This Is The Best Time In History To Start A Business
The 9 steps I would follow if I were starting a consumer company from zero today
I get asked all the time how to start a business. And I don’t mean how to raise venture capital, hire a team or scale something that is already doing millions of dollars in revenue. I mean literally: I have an idea, what do I do first?
This question came up even more after Aimee Smale came on HSR and shared how she bootstrapped Odd Muse into a $30M business. She started with £12,000 of her own savings, taught herself Shopify, made the website and logo herself and basically put everything she had into her first inventory order. When that sold out, she started using pre-orders and her customers would pay her and wait five weeks for the product to arrive because, as she said, “the product was that good.”
And then Shopify reported earnings this week with revenue up 34% year over year. One of my favorite HSR guests, Harley Finkelstein, President of Shopify, said AI search has been particularly helpful for smaller brands, which is interesting when you consider that smaller businesses make up the majority of merchants on the platform.
When Harley came on HSR earlier this year, he said something that has really stuck with me: “This might be the golden age of entrepreneurship and most people have no idea.” (If you are seriously considering becoming a founder, go and listen to his episode after you read this).
I actually think he’s 100% right.
It has never been easier or cheaper to test if you have a good idea. That doesn’t mean it has become easy to build a great business, because it definitely has not. But it has never been easier to start. There are SO many things I would have needed to hire someone to do five or ten years ago that I can now figure out myself with AI, Shopify, Meta, Fiverr, Etsy and a million other platforms. There are so many ways to test along the way before you take big bets.
The 9 steps I would follow to go from an idea to actually launching the product, including the literal first thing I would do before spending any money.
How I would figure out if the idea is actually worth pursuing, from studying consumer behavior IRL to testing whether I can actually sell within the category.
How I would test if people are actually willing to PAY for it before ordering thousands of units, and why someone joining your email list, signing up for a waitlist and putting down a credit card are very different signals.
Where I would actually go to source and develop the product, including resources we have used at HSR and examples from businesses I know doing $10M+ in revenue.
Where I would spend money and where I absolutely would NOT, including why I would never spend $30K on branding before proving the idea, but the one place I would never cut corners.
Basically, if you’ve ever sent me a DM asking, “I want to start a business, but what do I literally do first?” these are the 9 steps I would follow.
So let’s get into it.
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