The 4 P's of prioritization
Understanding the underlying structure of a sustainable business, and why most entrepreneurs fail to master even one.
Hi,
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.
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.
Your platform might be Patreon, Substack, or Shopify.
Your product could be an app, a book, a community, or a service.
Your pathway might be Substack Notes, Facebook ads, SEO, ambassador marketing, or a brand partnership.
Notice how the platform dictates the pathway. You don’t drive traffic to Patreon from Substack Notes, that doesn’t make sense.
For years, I focused mainly on selling books (product) on Kickstarter (platform) through my mailing list (pathway). Now, I focus on selling The Author Stack (product) on Substack (platform) through recommendations (pathway). Before I retired from selling at shows, I focused on selling bundles (product) at comic conventions (platform & pathway).
Notice, I still launch books on Kickstarter, but I’ve systematized it so that I don’t spend lots of time thinking about it. When I started my Substack, I was still doing conventions at a good clip, but I was spending way less time thinking about it than before the pandemic.
This is the kind of strategic thinking most brands skip. They flail around, piling tactic on tactic, without ever seeing the pattern underneath.
So, which of these should you start with? The one that gives you the most frictionless growth.
Not the easiest, the one you can do with the most ease. Easy means without difficulty. Ease means without friction.
When we ask “Why is this so hard?” People think we’re asking for things to be easy, but we’re not really trying to remove difficulty from the equation. If we did, the last thing we would be doing is building a business from scratch.
Instead, what we’re really saying is “Why is there so much friction making forward progress doing this thing that I love and am supposed to be good at?” This doesn’t come from the reduction of difficulty, but the reduction of friction.
Frictionless means the energy you put in flows forward without resistance. It multiplies instead of grinding to a halt.
That’s exponential growth. Put in one unit of energy, get two back. Send one email, fifty people join. Post one video a hundred new subscribers appear. It feels like the world is conspiring with you instead of against you.
Every day, I wake up having gained 25-50 new subscribers to The Author Stack for free without exerting much additional effort. When I do exert effort, like during a sale, I make far more than the effort I spend.
Most of the time, though, you’ll be stuck in arithmetic growth. That’s when you put in one unit of energy and you get back one. Or maybe 1.1, if you’re lucky. You’re working, and you’re moving, but it’s linear and exhausting. Life feels like a grind and never really pays off the way you want. That’s where most businesses live.
I stopped producing new books in The Godsverse Chronicles because the energy I received was almost on par with with the effort I exerted releasing them. I don’t make much from it, but I didn’t abandon the series, either. It still does work for me, but it doesn’t return enough energy for me to focus on it for more than a couple hours a month.
I still have them up on all retailers, and I’m releasing one chapter a week for free on my Wannabe Press Substack. This brings people into the universe on autopilot with almost no effort, and an automated email sequence is selling them my series when they jump on my mailing list.
Sometimes, you don’t even get arithmetic growth, though. If the worst happens, you hit logarithmic growth. That’s when you put in effort and you get back less than you started with. You burn energy, you burn money, you burn time, and nothing sticks. It doesn’t even make sense. You’re screaming into the void, and the void keeps screaming louder.
One of the main reasons I retired from shows is because I was losing money and overexerting my energy doing them. Since the only way to make money at conventions is to be behind the booth selling, I had no choice but to walk away from them.
I still go to writing conferences and signing events, but comic conventions used to be 25-50% of my writing business, and losing them was a huge hit to my bottom line. Still, when you’re putting in $1 and only getting $.80 back, sometimes you have to walk away.
If you plotted it on a graph, it would look like this, with arithmetic growth being the middle, straight red line.
You probably know the difference between these intuitively. You don’t need a spreadsheet. You instinctively feel when the wheels are greased. You can feel when your actions are compounding. You can feel when something is flowing forward without drag.
You’re looking for the pillar, platform, product, and pathway combination that feels the most frictionless.
Over time, even the most frictionless growth flattens. Facebook ads used to be exponential. TikTok used to be exponential. Substack Notes is exponential right now, but in two years it’ll just be arithmetic. That’s how this game works.
So you need to master the pillar while it’s frictionless, so that by the time it flattens, you’ve already built the system and moved on to the next pillar.
That’s how you leapfrog your way through the seven.
Not by forcing arithmetic growth to become exponential and calling it “persistence”, but by riding the exponential wave long enough to lock it in, then jumping to the next one before the wave breaks.
I know it feels different that what anyone has told you before, but look around. Does this industry work for almost anyone? Does it work sustainably? Is this how you want to live?
All you need to thrive is one pillar, one platform, one product, and one pathway. The key is figuring out which one, and how to make them all work together to amplify each other.
There is a better way, but it’s not the way it’s been done up until now. I believe everyone can build a thriving business, but not on the back of a broken system.
What do you think? Where is your exponential growth? Let us know in the comments.
I loved this line: “Because every single pillar has a failure period built in.” This is why I gave guest podcasting 18 months before throwing in the towel. It worked for the first 6-9 then visibility trailed downward. My failure period didn’t come at first, but after the season tailed off. So, on to another. It’s just a method and I can change methods all day.