The Big Question

At the beginning of this course I promised we’d get into one specific question. Here’s that question: 

How will your business make money? 

You may not know it, but that’s what we’ve been talking about when we’re choosing archetypes and figuring out Minimum Viable Income. 

I am sick and tired of watching entrepreneurs pursue their business WITHOUT giving a care to how they’ll actually make money.

I made this mistake too!

I’m sick of it because I did it. I made this mistake myself for a long while when I was starting out. I was sort of blinded by the pursuit of making something, “can I do this? What if I did that??” 

I got sort of caught up in the creation of the thing and lost track of the economic realities of running a business that works. 

And I’m not the only one, this happens OFTEN with new and creative entrepreneurs.

In light of that common mistake, in this course we familiarized ourselves with the different business archetypes, learning about the economic realities of each archetype.

Then we chose the archetype that fits us best right now, just to start with. This helps you understand the general shape your business can take, and it gives you some role models to pay attention to.

Then we ran the numbers and calculated our Minimum Viable Income, or MVI. This is our freedom number, the base “ramen profitable” number we need to hit to support ourselves with this business. And remember, even if your business is just meant to earn a little extra income on the side, getting clear on your finances can bring so much clarity to your life and business strategy.

So now you know some really important things

You know your concrete financial reality (your MVI) and you know roughly HOW your business is going to earn money, the shape of your business model. 

Things might change between now and when you start making your first product, but that’s absolutely fine. Our goal in this course was to simply to understand the options and get some clarity so we can make informed decisions about our business moving forward. 

We don’t have to earn revenue tomorrow, but we know a lot more about what it’s going to look like.

OK, great work. When you’re ready, mark this course as complete and we’ll see you in the next course in the roadmap.