Starting and Growing Something from Scratch: A Guide for Builders

Good Morning everyone

This is part of a new series where I’ll be writing about the art (and the chaos) of starting and growing something. Whether it’s a brand, a project, or a dream that’s been sitting in the back of your mind for years, this is for you.

I’ve been there more times than I can count, and if there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s that getting something off the ground is messy, exciting, unpredictable, and strangely addictive. There is no perfect playbook for it, but there are patterns, principles, and lessons that can make the journey less of a blindfolded sprint and more of a deliberate stride.

Defining Success Before You Chase It

The first step is deceptively simple: define what success looks like. You would think everyone does this, but you’d be surprised how many projects fail because no one took a moment to ask, “What does winning look like?” Your definition of success sets the tone for everything that follows. Is success building a small but fiercely loyal community of 100 people who love what you do? Or is it reaching 10,000 customers in the first year? Be honest with yourself here, because the rest of your strategy will depend on this definition.

This is also where you guard against someone else’s definition of success becoming your own by accident. Social media will scream at you to grow fast, raise capital, and “scale or die,” but not every project needs to follow that trajectory. Sometimes the most successful projects are the quiet ones that stick to their vision rather than the loud ones that chase trends.

I speak about this a little in my latest podcast episode which you can see here

Phases: Startup vs. Establishment

One way to avoid overwhelm is to break your journey into phases. Every project has a startup phase and an establishment phase, and the things you need to focus on in each are very different.

The startup phase is all about experimenting, testing, and learning. You’re not trying to be perfect yet; you’re just trying to exist and see if the idea resonates with anyone beyond your immediate circle. In this phase, you want to move fast, fail quickly, and pay close attention to feedback. The quicker you launch something (even if it’s rough), the sooner you can start listening to what your audience really wants. The first version of your brand or project will almost always be wrong in some way, and that’s fine. Every iteration brings you closer to what it should be.

The establishment phase is where you start solidifying your processes, your brand identity, and your team structure. Once you know the core of what works, you can start fine-tuning and scaling. But you can’t jump to this phase without first being scrappy, flexible, and willing to throw half-baked ideas into the world to see if they land.

Building the Right Team

No one builds anything worth remembering entirely alone. At some point, you will need a team, even if it starts as just one or two people who share your vision. One of the most underrated skills when starting something from scratch is learning how to narrate your vision clearly to others. You cannot expect people to give their time and energy to something they don’t fully understand or believe in.