They “learn” how to do it, they assemble all of the right ingredients, and many months or years later, they’re exhausted but unwilling to give up. Their struggles are often just a result of their not working on the right things at the right time—the avocado that is their business, market, product, or team just isn’t ripe yet.

Summary: Stage 2

What we often forget is that even though the grass may be greener on the other side, it still needs mowing.

The first thing to do to make it through Stage 1 is to focus on what I call your “beachhead” offer.

The Paradox of Choice, that shows that having more choices often leads to less choosing. Having so many possibilities around what business you could start can make it harder for you to choose which business to start.

Each new solution that your business develops should be at least as profitable as the last solution you developed. The exception is if this new solution is primarily meant to acquire new customers that you can sell a more profitable solution to down the road. Just be sure you make that link so the

Stage 1 Summary

You'll note that I've started with you as the center of your business building process, and there's a reason for this. Part of the challenge of getting something started is that you look externally into the world and you see all sorts of things that you might do. That array of choices keeps you from doing something.

Bootstrapped businesses have a huge advantage of being customer-focused out of necessity, but at the same time their growth comes from what they pull in—and a growing business is a hungry business. So much of the early stage resources are put into the day-to-day hustle that there’s rarely any left over for strategic investments in the people,