$zero to $one
Firstly, this is not a knock of the great Peter Thiel book “Zero to One” although I would highly recommend picking up a copy.
This is my story of taking an idea from zero dollars in revenue to one dollar in revenue. Over the last ten to fifteen years I’ve done this four times - taking a flicker of an idea and then generated at least a dollar from it. It’s such an invigorating feeling, to invent your own money & revenue but a lot of people struggle to ever make that first dollar and even more never even give themselves the chance.
DISCLAIMER: If you’re looking for a blog about how to be PERFECT before attaining your first dollar in revenue, this is definitely not for you.
In my opinion, perfection is the enemy of progress. Especially when we’re talking about startups. More ideas go to the graveyard because people over-complicate their step one. They’ll take a simple concept like starting a yard care service and within 24 hours it will have evolved into needing a fully branded trailer, a new Ford F-250, 13 lawn mowers, 5 leaf blowers, 5 edgers, $40,000 for marketing and a team of 7 - just to get started.
I’m writing this to make my position crystal clear - if that last paragraph describes your last idea you’re not an entrepreneur yet, just a procrastinator.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been there before. I once had an invention idea that in retrospect I could have gone to market with just the prototype I’d created to generate a first sale but instead I mapped out how to start it as if I were a billionaire and the idea never left my living room.
My point is this: many of you (if not all of you) get so caught up in all the expensive frills & bullshit aspects of a startup that it prevents you from even launching your idea.
Things like:
Logo design
Name of the company
Catchy tag lines
Website design
Thinking about how you’re going to scale to your first 10,000 customers.
Scale doesn’t matter on day one.. shit.. it doesn’t even matter on day one hundred.
I am absolutely ruthless at getting products into end users hands and getting early feedback. Back in 2019 when Brooklynn and I were first starting Wicked BOLD Chocolate I wasn’t even thinking about business names until we could actually make a decent bar of chocolate. To give you some perspective, we ordered the $260 machine in June of 2019 and didn’t register the business with Texas until September of 2019. That’s primarily because two things happened:
In September of 2019 - we finally mastered the tempering of our chocolate. (We captured the moment on video)
Our not-so-perfectly tempered batches to that point, we were giving away to friends and the feedback on taste was outstanding.
All that just means one thing - I didn’t even treat my business like a business until I knew I had a product that I could build a business around.
So, this takes me to our first dollar.
In October of 2019 we attended a Farmers Market in Irving, TX. We bought a table that was way too fucking heavy, bought a table cloth from target, a few chocolate-looking decorations and set up shop - myself, my wife & our two kids.
On that day, we generated about $200 worth of chocolate sales with one guy coming back to buy more before he left. We then promptly wrapped up the market and went to a fancy restaurant where we spent I think all of that money on our dinner to celebrate.
We’ve made a bunch of mistakes since that day that I’ll write about in upcoming blogs but for now, just go figure out a way to fucking start and if you need any help on your journey, reach out to me here.
-D