The 5 Phases I Went Through While Building My Business From Scratch

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Building a business feels like jumping out of a plane and trying to put the parachute together on the way down.

You don’t know what you’re doing, but you keep going because stopping isn’t an option.

These are 5 business stages with lessons I wish I knew earlier.

Let’s dive in.

1. Hunger

This was the first phase for me.

Since I was a kid, I’ve been obsessed with building stuff. By high school, that hunger only grew.

I’m not sure why, but I always wanted to create something myself. I’d stay up all night in middle school reading biographies of entrepreneurs. It wasn’t about a formula, but was probably more pure hunger.

I experimented with everything like selling bracelets door-to-door and trying random ideas. Content caught my attention because it seemed like it had massive output for minimal input. Back then, it wasn’t a science to me. It was just trying things, failing, and finding what stuck.

Two months into college, I had grown my account to 2,000 TikTok followers.

I felt like a celebrity.

2. Stumbling

This was the next phase. Looking back, it was me just leaning into excitement. Basically doing what felt fun.

It started with my first viral TikTok. Then 10k followers. By 1 million followers, I was hyped. Every 100k felt like a milestone, but I had no real plan. It was just chasing the metrics.

Then an opportunity came randomly. I think it’s because I built the field (field of dreams reference). Anyways, it was a startup house for creators. I applied and got in and felt like I’d joined an exclusive club. It was exciting and I stumbled into rooms full of smart people. That led me to building projects with them.

One founder was into AI before it was big. We talked about cloning content creators. Another and I tried building an essay-writing tool called Sheesh. Although nothing panned out, it was a fun time.

One day, I gave a talk at the house about content tips. I was nervous but everyone said it was great. It was the first time I realized I knew more about content than most people in the room.

That moment led me to my first client. I had a sales meeting with them before even knowing what that meant. It just felt right to put together a deck to show them what we could do. We had no case studies or anything. Just showed them our content pages we had built. But sadly, they got no traction a few months in. They were pretty upset. That sucked. But you get through it. Just make sure to incorporate the feedback and get better.

A few months later, a friend introduced us to another startup. This time, we learned. We built out a full content strategy and mapped out what success looked like. Then we realized we couldn’t be making content for the clients with our own faces. It was just too taxing. So we hired a creator with great energy instead of using our faces. 3-4 months in, we had our first viral video.

3. Breakdown

With that first win, we started scaling fast. Everyone wanted to know how that startup went viral.

In months, we had 5-10 clients through pretty much all referrals. Some did well, others didn’t. The problem was that we used the same strategy for everyone. It didn’t work because each business was different.

Soon, it started collapsing. Clients started leaving. Their followers grew, but their businesses didn’t.

In a matter of weeks, we were down to 1-2 clients. What we thought was a business wasn’t a business. It was chaos. But chaos fuels clarity.

The collapse shattered my ego. And that’s exactly what I needed.

4. Systemization

By April 2023, we were completely unprofitable. My brother and I took a step back. We asked, “Where did we mess up?”

We realized two things:

1. We had product-market fit (the service worked when done right).

2. We didn’t have a business (we had hustle, not systems).

Here’s what we did:

• Opened a business bank account and stopped mixing personal and business finances (yep we were idiots for not doing this before).

• Documented everything we did to deliver our service.

• Mapped out every function of the business: sales, marketing, accounting, customer success.

The formula:

1. Do the work.

2. Write down how you did it.

3. Refine it into a system.

4. Make it run without you.

This process rebuilt our foundation.

5. Scaling

Now we’re between systemization and scale. Most processes are in place, but scaling requires constant updates.

The formula:

1. Build something.

2. It breaks.

3. Rebuild better.

We scaled without a foundation early on. It worked for a while, but the crash taught us the importance of systems.

The key to building anything great: Build → Break → Rebuild. Keep iterating, and eventually, you’ll create something magical.

You may be wondering, how do you actually systemize and scale? But that’s for you to figure out. Each business is different and over a period of time, you’ll realize what you need to do.

It took us well over a year to map out most of our processes. Part of that time was understanding how to even map processes. And most of the time was understanding what to actually include in the processes.

Here’s what I would tell myself tactically if I could go back

1. Open a business bank account, register your business, track your expenses, and separate personal and business finances.

2. Write down how you do everything. Even if it’s rough, document your first version.

3. Don’t fear failure. Let things break, learn from the chaos, and rebuild stronger.

4. Try your best to work with people who excite you. Choose clients, teammates, and projects that feel right. Energy > Money. I know this is hard when starting, but it will just make it that much better.

The magic isn’t in avoiding failure.

I found that it’s in learning and evolving through it.

In other words - in order to to succeed… you kind of have to fail first.