A lot of people pretend to play business.

If your “business” doesn’t have a clear, validated path to generating revenue, it’s not a business. It’s a Personal Development Project.

Too many people are out there buying business cards, filing LLCs, and designing t shirts before they’ve confirmed that people will pay for what they’re offering.

If you want to avoid failure, start with the sale.

This is the process we use to validate every single one of our products and services:

1. Create a doc outline of the entire product – talk about the problem is addresses, share details about what’s inside, answer common questions, and include pricing and — most importantly — a link to preorder.

2. Create a survey that asks questions like:

• What was your favorite part about the product?
• What is missing from the product / what could we add to make it more valuable?
• What questions do you have after reading about the product?
• Do you want to preorder the product for $X (a Y% discount from the launch price of $Z)?

3. Compile and audience and send them an email mentioning that you’re creating something big around [Insert Product Topic] and you want their input, they can reply if they’re interested.

4. For everyone that replies, send them the doc and the survey. Pay attention to the feedback and make a note of the people who said they would preorder. Follow up with those people and track your sales.

5. If you can get a 10% sell through rate on preorders (# orders / # of people emailed should = 10%), you’re in good shape.

Start building out the rest of your new business.

The entrepreneurial journey is largely a lonely one.

When we think of a business idea, we imagine customers, funding, the buzz of media, etc. The hype, the freedom, the money, the audience. That’s the peak of the mountain.

But there’s another side to the journey, the part where everything falls on your shoulders – sometimes in unexpected ways:

1. Your close friends and family usually won’t “get it” until you’re at the point where you don’t care about judgement. And that’s ok!

But if you want to succeed, you need to rely on self motivation and determination to make your vision a reality. If you’re relying on the approval of others to get started, it won’t happen.

2. Conversations are largely made of up self talk

When you work in an office or on a team, you have dozens of people to bounce ideas off of. Team members, colleagues, managers, etc.

As a new entrepreneur, those structures aren’t in place. You bounce those ideas around in your own head, mulling them over for days or weeks in your echo chamber.

“Am I doing this right?”

“Why isn’t this thing working?”

“Is it normal to feel this way?”

You wonder if other entrepreneurs are thinking the same thing (they usually are) or if this is your own issue (it’s usually not).

3. Success can lead to more isolation

As you grow, you’ll realize that it can be even harder for the people close to you to relate.

You’ll feel bad about sharing feelings you’re dealing with – imposter syndrome, self doubt, etc. How could you be feeling that way after achieving [Insert Big Accomplishment]?

You’ll also realize that you’re not able to share in the same way. In the beginning, there’s nothing to lose so things like numbers, dollars, ideas, strategies are easy to spread around. But as you grow, the pressure mounts and you second guess who you can really share things with.

All of that to say, is it still worth it?

Absolutely. 100%.

But it’s important to have the expectation set so you can recognize loneliness and create systems to combat it.