Charles Cormier argues young founders shouldn't give away work for free. Instead, identify your ideal customer, invite them onto a podcast to qualify prospects and gather market data, then test concrete offers like a small retainer plus performance fees to find what works.
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I'll start with like a piece of advice that circulated out there that's really toxic in my opinion to young founders, which is that give your shit for free, right? Like it's the Hormozy advice, like give stuff for free, right? I think that's terrible advice, but where not to start is like giving yourself for free. I think it undervalues you. It doesn't teach you the fundamentals. The fundamentals are pick an ICP. I'd pick an ideal customer persona, try out offers to them. Obviously not, what is an offer? It's something valuable to them. And see what sticks, right? Fundamentally, it's to start a podcast and to start cold emailing that ICP, right? So you can use platforms like Apollo or Instantly, reach out these folks asking them, hey, do you want to be on a podcast? That's the first offer, right? Then on a podcast, well, even before they book the podcast on the Calendly link, you ask them filtering questions to make sure that they're good. They're not schmucks, that they have budget for you. And then on a podcast, you ask them a series of questions, right? So what does, what that does is it qualifies them. And it also gives you the data to forge the right product for them. That's how I would start if I would be 17 or 18. And then the way to do it, the entry point is a podcast. Every— and I would advise for you to go in B2B, not B2C, right? So interview other founders, other CEOs, and then you'll find out that these founders and CEOs, they have human needs, right? They want to— they want for young people to ask them questions. They want to talk. People are lonely nowadays, right? And you will get data on the other side and you might get a client one time. Out of 5 or 10, right? If you throw them the right offer, the offer after your podcast could be, hey, you told me during the podcast that you struggled with your ads. How about rebuild your ads for this month and I charge you a small retainer and a performance fee on the backend? Something like that. You test out 10 of these, eventually you'll find out like what works for them. So that's how I would advise young people to start and obviously do start a business, right? Because AI is coming. Do not go try to fetch a job. You will get direct by the agentic tsunami that's coming. So do start a business in B2B and use a podcast to find out what's your product-market fit.
