Before you build anything, name anything, or sell anything, five deceptively simple questions will determine whether your business has a foundation — or just a dream
By Futurist Thomas Frey
The Moment Before Everything Else
Every business that ever existed started the same way: with a person who couldn’t stop thinking about something. A problem that nagged them. A skill they kept getting asked to use. A gap they spotted that nobody else seemed to notice. That restless feeling — that itch — is the raw material of entrepreneurship. But raw material isn’t a business. The distance between the itch and the income is a series of questions, and most people who fail skip them.
The solopreneur’s journey is different from the startup founder’s journey in one fundamental way. There’s no team to pressure-test your assumptions, no co-founder to push back on your blind spots, no board to ask the hard questions in a quarterly review. It’s just you. Which means the questioning has to happen internally, deliberately, and honestly — before the market does it for you, usually at a cost you can’t afford.
What follows are the first five questions. They’re not the only questions you’ll ever need. They’re the ground floor. Get these right, and every question that comes after becomes easier to answer. Skip them, and you’ll spend years rebuilding on a cracked foundation.
Continue reading… “The First Five Questions Every Solopreneur Must Answer”
