After building companies online for the last 7 years I have found there’s 3 common traps that business owners fall for that will kill their business (almost every single time)

so I’m going to share you these three most common traps today so you can avoid it and hopefully go up a tax bracket much faster by avoiding these, so let’s dive in

Trap #1: Building a Low Ticket Business

Whenever I hear someone (especially a beginner) wanting to start a very low ticket business I tell them to scrap it

I just had someone reach out, saying he launched a company and did not really see results, I asked the monetization plan….

$8/month

It is EXTREMELY hard to acquire customers for under $8 (basically impossible besides pure organic videos and direct outreach) and since it’s a new company, you don’t know your lifetime value yet of a customer

even if the churn was low, and people stay for a year, that’s still only $96 CLTV and it is still very difficult to acquire customers under $100 especially with paid ads in the future

Charging low ticket sucks for every business, software, selling services, it doesn’t matter, it’s harder to scale, churn is usually higher, and the cheap customers are usually a pain to deal with

you should build solutions where you can charge a premium, and ideally where the pricing goes up as you sell to bigger businesses (usually usage or seat based pricing)

if your CLTV is $1,000 it’s wayyyyy easier to acquire customers profitably at scale, so avoid building super low ticket businesses

Trap #2: Hiring Agencies to Solve Your Problems

Many people start to see a little growth, or maybe not, and think they can just hire an agency to fix their business or grow their business

this is a MASSIVE mistake, you as the founder need to be able to solve all of your own problems, and document it, and then hire someone internally

here’s an example, when I was running Closify, I cracked the cold email campaigns myself first, and then hired someone to scale our campaigns

but I also had to first make sure our offer was validated, that customers got results, before I hired anyone to do it

maybe you want to hire a UGC agency, well if you don’t understand what type of content works in your niche first, or you haven’t validated demand, or you don’t know the economics of your business yet (LTV) it won’t work

I don’t know a single business owner that hasn’t been burned by multiple agencies, and often times it is because agencies just aren’t good, but other it’s because the founder is just trying to outsource fixing / growing the company to an agency

avoid at all costs — fix your business yourself as the founder, document how you did it, then hire someone internally

Trap #3: Doing it all yourself

I know there’s a popular “solopreneur” and “indie hacker” movement of one man companies, but the truth is you will never build anything that big alone

you need a CTO at scale, you need a CEO that’s a true visionary and cracked at growth, you’ll need a stud sales person, sure your team can be more lean than ever with AI now, but if you want to build something big, build a team

it’s also crucial to learn from those ahead of you, podcasts, books, coaching, events, however you can be a sponge and soak up knowledge to go further faster

if you’re not learning as fast as your competitors, sorry, but they will crush you, the speed to accessing the most recent information has never been more important

if a new ai tool comes out and you don’t hear about it for 3 months after your competitor, that’s a major wedge for them, so you need to make sure you have your finger on the pulse of what’s happening at all times

These are the 3 biggest traps that I see kill businesses, and they’re all easily avoidable and there’s many more but these are the most common

if you want access to my entire playbook for building companies, I open sourced it into a fast track program for you to run with

this 10 minute video explains how it works

«you can watch here»

Happy Monday

Alex