How to Start a Business

The right business is the one you can actually ship given your money, time, and skills. The four shapes that pay off fastest for first-time founders:

• Productised service — sell a packaged outcome (e.g. "Webflow site in 14 days, $4,800"). Closest thing to instant cash flow; lowest startup cost; converts your existing skills to revenue.
• Micro-SaaS — small focused software, $19–$99/mo per customer, narrow ICP. Slower to revenue but compounds.
• Local service — defensible, recession-resilient, lower competition online; needs a way to find customers.
• Creator / community — content, newsletter, or community as the product. Slowest to monetize unless you already have an audience.

If you have money but little time, lean toward SaaS or productised service. If you have time but little money, productised service or creator. If you have skills but no audience, productised service is almost always the fastest path.

The most expensive mistake is building something nobody will pay for. The cheapest validation methods, in order:

1. Customer interviews (10 people) — ask about the past, not the future. "Walk me through the last time you tried to solve X."
2. Landing-page smoke test — describe the offer, take a pre-order or waitlist. If 0/100 visitors convert with a "buy" button, the offer is dead.
3. Concierge MVP — deliver the outcome manually for the first 5 customers. No code. The product is you.
4. Pre-orders — most under-rated. If 5 strangers prepay, you have validation no amount of survey data can give you.

Skip anything more sophisticated than this for the first 30 days. Use our Business Idea Scorecard to pressure-test what you have before you write a line of code.

For most first-time founders the legal stack is simpler than online "best practice" suggests. The real minimum, in jurisdiction-neutral terms:

• Entity — pick a structure that fits your tax situation (LLC, Ltd, sole proprietor, etc.). Don't optimise for fundraising you're not yet doing.
• Founder agreement — even if you're solo today, a one-page founder agreement protects you against the version of you that gets a co-founder next year.
• Contracts — a standard customer / service agreement. Templates exist; one lawyer review costs less than one bad dispute.
• Privacy + terms — required by every payments processor and most jurisdictions if you serve EU/UK users.
• Tax registration — register for the right tax IDs in your country. Don't skip this.

Educational only — see our Startup Legal hub for jurisdiction-specific notes. When the stakes get real, talk to a lawyer.

Paid acquisition for a brand-new business is almost always a mistake. The repeatable channels that produce a first customer in under 30 days:

• Direct cold outreach — 50 emails / DMs to a sharp ICP. Reply rate of 5–15% is realistic with a good list and a non-pitchy opener.
• Network ask — write one specific, short ask to 20 people who know you. "I'm helping founders do X — do you know one who is currently struggling with Y?"
• One useful piece of content per week — answer a specific question your ICP is asking. Post in the place they already read.
• Concierge launch — message every customer you talked to in validation. "I built it. Want to be customer #1?"

Most first-time founders try too many channels at once. Pick one, commit for 30 days, judge by outcome (paying customers), not vanity metrics (impressions). The First 100 Customers Planner maps weekly activity → expected pipeline.

If you can answer these three questions every week, you'll outperform 80% of founders:

1. How much cash do I have? (current balance, including any pending receivables)
2. What's my monthly burn? (every recurring cost + reasonable estimate of variable costs)
3. How many months until I run out? (runway = cash / burn)

When runway drops below 6 months, your job changes from "build" to "survive." When it drops below 3 months, every decision is a cash-flow decision. The Runway Calculator is the simplest possible way to keep these numbers in front of you.

For a business charging customers monthly, also track gross margin (revenue minus variable cost-of-goods-sold) and LTV:CAC (lifetime value of a customer divided by acquisition cost). These two ratios tell you if your business model works at scale.