$300K. Gone.

I spent over a year building the product first. Hired 4-5 engineers. Built sophisticated algorithms. Ran backtests for months. Did everything the startup books tell you to do.

Finally launched it. The returns were terrible. Couldn't even beat a basic index fund.

The company died. $300K burned in one go.

Meanwhile, I found this investing community on Reddit called Bogleheads. They just buy 8-10 basic ETFs and leave them alone. I tried it. Made 10.35% in 3.5 months with zero effort.

That's when I realized: I was following advice written for people living in a completely different world than me.

Most startup advice assumes you're in San Francisco with venture capital investors ready to write checks. It assumes you can go 1-3 years without paying yourself while you "build and hope."

Try that from Waterloo, Canada. Or from anywhere that's not San Francisco, New York, or maybe Austin.

I needed a different way.

After that expensive mistake, I found something that changed everything.

Instead of building a product and hoping people would pay for it, I started with customers who were already paying for similar services.

Here's what I did with SimpleDirect:

I was selling software to home improvement contractors for $29/month. The math sucked. I needed 100+ customers just to make a basic living. And getting 100 contractors to sign up? Nearly impossible.

Then I talked to one of my customers. He mentioned he was paying $10,000 per month to a marketing agency for Google Ads.

Meanwhile, my tool was helping him close $50,000+ in additional sales every month. I was solving a bigger problem than his marketing agency.

So I changed what I was selling. Instead of software, I started offering it as a consulting service for $1,000/month.

Same phone calls. Same conversations. Same time investment on my part.

But now instead of asking for $29, I was asking for $1,000.

I found people who already worked with contractors - equipment salespeople, suppliers, operations folks - and offered them 30% of the monthly fee for anyone they referred who became a client.

So if they referred someone paying $1,000/month, they got $300/month for that referral.

These people already knew dozens of contractors. They were motivated to actually talk about our services because it was real money for them.

You can only do this when you're charging enough. Nobody's going to hustle for 30% of $29.

Within 3 months, I had a profitable business that paid real salaries.

More importantly, I learned exactly what customers needed because I was solving their problems manually, one at a time.

That's what made the product we built later actually work.

This approach isn't just for software companies. It's how I built my venture studio. It's how 37signals went from a web design shop to making Basecamp (worth over $200M).

I spent the last month writing the complete guide: ‘De-Risk Your Startup: The Consulting Model’.

It's about 8,000 words. Real stories, real numbers, no bullshit.

The guide comes out next week. Everyone on this list gets it free.

Sign up here to get notified here.

Quick thing: You might be thinking ‘This is for tech companies, not for me.’

Actually, this works for almost anything.

The pattern is the same:

SimpleDirect's AI tools all started this way. We helped customers manually before we automated anything. That's why they actually work - we'd already solved the problems dozens of times by hand.

You can do this with marketing services, operations consulting, financial advice, technical help - anything where businesses have problems they'll pay to solve.

Before the full guide drops, do this quick exercise:

Think about what you want to build or what you're already building.

If the answer is no, ask yourself why they'd pay $50/month for the software version.

If the answer is yes, you might not need to build the product yet. You might just need to start selling the service.

Next week you'll get the complete guide with everything you need to make this work.

Just find customers with problems, solve those problems, get paid.

That's it.

-George

P.S. The guide has the full story of my $300K mistake - what I built, why I thought it would work, and when I realized I was doing it all backwards. Sometimes the expensive lessons teach you the most.