If you’re reading this, I assume you probably found me through something I posted on social media.

And I’m going to make another assumption:

You know something, can do something, or have access to something that could be valuable to somebody else.

Maybe you teach.

Maybe you design.

Maybe you understand a particular industry.

Maybe you’re good at fixing something.

Maybe you’ve solved a problem for yourself that other people are still struggling with.

Maybe you already have an idea for a business and have no idea whether anyone will actually pay for it.

This collection is about what happens next.

It is not a step-by-step recipe for one particular business. What you know, who you can help, and the opportunities available to you will be different from mine.

Instead, I want to give you some of the frameworks I use to think about questions like:

Who should I sell this to?
Which problems are actually worth solving?
How do I know whether an idea is real or something I invented in my head?
How do I test it without spending months building?
Where do I find potential customers?
What should I ask them?
How should I price what I do?
How do I know whether a distribution channel works?
What should happen between someone discovering me and eventually paying me?
How do I turn one successful sale into something repeatable?

The underlying idea is simple:

Something can be genuinely valuable and still be offered to the wrong person, at the wrong time, in the wrong place.

Imagine trying to sell bottles of water to someone sitting on a boat in the middle of a freshwater lake.

You might have perfectly good water.

You might have a beautiful bottle.

You might explain its benefits extremely well.

They still probably don’t care.

Now take that same water somewhere people desperately need clean drinking water.

The value changes dramatically.

That isn’t about exploiting someone.

Getting clean water somewhere difficult may itself require more work, infrastructure, transport, risk, and expense.

The lesson is simply that value depends on context.

Business is partly the skill of finding the people for whom what you can do matters most.

I Learned This the Expensive Way

When I was younger and living in Portugal, I did technical work for around $2.50 an hour.

These days, I don’t really know what my hourly rate is.

I don’t normally think about my work that way anymore.

My best months have been north of $50,000.

I did not become 20,000 times more intelligent.

And the fundamental work is often not radically different.

What changed was my understanding of business.

I learned to look for different problems.

I learned to work with different customers.

I learned that different customers buy for different reasons.

I learned that the same ability can have almost no economic value in one context and enormous value in another.

I learned that what something costs me to do and what the result is worth to the customer are two different things.

And I learned that you cannot figure all of this out by sitting alone and thinking harder.

You have to interact with reality.

You have to talk to people.

Make offers.

Try prices.

Test messages.

Try different audiences.

Try different distribution channels.

Watch what people actually do.

And be willing to discover that some of your assumptions were completely wrong.

The Goal Isn’t only to Charge More

There is an important distinction here.

The goal is not:

“How can I convince someone to pay me $5,000 instead of $30?”

The goal is:

“Where can I create enough genuine value that paying me $5,000 could make complete sense?”

Those are radically different questions.

If somebody has a $30 problem, sell them a $30 solution.

But don’t spend years chasing $30 problems because $5,000 feels like an impossibly large amount of money to you.

There are people and businesses dealing with problems worth:

thousands;
tens of thousands;
hundreds of thousands;
or millions of dollars.

They already spend money solving them.

You may simply have never participated in those markets before.

That does not mean they do not exist.

Do Not Assume You Know

A theme you’ll see repeatedly throughout these articles is:

Let reality decide.

If you think nobody will pay your price, test it.

If you think the market is saturated, investigate it.

If you think nobody has this problem, talk to them.

If you think TikTok will never produce customers, test TikTok properly.

If you think companies don’t spend money on something, find companies that buy it and ask why.

Your imagination is incredibly useful for producing ideas.

It is also incredibly good at producing convincing reasons those ideas will fail.

Use your imagination to create possibilities.

Use reality to decide which ones survive.

The Overall Process

You do not need to figure out the perfect business in your head before you start.

Most of what you believe at the beginning will be assumptions. That is fine. The trick is not to become too attached to them.

Talk to people. Put things in front of them. Ask for money. Deliver manually if you have to. Watch where people get interested, where they disappear, what they pay for, what they complain about, and what keeps happening again and again.

A useful way to think about the process is:

identify a potentially valuable problem;
choose an audience that actually experiences it;
understand who benefits and who can pay;
talk to those people without trying to force your idea onto them;
test the most dangerous assumptions cheaply;
study businesses already serving similar customers;
create the smallest useful paid offer;
test how people discover and move through your business;
price around value and economics rather than simply hours;
measure what happens and improve from evidence.

This is not really a ten-step process that you complete once. It is a loop.

You might discover during sales that you misunderstood the problem. You might learn from delivery that a different customer gets more value from what you do. You might find that people love the offer but never discover it, or that they reach the sales call but do not feel enough urgency to buy.

When that happens, go back to the relevant assumption, change it, and test again.

The goal is not to be right from the beginning. It is to replace guesses with evidence until you have something that works.

The articles below break different parts of this process down in more detail. If you are starting from zero, read them roughly in order. If you already have something going, jump to whichever problem you are trying to solve.