Most people don’t actually want to start a business. They want to look like someone who started a business.
In their mind starting a biz begins with buying a new laptop, upgrading to the latest iPhone, and renting a cool vibe co-working space with a latte bar. And of course, printing business cards with “Founder” on them! They spend weeks debating logo colors. Months polishing a website. Then one day they order hoodies and ballcaps with their logo on them and declare to the world they’ve “launched.”
Kill me now.
That scenario above is the Instagram version of entrepreneurship. And Instagram is a fantasy land. Social media has turned entrepreneurship into a fashion statement.
Someone watches a few Gary Vaynerchuk clips, starts tossing around words like hustle and founder, and suddenly they think they’re building a company. But they forget a pretty important detail...
Before GaryVee became GaryVee, he spent years grinding in the dirt…bagging ice in the family liquor store, doing DMs until 2 am, and shooting wine videos that had eleven views…with four of them from trolls. He did the unsexy work that actually builds an audience and a business.
People see me rocking stages of 10,000 people in London, Dubai, and Oslo, wondering how I got so lucky to be discovered. You should have been there when I was flying economy on Eastern Airlines to Davenport, and presenting to 22 people at the fucking Holiday Inn.
What people see today is the highlight reel. What they miss is the decade of obscurity… the late nights… the hundreds of reps nobody applauded.
And that’s the dangerous part of entrepreneurial celebrity culture. People start chasing the vibe of success instead of the work that produces it. Because calling yourself a founder is easy.
The market decides if you actually are one.
The real version of entrepreneurship looks a lot less cinematic and a lot grittier. It’s making pitch after pitch after pitch, most of them going nowhere. It’s asking people who barely know you if they’ll try what you’re building and give you honest feedback. It’s assembling a scrappy group of beta customers who get the product free or cheap because you’re still figuring out what the product actually is.
And most of the time, you’re doing all of that while you’re still working your day job.
You come home… eat something quick… and sit back down at the computer to work on the business. Your friends are watching Netflix at nine while you’re rewriting your offer. Your coworkers are asleep by midnight while you’re answering emails and trying to book the next sales conversation. By one in the morning, you’re tweaking the pitch again because the last ten didn’t land the way you hoped.
This is the part nobody glamorizes. Early entrepreneurship isn’t branding. It isn’t aesthetics. It’s marketing.
A business isn’t real until someone pays you.
There’s a famous line from the movie Glengarry Glen Ross: “Coffee is for closers.” It’s meant to be savage, and in the movie it certainly is. But strip away the theatrics and there’s Truth with a capital ‘T’ in that line. In the early stage of a company, everything comes down to closing.
You close the first customer who believes enough to take a chance on you. Then the second one who gives you feedback instead of a refund. Then the tenth one who proves you might really have something here. And along the way you discover something important: you’re not just selling the product… you’re discovering what the product actually is.
Your early customers shape the offer. They tell you what works, what’s confusing, what they actually value. Half the time the thing you thought was the big selling point isn’t the real value at all. The market teaches you where the leverage lives—but it only teaches people who are actually in the arena having real conversations.
This is where most would-be entrepreneurs sabotage themselves. They try to perfect something that hasn’t even been tested yet. They polish the website, tweak the logo, rehearse the brand story… all before they’ve had a single real sales conversation.
That’s backwards.
I’ve launched businesses, advised startups, and coached thousands of entrepreneurs go through this exact phase. And I can tell you that businesses aren’t built by people who perfect logos. (Or marketing teams spending three days at an offsite arguing about brand fonts.)
They’re built by people who book business.
The smartest founders I’ve known start with traction instead of polish. They spend their time talking to customers, refining the offer, and stacking evidence that their idea has legs. Once you develop a little traction, everything else becomes easier…
The messaging becomes obvious because you know what people respond to. The website practically writes itself because you finally understand the problem you solve. (Or you realize you don’t even need a traditional website any longer.) Your brand becomes clear because it’s anchored in reality instead of guesswork.
This ties directly into prosperity thinking. Scarcity thinkers wait for certainty before they act. Prosperity thinkers act first…and build certainty through evidence. One group waits until everything feels safe. The other group starts creating proof.
And the most powerful proof you can collect is customers. Not logos. Not swag. Not a clever domain name. Customers.
So if you’re starting a business right now, forget the co-working fantasy and the brand kit rabbit hole. Focus on conversations that lead to customers. Make offers. Listen to feedback. Adjust. Rinse and repeat.
Because in the real world of entrepreneurship, the early days always come down to the same thing...
Coffee is still for closers. ☕️
Peace,
- RG
P.S. If you’re committed to the real version of being an entrepreneur, you need to be in my Breakthrough U program. Check the details here.
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