Why The Difficulty Of Starting Up Is A Gift

Does building your business right now feel hard? Good.

Is your product the smarter Apple Watch or the tastier La Croix? Is your consulting package everything that your customers defined as their dream offering?

Your product or service is great, if not better than what’s currently on the market. So what gives? Why are you hitting strikes when it should be a home run?

There’s this saying that we’re all familiar with that goes: If you build it, they will come.

My version of this saying is: If you build it and open the 1,000lb door, then they will come.

When you create a product or service, you build a house around your idea and put a roof on your mini-world. You customers can walk in and experience its greatness, but they need to pass through the 1,000lb door that separates them from you.

This heavy door bears its weight because it’s temperamental, and it needs to be opened with care.

The key to opening this 1,000lb door is all that branding, marketing, and audience-building stuff that’s the lifeline of every business. But open it too fast and it’ll feel like a firehose — you won’t be able to keep up with the influx of customers and your business will run around like a chicken with its head cut off.

Open it slower, with care, and you’ll receive a steady inflow that’ll help you grow.

To open this door by yourself, you need to use strategy rather than brute force.

Brute force looks like draining thousands of dollars in advertising in one fell swoop, while ignoring the organic, free marketing you can do on a daily basis.

Brute force looks like onboarding a bunch of influencers to do one campaign and hoping that solves your marketing problems for the rest of the year. This type of brute force opens the door with hyper-power, allowing for volume to temporarily come in, only for it to slam back shut due to the velocity.

Strategy looks like putting the right people and tools in place to slowly open that door with care, so that you don’t risk having to start from scratch because you got too greedy.

Strategy looks like weekly, smart content that builds a relationship with your audience. Strategy looks like picking and committing to marketing assets that you invest into every day for the dividends that’ll pay out later on. Slow and steady brings in a drip of customers at a manageable pace that allows you to reinvest and grow.

All of us are in some phase of opening this 1,000lb door right now. If you’re in the beginning phase of getting the door ajar and it feels like a slow, hard, frustrating push — know that your persistence pays off and that the push is a gift.

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