The Minimalist Entrepreneur: How Great Founders Do More with Less

Once you’ve addressed feedback and turned your friends and family into customers because your product is genuinely good, you can move on from your friends and family, and into your communities.

Start by educating, then inspiring, then entertaining. Each of these three levels of content is more far-reaching than the last.

Whether you’re just getting started or you’re already in the process of building a product, knowing and contributing to your community is key at every stage. Remember that, and you’ll find and nurture the right atmosphere for collaboration, growth, and eventually a sustainable business that matters.

Instead of making headlines, they make fans—who turn themselves into customers over time.

You picked a community. Why that one? You shipped a manual valuable process and then iterated it into a minimum viable product. Why did you choose to solve those problems in the ways that you did?

Let me tell you a secret. Every founder, even the most successful ones, knows nothing at the beginning, and learns from there. This is about interests, not skills. Instead of focusing on the things you do not know, focus on the things you do.

Minimalist entrepreneurs aim to be profitable from day one or soon after, because profit is oxygen for businesses. And they do that by selling a product to customers, not by selling their users to advertisers.

It’s important to note that your goal here is to join communities, not networks. In a network, such as Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, newcomers start at zero. No one says “hi” when they walk in the door, and if you have something to say, there’s no guarantee that anyone will hear or help.

Your company will grow as quickly as your customers determine it will grow.