If you have not yet, I highly recommend doing an Eisenhower Matrix to learn what’s in your zone of genius and completing our Big Domino exercise to learn what you should focus on next before reading this article.
Russell Nohelty
Russell Nohelty
I’ve got good news.
Running a successful business is not as complicated as everyone makes it out to be. People love to drown you in tactics, hacks, and “secret” systems, but when you boil it all down, there are only seven things you actually need to figure out if you want to make a sustainable living.
- Creation: This includes blogs, products, social media, podcasts, Youtube, etc.
- Retailer/catalog sales: Not every business has retailer or catalog sales, but every business can add physical goods to their product line in order to get discoverability on these platforms.
- Crowdfunding: This includes doing a special edition or limited time offers of your products.
- Subscriptions: Every business should eventually have these and should eventually have these.
- Landing pages/special offers: You can create special offers every month around the year to entice your audience.
- Your own web store: Even if you don’t have a traditional product line, there’s always merch.
- In-person and virtual events: Including conferences and other types of events where you aren’t selling.
And you don’t need all seven to succeed. You only need one (plus creating, obvi). In 2015, my one was conventions. Then, I added crowdfunding and, in 2017, had my first six figure year. Over time I added more and more, but I had a successful business with one, and a six-figure one with two.
If you can build systems around these pillars, you will not just survive, you will thrive.
Yes, they’re big categories. Each one is a rabbit hole that can consume years of your life if you let it, but everything else is just a variation on one of these seven.
That’s the good news.
The bad news is that most entrepreneurs never get even one of them working sustainably.
It’s not because they’re lazy. It’s not because they’re untalented. It’s because of two lies we’ve all been sold about success.
The first lie is that if you just make something great, everything else will magically happen. That’s the fantasy everyone desperately wants you to believe, but it doesn’t work like that.
The second lie is that you have to do everything, all the time, and if you don’t then you’ll never succeed. It’s the lie of silver bullets, magic strategies, and overblown hype.
They are comfortable lies, so it’s easy to fall into them. They bounce around doing everything at once and thinking they’re making progress. Maybe they try a Patreon for two weeks but it doesn’t get big enough for their aspirations immediately, so they abandon it. They dabble in Kickstarter, but don’t fund in 24 hours, so they call it a scam. They buy Facebook ads, lose $200, and decide ads don’t work.
That cycle guarantees you’ll never succeed.
Why? Because every single pillar has a failure period built in. The first few months are going to be messy. You’re supposed to get it wrong. Nobody hits the bullseye first shot.
I had ten communities flame out before I landed on Substack. Sure, when a community didn’t work, or didn’t feel right, I abandoned it so it didn’t weigh me down…but I gave it time first. I gave myself time to try different strategies, to try different platforms, and only when nothing moved the needle did I blow it up.
The team at Writer MBA gave our conference two years before we pulled the plug, and spent another year before that building toward it. After three years, the company failed, but we tried really hard, and had a lot of success, during that time. It just wasn’t enough.
I built an app for my business years ago, at a significant expense, and only burned it down after trying everything for a year. It seems I have the capacity to handle long stretches of boredom and high levels of pain, as long as there is an end date and a juicy reward at the end of it.
Most entrepreneurs won’t give themselves that grace. They panic when things don’t click instantly, so they pivot before the system has a chance to stabilize. Then they pivot again. And again. Until they’ve “tried everything” and built nothing.
This is why nobody gets even one pillar right. It’s not about talent. It’s not about luck. It’s about attention span. It’s about patience.
The market rewards people who can sit in the discomfort of those first broken months and keep showing up anyway. The ones who accept that three months of “kinda working” is not failure, it’s stage one. The ones who give the pillar enough oxygen to grow into something sustainable.
But most of us don’t. We don’t stay long enough in the fire. We jump before the bread is baked. That’s why the graveyard of abandoned Patreons, empty web stores, dead Kickstarters, and dusty catalogs is bigger than the field of working systems.
Each of these pillars is massive, and expansive, and overwhelming, but when you try to do all seven at once it’s no wonder everyone is burnt out.
That said…there are only seven of them. Anyone can learn how to do seven things well, right?
Oh, if only if were that easy. Even if you’ve with me so far (which isn’t a guarantee, or even likely), you’re probably saying “Okay, but how do you master these seven things?”
So, once you pick one of the seven pillars above to focus on, all seven roughly work on the same three levers:
- Platform – Where you build this part of your business.
- Product – What you’re selling through that platform.
- Pathway – How you’re driving traffic to that product.
This is the engine. Platform, product, pathway. Over and over. Let’s take subscriptions as an example.