The Minimalist Entrepreneur: How Great Founders Do More with Less

by Sahil Lavingia

she says, “When I’m asked about what made Schmidt’s so successful, I often say that my customers were my business plan. It started when I listened to those at the farmer’s market, and it continued through each step of growth.

Once you’re running a growing, profitable business with a hundred customers who love you and whom you care about, you can celebrate them—by launching. Throw a party.

Repeat customers mean that your business is able to persist without ongoing sales efforts so you can start to focus on scaling.

First comes scaling your customer acquisition and sales strategy, then your company, then your ambition.

People don’t care about companies, they care about other people. And you’ve built something from nothing. You love what you do. You don’t need to share what you ate for lunch, but you should take your hard-earned learnings and share them with the world.

They are paying you for your work, they’re interested in how you think, and they want to know why you made certain decisions and how your product came to be.

Most people will not be a fit for your business. That’s okay. Your audience will grow much larger than your customer base—but your customer base is a subset, likely the most passionate, of your audience.

But the truth is, your audience doesn’t care. They want to lose weight, laugh, be entertained, get smarter, spend time with loved ones, go home on time, sleep adequately, eat good food, be happy.

Few make the transition from being themselves to being teachers, but those who do build audiences quickly, because people spend much of their time on social media in search of a better way to live, learn, and make money.

If you have a hundred customers, there are at least a hundred things you have learned. Start by sharing those.

Building a social media presence is a lagging indicator of the success of your company, and it should always be secondary to it.

Don’t just teach. Speak from experience, tell the truth, and the inspiration will happen.

Ideally, you should have a clear idea of what’s already working. Then, and only then, should you spend money to accelerate.

Instead of thinking about loyalty programs as a marketing function, think of them as genuine rewards to loyal customers. For example, you can offer discounts for leaving a business review online or for sharing it on social media.

Haus relies on user-generated content to generate word of mouth. Lo-fi content shot on an iPhone and genuine customer voices convey the authenticity that is a hallmark of the brand and that speaks to potential new customers.

“Marketing doesn’t have to be fancy to be impactful,” she says. “It has to be real.”

But being a minimalist entrepreneur isn’t just about owning a business that doesn’t own you; it’s also about owning a business that you want to work on, even if you don’t have to work on it anymore.

It’s all you, every day. For now. Then it’s software. Eventually you and your army of robots will be at maximum capacity and you’ll need help. But before you hire your first full-time employee, use freelancers.

Far too often, companies with plenty of talent and market potential run into trouble not because of the product or the customers but because of the unglamorous but essential parts of running the business:

Don’t get swept up in what a “successful” business is supposed to look like. Keep doing what’s working, stop or improve the processes that aren’t, and always, always, always keep an eye on the numbers and your ears on your customers.

The tuning fork you should resort to over and over again is quite simple: your customers. Your customers do not want you to get bigger and grow faster. They do not care how rich you are, if you were on the Forbes “30 Under 30” list, which venture capitalists you raised money from, or how many employees you have. They want your product to improve, and your business to stick around. That’s about it.

“There is a misconception that money or investment confers validation and permission to do things in conventional and expensive ways, but that’s not true. It’s about product, revenue, and traction.

be diligent about the essentials. It’s easy to excuse sloppy practices when you’re growing and feel overwhelmed, but that’s the moment when you need to be most disciplined about how you spend your time and money. Not just because of the implications for your bottom line but also because nothing brings a business to a screeching halt faster than a legal problem or a break in the supply chain.

If you rely on VCs for capital, like we did in the early days, you rely on outside forces to be successful.

When you are profitable, you can take your time. You can talk to customers and really make sure you understand their problems before you attempt to solve them. Then you can iterate on your solution over and over again until you’re really happy with it even if you take years to do it.

Moving slowly will mean you can ship more thoughtfully because you’ll have the time and space to learn about yourself, your customers, and your market.

One of the fastest ways to drain your enthusiasm and to lose steam is a cofounder fight. According to Paul Graham, founder disagreements are par for the course, and 20 percent of those situations escalate until one founder departs the company.

Drs. John and Julie Gottman, well-known couples therapists, say they can predict the end of relationships using “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” their name for four types of communication styles that start to appear in a relationship: (1) criticism, (2) contempt, (3) defensiveness, and (4) stonewalling.

Have these hard conversations again and again. Think about specific check-ins to reevaluate these goals so that disagreements don’t fester silently, and make sure that whatever path you plan on taking, you’re on the same page about it.

Generally, I don’t let my business make me too happy, so that it can’t make me too sad.

To be clear, this isn’t about scaling back your ambitions in order to make your business work. It’s about aligning the ambitions you have for yourself and your company with the ambitions your customers have for themselves.

In fact, the longest-lived businesses in the world are also some of the smallest. They are restaurants, hotels, construction companies, and more. Many of them are family firms, or small to midsize enterprises content with steady evolution of their niche and a passionate multigenerational customer base. Something to aspire to!

community before process, process before product, sales before marketing, and marketing before growth.

Values supersede you, and values allow you to scale. After all, one of the reasons you started a business is to control your environment: when you work, how you work, where you work, who you work with, who you work for, and more. Values make sure that everyone is aligned on what that looks like. This is especially important when it comes to making difficult decisions.

businesses are product agnostic, which helped them make the decision to shift Beanstalk to maintenance and support mode.

Behavior is what someone is doing; intention is why they’re doing it. Most people judge themselves based on their own intentions but then judge others based on their behavior. Transparency makes that difficult, if not impossible.

Ultimately, if you hire well, your employees will be better managers of themselves than you could ever be. And in the long run, giving everyone autonomy allows you to be a peer to your employees so that you can code alongside your engineers, design alongside your designers, and spend your time creating and building something impactful rather than constantly managing others. As long as you continue to lay out the long-term vision for the company based on clearly articulated values, your employees will be happy to support you.

Don’t be a product visionary—or, worse, a product dictator. Your company shouldn’t be a cult of personality, building exclusively what you want on the timelines you decide.

Whether you have three employees or three hundred, have clear key performance indicators (KPI) that everyone knows about and can measure their work against, which will allow everyone to either talk to or build for customers.

Most companies use meetings as an essential tool to get their work done, but we don’t have meetings at Gumroad. We’ve even taken it a step further: we’re fully asynchronous. This has meant that for us, all communication is thoughtful. Because nothing is urgent—unless the site is down—discussion takes place only after mindful processing.

This three-pronged system is a useful heuristic to help employees know where to go to get help when they need it. In a few hours, Slack. In a day or two, GitHub. Longer than that, Notion.

Ultimately, it will be more work to build your company culture than your product. But it will also be more valuable.

Great people will only apply if they see a job that matches (or exceeds) their expectations for what their ideal work life could be like.

From the beginning, you should look to hire people who are better than you. They’re not there to implement your vision but to improve upon it based on their own interactions with customers.

Truthfully, when you start doubting, you probably know the answer and just aren’t comfortable making the hard decision of letting them go.

They weren’t bad employees, they just weren’t a fit for you. Your company is a business, not a cult. Embrace change, don’t abhor it.

As long as you’re making the world better in an honest, scalable way by selling a product worth paying for to a community that wants it, starting a company is worth it.

Being a creator and a minimalist entrepreneur is a path that should be available to a huge array of different kinds of people, and all different kinds of employees and customers should be able to find the exact right fit for themselves.