Codie Sanchez lays out seven steps for launching a business in 2026: prioritize speed over perfection, sell before the product is done, target wealthy customers, build your own email and community channels, lean on relationships over AI, use AI to kill low-value work, and run the obituary test to stay aligned with your purpose.
If you lost everything tomorrow, do you know how you'd rebuild in 2026? Because the rules have changed. Here's what I'd do if I lost it all tomorrow. Number 1, speed over everything. First off, world is moving too fast for perfectionism. So you gotta test, ship, iterate. Number 2, sell before you're ready. Stop polishing, stop planning. Sell the thing first, then build around the demand. Proof of concept beats a perfect product every time. Number 3, sell to people with money. The middle class is squeezed, but wealthy customers, They're still buying a lot. So go where the pricing power is, where the rich are buying. Number 4, build your distribution before you need it. Email list, community, content. You need to own your traffic. If you're relying on Instagram or ads, you don't have a business, you have a dependency. 5, make relationships your unfair advantage. AI can automate tasks, but it can't replace trust, referrals, reputation. If you want your business to grow fast, you need to stay human, actually. And then 6, you build an AI-first company on top of that. You're not AI eventually, you're not AI everything, you're AI now to automate all all the low-level tasks that most humans shouldn't do. Then number 7, know the obituary test. What do you want your life to add up to? Your why is going to determine your direction. So don't build fast and forget why you're building. If you want the full breakdown of how we'd build a business in 2026, comment 2026 and I'll send you the guide.
