Understand these five things and you will see through any business: a one-person company does not have to spend 2 million to study for an MBA

Most people think that you need to know a lot before starting a business. To understand financial reporting, strategy, and supply chain, it is best to get an MBA. But Josh Kaufman said in “Earn an MBA from a prestigious school without spending money: Save 2 million to start a business, just learn the MBA by yourself!” (opens in a new tab)” claims just the opposite: Business is not complicated at all. What is complicated are those who make it complicated to show off their status. He breaks down any business, from a roadside candle stand to a multinational group, into five necessary links: value creation, marketing, sales, value delivery, and finance. By understanding these five pieces, you can break down any company into five questions. This ability he calls a superpower.

After listening to this episode (opens in a new tab), what impressed me most was not the beautiful words against MBA, but the significance of this framework to a one-person company. When you have only one person, these five things all fall on you: you are not only product development, but also marketing, sales, customer service, and your own chief financial officer. A traditional company can let five departments each take care of one part, and each can pretend that the other part does not exist; a one-person company cannot do this, and if you neglect one part, the entire chain will be broken. Therefore, the value of this framework to us is not to analyze other people’s businesses, but to take stock of ourselves: Where should I spend my efforts this month? What have I been avoiding? This is also the same thing that I thought of repeatedly when reading “One-person Company Management in the AI ​​Era”: The more powerful the tool, the more you need to go back to the most basic structure to look at yourself.

Don’t ask your friends and mom, look at the credit card that was swiped

The sentence I most want to copy from this episode comes from Intercom founder Des Traynor: Show me a credit card that is actually charged, and I will admit that this problem is real.

Kaufman goes even further. Many people bet on an idea for years, just because my friends and mother said they would buy it. But this sentence proves nothing, because the cost of saying you like it is zero, and the cost of paying money is real. The real verification method is pre-ordering: having someone swipe their credit card before production. It is worth putting into production only if you have collected several hundred pieces.

This passage resonated particularly well with me. I have been working on several knowledge products in the past six months. The most practical one is not to make the thing more complete, but to launch pre-sales first, let real credit card swiping happen, and then go back and decide how much to invest. On the other hand, those ideas that I think are great but have been reluctant to charge for, most of them haven’t passed this level yet. Here’s the key: The evidence of need isn’t in someone else’s mouth, it’s in their credit card statement. This is the same underlying logic as when I talked about Ali Abdaal’s roadmap when I wrote “Verify First, Then Build”: let the market nod first, and then invest time in building it.

It’s not the 10,000 hours, it’s the first 20 hours

The second half shifts to Kaufman’s second book, The First 20 Hours , and here’s a very liberating view of the creator.

Yes, we’ve all heard of the 10,000-hour rule. But Kaufman reminded that that study (Anders Ericsson) was talking about mastery, about being at the top in a highly competitive performance field. But what we do most in life is not to pursue excellence, but to learn something new for the first time. And going from nothing to pretty useful only takes about 20 hours of dedicated practice: 40 minutes a day for a month.

What really blocks people is not the 10,000 hours, but the first 20 hours, which he calls the frustration barrier: the first one to ten hours are the most emotionally difficult, as they feel stupid and are afraid of making a fool of themselves. This is where most people give up. He also pointed out one thing: Many people are stuck in the research stage and hesitate to start, not because of diligence, but because research is more comfortable than exposing their own incompetence.

This paragraph is related to a recent experience I had. The methodologies I have been working on these days have been solidified into skills one by one: thesis research, video editing, lesson preparation, and proposals. As I was doing it, I realized that these are actually different versions of the same thing: compressing a set of processes that originally relied on people to repeatedly explore into something that others can get started directly. Kaufman’s 20 hours talks about how individuals can quickly cross the starting threshold; and what I am doing, to a certain extent, is to shorten those 20 hours for others. This means that rapid skill acquisition is not just a learning method, it is itself a business that can be productized.

Complexity does not equal value

There is another concept that I think is worth posting on the wall of everyone who makes products: complexity does not equal value.

Kaufman cites Gall’s Law: All functioning complex systems evolved from a functioning simple system. Therefore, if you want to make something complex, you must start with a simple version, so that every additional point of complexity must be exchanged for corresponding value. He gave Whoop as an example: the founder deliberately did not add the function of showing time, because once it turned into a watch, the framework and expectations of the entire product would be distorted.

We often think that the more functions, the more valuable they are, so we add neon lights, metal covers, and mobile phone charging to candles, thinking that customers will be willing to pay more for this. But the opposite is often true. For a one-person company, this sentence is even more of a discipline: Your time is limited, and every time you add a feature or launch a product line, you are diluting your already limited strength. Convergence is usually more difficult and more valuable than expansion. This is what I talked about in “Exposing the Sales Funnel in the Sun”: Instead of doing fifty more things, it is better to fix the bottleneck that is really blocking you.

Three actions for yourself and for you

After listening to this two-hour program, if I were left with only three actions that I could do right away, I would write this:

First, take stock of yourself in five aspects. Make a list of value creation, marketing, sales, value delivery, and finance, and honestly mark which area you avoid the most this month, and make up for that area next week.

Second, change the idea that you want to do the most but haven’t done yet into a pre-sale. Stop asking people around you if they like it, set up a payment link and see if anyone actually swipes their card. Just do it after brushing it.

Third, pick a skill you’ve always wanted to learn and give it a 20-hour pre-commitment. Not trying to do well, just trying to survive the initial period when I felt stupid. Because what really divides people into two types is never talent, but who is willing to stay in the barrier of frustration for a while longer.

The threshold for business is actually lower than most people think; the difficulty is never understanding, but doing it and then staying.