested money is the same as the money that you get from customers. Customer’s money is worth more, because they will use your products and services. You will not get investments every month. So if your model is not based around customers, you will always be in a rush for money. Imagine waking up every day and owning a company that does not solve any problem and just tries to find a new investor who can be fooled. Not good. Of course there are exceptions to this, but you get the idea.

The company’s performance will always be the profit that the company is making, not the angel investment.

To have most of the things planned and defined upfront we can use a tool.

Business Model Canvas

A good business model is always different. But there are clear signs that you do not have one.

1. You do not control money

If you are just floating around without even knowing how you would make money is a clear sign that you are missing something. You might not know how you solve problems, or just you don’t know who your customer is. Sadly enough you might spend money on everything without even knowing what you do.

2. You want to solve problems with money

Is it possible that you want to solve problems with money? Are you sure you need an office or a cofounder? Hiring more people usually does not mean that you would have more resources, rather more chaos, more people to manage and even can be a performance drawback.

Make sure you always first try to find a software or system that can do the same for less complication and money. If there is no solution for that, try to make it and the last option should be to hire someone. Three key players would always make more value.

3. You do not have processes

After a time you will have to be more focused on your business rather on the product. So you have to work on your business rather in your business. At those times you should create and define processes. I am sure you heard it multiple times, but what does it even mean?

An earlier effort should affect present actions. It should be shorter or even better to be fully automated. You should have clear solutions for certain actions. Having clear procedures and solutions for everything will come handy in any stage.

The Offer

Every business model has something that makes the most money. That can be a product or a service that we offer. Every successful business has one.

If we do not have it we should try to find it. That would be our $100 million offer. The goal would be to invest every resource that we have into that single offer and make it excellent. That would keep us profitable and would make the business a machine that can be automatized and improved.

Also we do not want to be an entrepreneur who does multiple things without any focus. The offer would always make us sure and certain, so we will always know what we should do.

When we are starting out we cannot compete with bigger companies, and we should not. The best way is to have our offer that solves customer problems.

There are few characteristics of a $100 million offer:

1. Charge More by Making It a No-Brainer

If you want to compete with larger companies, you will fail no matter what. They will always have more resources to do what you want to do.

That is why you should be focused on giving the best possible solution for your customers while making it pay as much as it possibly could. That can be achieved by increasing perceived value and making the offer irresistible.

2. Sell the Vacation, Not the Plane

Still our value proposition is the guide for our success. Give them what they want and do that as fast as possible.

3. Can be automated

A product or service that can make our living must be automated, at least to a level where we are not required to work on it every day. There should be clear procedures on how customers would get their gains while reducing their pains.

It should be a service or product that can be automated while reducing human work. By working on it we gain strategic value that might be valuable in the future. For example, by creating an evergreen promotion with a sales funnel we can automate the traffic to the offer, and we can focus on fulfilling the orders and automatizing it.

When we have a winning product we are on a good track, but still we have to think about how to improve it and maximize profit on it.

Think about profit

There are businesses that have a clear problem-solution fit and a decent offer. But they are not thinking hard enough about how they would make profit. Once more, profit is important. Money is a resource that we can use for expansion of the company or to try out something else.

Luckily there are useful models that we can implement to maximize profit. Few of them:

1. Customer Solution Profit Profit comes from deeply understanding a customer’s needs and providing a tailored solution.
2. Pyramid Profit Attract customers with low-cost or entry-level products and upsell premium offerings.
3. Time Profit Profit is generated by being faster than competitors in execution, distribution, or development.
4. Network Effect Profit The more users a platform or product has, the more valuable it becomes, increasing profitability.
5. Brand Profit Customers pay a premium for a brand due to perceived quality, prestige, or trust. Example: Apple, Louis Vuitton.

Of course the more you have implemented in your $100 million offer the better. So make sure you think about these.

Automatization

Your main focus while working on your business model is to have nearly everything automatized. That would reduce costs and would make the company easy to operate.

What we do today should have an effect on future actions

There are things that should be automatized and that is the right way of doing them:

• Managing customers (CRM, email automatization)
• Cart services (payments, abandoned carts)
• Traffic to your product (evergreen content)
• Billing (sending bills, accounting)
• Customer service (emails)
• Sales (landing pages, emails)
• Fulfilling offers

But there are some that should not be automatized, but they are important:

• Self improvement
• Creating evergreen content
• Creating new offers
• Copywriting for the offers
• Answering customer questions
• Creating new processes

While using the business model canvas we can reduce costs of the company and understand each part of it. Having processes and procedures are crucial before moving on to scaling. When we are not prepared and the processes are not stable, scaling cannot happen. The customers might be dissatisfied and that can be fatal.

Phase 3 – Scaling

When we know our customers and we have a profitable business model we can decide whether some improvement is still required or we can move on to scaling.

Most of the time scaling happens through paid ads. People are afraid of ads, but this can help us to find new customers. SEO optimization and those kinds of stuff sound good, but it is not so reliable. The thing is that we have to learn how we can run ads profitably.

If we spend $1, we will get back a customer and more than $1. This is a profitable ad.

If our product and business model can handle the bigger scale, that means that we can multiply our profit. This might sound a bit strange, but if we have solved every earlier step we can do it. Still scaling should happen in steps, to make sure everything goes well and fix what not.

Ads

Running ads is important. That is a reliable way to get new customers and scale a business. Doing it is hard, but if we create ads based on the value proposition we will always find customers, because it will solve problems.

Evergreen free content might be the best for ads. We can always modify it to meet customer expectations and we only have to make it good once. Later it will bring customers even without doing anything.

People when they see our ads will always ask what I have in it? If we did everything correctly, we should have clear answers to what they need. So in that case we can write copies to meet their expectations.

An ad should look like a typical content of the platform. Has to share some positive vibes, smile, and a nice background. Good topics for ads:

• how to do somethings – a practical example how to write code
• collection of information – best sources to stay up to date with programming
• tools – tool for creating new websites

If the ad is bad, in terms of not so practical, or does not offer any solution it will be more expensive to run making it hard to keep profitable. It is a good practice to make it a bit controversial but should not be noticeable or considered as an attack. The text should start short then turn into a small post.

The best way to try:

• create a collection of information
• target an audience
• create creatives
• test

While we went through each of the important steps of our business we could see that there are a predefined number of things to solve. But as a business you also have phases as a business grows.

Your phases in a business development

In the earlier sections we have seen that there are multiple things to be learnt. Self preparation of the founder would always make the difference in business success. Luckily, there are predefined problems that we might face, so learning about them even before starting a business will be really valuable.

If you do not have these skills, your company might face a limit where you won’t see any solution. Most of the time that comes down to lack of skills. Of course there are situations where there is a limit, but that is a story for another post.

While your company grows there are some milestones that you should tackle:

1. Learning skills
2. Creating systems and processes
3. Managing people

Managing people and creating systems and processes are also for another article, but skills are important to understand the whole context. Most important skills to have:

1. Technical skills

Having the skills to build websites, fulfilling orders and making sales funnels would be a must. Without them you won’t be able to run your company. Besides these, running ads, creating and editing content for them, and the most valuable is to know how to write effective copy that sells.

2. Industry skills

Having an understanding of how that particular industry works where you want to start your company. Knowing what offers work and what not is also a very valuable skill, if you have it, you will be always able to make a living, because you will be able to sell products and services.

3. Personal skills

Knowing how to communicate, how to present something, how to do quality work. These are examples, but still very important ones. That can be also for another post. ?

If you have multiple skills for each category that makes you a prepared person.

Example of an Ideal Journey in Action

An ideal scenario for starting a business and supported by modern entrepreneurial practices, looks like this:

1. Identify a Problem or Opportunity

You observe a problem in the market or an unmet need among a specific group of people (e.g., busy parents struggling with meal prep).

You conduct interviews, surveys, or ethnographic studies to deeply understand the pain points and aspirations of your potential customers.

2. Define the Value Proposition

Use the Value Proposition Canvas to align customer pains and gains with your solution.

You articulate how your product or service solves the identified problem in a way that resonates with customers.

3. Sketch a Business Model

Using the Business Model Canvas you visually map out your key assumptions:

Who are your customers?

How will you reach them?

What resources, partnerships, and revenue streams do you need?

4. Prototype and Test

Build a simple, low-cost prototype of your product or service (e.g., a basic meal kit or a website explaining your service with a sign-up form).

Test your MVP with actual users, gather feedback, and track key metrics like conversion rates or customer satisfaction. Use feedback to refine your offering.

5. Validate the Market

Run a small-scale version of your business to validate demand (e.g., offer your product to 20 families and measure repeat purchases).

Determine if the idea has traction or needs more thinking.

6. Scale Gradually

Automate or improve key aspects of the business.

Experiment with new marketing channels, partnerships, or additional product offerings. Continuously listen to your customers and adapt to changing needs.

What Makes It Ideal?

• Customer-Centric: Every step is based on real feedback from the target audience.
• Low-Risk: Small-scale experiments validate the idea before making a major investment.
• Adaptive: Continuous improvements ensure the product stays relevant and valuable.
• Sustainable Growth: Scaling only happens once demand is proven.

This approach increases the likelihood of success by ensuring you build a product people truly want while minimizing unnecessary risks.

How would I launch a new info product?

I have seen multiple businesses missing a hugely important step. Every one of them were at the beginning extremely focused on the product itself, to introduce new features, making it nicer, but in reality what matters the most, is the product solving the problem or not?

What is the problem with focusing on your product? Isn’t it an important thing to do? When you are starting out it is not. As we discussed earlier your main focus should be on understanding your customers and based on that information you will be able to create your value proposition.

Phase 1 – Learning (6-12 months)

If you have a value proposition that describes and addresses pains and gains, and your product can solve that problem, you are in a good position. Still there are a lot of things to learn depending on your skills, but you should have good times.

But even in this situation I would not get straight to the desk and start to work on the product itself. I would rather write a sales copy on a website with a form to subscribe or preorder. You have to validate your idea upfront and the only thing that can validate your idea is money or subscriptions. The copy should address all of the important information about the problem being solved, what would they get and what would be the benefits of working with you. You can also ask for some testimonials to make you relevant. The price might be low at first, a symbolic $1, but if somebody gives you $1 it is a good place to be in.

After they raised their hands, thus they are interested, you can have multiple next steps:

1. You should invite them to a live webinar where you describe your idea and what you are about to do. Here you can get hands-on information and preferences from them. Write them down, and make sure you thank them for their time.
2. Create your first minimum viable course and share with them

The thing is you cannot jump into making the product without validating it, because you might lose money and even worse, your motivation or time.

When you have 10-15 feedbacks and interested people you might start to work on the product. Still I would be really focused to address only those pains and gains that really make sense for them. I would not really care about what the product looks like, rather it solves the problem or not. That would be my MVP.

Online courses should always be action based. What is minimally required from the customer to meet their needs? I would create some free content as well to demonstrate my knowledge to them. Maybe a roadmap or a mind-map that would show them what they would get from me.

From my experience what they really need is:

• step-by-step guide
• easy to understand flow
• conversational tone

Grab their hands and guide them through a topic as it is a friendly conversation.

Phase 2 – Building (1-2 years)

Later, when I have the idea validated, I would start to iterate over the product a few times more to improve it based on feedback. Besides improving the product I would start to work on the company instead of the product only. I would look for things that can be automatized or optimized, and would hire an online assistant who can help me visualize and follow expenses and also they can help in the company formation.

Still 80% work should be focused on the offer, but the other things should become important as well. After a few more iterations I would consider starting to start scaling or there are still operations that can be improved.

Phase 3 – Scaling (2-5 years)

I would immediately start to create evergreen content that promotes the main offer. That would of course require new skills. When the evergreen content is ready a strategy should be picked for promotions. During these promotions I would be really focused on the performance of the ads and to reach as many people as possible.

Besides promotions I would still improve the offer to meet customer expectations and should be prepared for scaling, to handle the traffic and related technical stuff.

Based on the feedback new services or products can be created while still improving the main offer. At this stage I would consider hiring a team who can help in the daily operations.

This would be my journey. How I would do it. Of course this is just a plan, but an ideal scenario would look something like this. My main goal was with this to describe what would happen. If you think that you do not have an idea, read further.

Do not have idea?

A common issue that many people face is they do not have an idea to start to work with. The best way I found it was to start to surf around the internet. Find books, read reddit, find businesses.

Try to find out what people spend money on and are there existing profitable businesses. I do not agree that your idea has to be very special. The thing is that you have to do it somewhat differently. And it is a very good thing to know if others are making money from it, you could as well. So do not fool yourself if there are no existing businesses in that segment you will be the one. There are no businesses for a reason. Do not let you waste money on these ideas.

Conclusion

During this research period I was really focused on how it should be done. I think I have got a good high-level understanding.

The ideas will be tested in real life, so stick around and see what will happen.