From idea to first customer

Most businesses that never start were waiting: for funding, for the right moment, for the product to be finished, for more certainty. The ones that start find a first customer and work backwards from there.

Start from a problem you have seen, ideally one you have had yourself or one in an industry you know. Businesses built from an interesting idea with no contact with the market fail at a much higher rate than businesses built from a problem the founder watched somebody have.

Sell before you build, which the market research course covers. Describe the offer, find somebody willing to pay, and build it. An uncomfortable number of ideas do not survive that, which is the point.

Start smaller than feels serious. One service, one kind of customer, one city. Narrow is easier to explain, easier to be found for, and easier to be good at. A business trying to serve everybody at the start serves nobody memorably.

Do not spend on what does not matter yet. A logo, an office, printed materials, a company registration and a full website are all things people spend on before their first customer and none of them produce one. The first sale does.

Keep your income while you start where you can, because a business under pressure to produce money immediately makes bad decisions, particularly about pricing and about which clients to accept.

And start now, badly, because the information you need is not available until you have started.