Business Advice I Wish I Knew Sooner

I’ve been running online businesses for 5.5 years now and I was thinking about it and I have learned a LOT

I have made so many mistakes that would have been so easily avoidable if I had someone to help me when I started, so in this email I’m just going to share some lessons I wish I knew when I started

1. Have clean books: you need to hire a book keeper ASAP, incorrect/messy books leads to you not actually knowing the health of your business, it makes your business incredibly hard to sell, you will likely end up over paying on your taxes, and stressing you out from focusing on the growth, outsource this as soon as you can, if you don’t have a book keeper yet or you’re not happy with your current one, I recommend utilizing this one here

2. Keep Your Team Lean: I used to think it’d be cool to have a big team, that hiring a bunch of people would be cool. This led me to over hiring and also a lot of the hires didn’t move the needle in any way. I hired a “social media manager” for $1500/mo that really just posted for us, the truth is a lean team of A+ talent that you pay more is better than a big team. The new meta with AI and software will be companies will be reaching unicorn status with <10 people

3. Different is better than better: this is a marketing lesson, everyone wants their angle to be why they’re better than the competition, that’s a losing race and what everyone does, say why you’re DIFFERENT and you’ll see much better results

4. Focus on leverage: build software, grow an audience, leverage other people’s time, by focusing on things that you can have a small input and get a large output you will win bigger

5. Play the long game: everyone is focused on getting rich in one year that no one gets rich in 5+ years, I can’t tell you how many “big names” that were around in 2020-2022 aren’t around anymore. Rome wasn’t built in a day but it sure can come down in a day

6. Chasing money is the easiest way to never get it, when you change the question in your head from “how do I make money?” to “How do I provide value?” is when you’ll actually start to make money

7. Momentum and the compound effect are the most important things in business: the results I’m seeing today are the results of my inputs the last 3 months that are constantly compounding, if I let off the gas I stop the compounding effect and I will see a STEEP decline that appears out of nowhere but it will be because I killed compounding / momentum, this has happened to me with my content and it was a big lesson

8. Personal brand is a requirement in 2024 and beyond: go look at this generations wealthiest people, they all have a brand, and this is also your biggest insurance policy you could ever have, build a brand and an email list

9. Have goodwill with people: help people without expecting anything in return, the amount of people that I’ve helped just to help that have then come to me YEARS later with an opportunity for me, made an intro, or paid me for one of my services is insane, always help people and you never know when they may be able to help you

10. Have fun through it all, the high’s, the lows, but the moment you can no longer have fun, you’ve lost.

    and that’s 10 lessons I wish I knew sooner - truth is I could go on and on as I’ve learned so much these last 5.5 years

    but anyways I’m looking for a few more people to work closely with on starting their own software company inside 90 days

    if you want to apply - click here

Best,

Alex