In 2017 I started a consulting company and made $0. - Actually, I spent about $3000 and did not get any revenue. But in 2018 I made $1000, and things began growing. By 2022 I brought in over $200k in annual revenue. Since inception, I just crossed $500k in revenue (🎉 - I didn't really have anyone to share this with, so I'm celebrating here) and about $400k in profit. Here are a few things I learned:

**1. Just do it.** Get to your MVP as fast and as cheap as you can. You can always make adjustments along the way. I launched and reached profitability before I even had a website. Stop waiting for all the pieces to fall into place and get out there.

**2. Customer acquisition is *everything.*** If you can get customers and make them happy, you will almost always succeed and keep growing. I hit some lightning in a bottle with my content marketing and it really changed my trajectory. You MUST determine how people will find you and make that easy for them.

**3. You don't have to go all in.** I started while working a full time job and that's the only reason I could afford such a slow growth ramp. Those first 2 years would have bankrupted me at the time if I had quit my job to go all in. Manage your risk. I wouldn't have had enough clients at the beginning anyway, and starting out part time took a lot of the pressure off. I could experiment more with product/service offerings, pricing, marketing, etc.

**4. There's a TON of luck in this.** I did a lot of things right, but in hindsight I definitely got lucky with some things. This was my 4th attempt at starting a company and the first one to really succeed (2 died on the runway and 1 was just a self-made job that wasn't likely to scale at all). And four years in, I still wasn't out-earning my prior 9-5 job. So if your first tries aren't immediate homeruns, don't panic or abandon ship. Just keep doing what's working and trying things.