In this solo presentation, Dan Novaes shares the hard‑earned playbook that helped him grow a mid‑eight‑figure company and prepare it for an IPO. He argues that most startups fail not because of competition but because of confusion: building products nobody wants, running out of cash, and chasing founder identity over real problems. Novaes advises founders to start with a genuine pain point, validate demand before writing code through customer interviews, landing pages, and even pre‑orders, and launch an embarrassingly simple MVP that solves one person’s problem. He illustrates the process with the evolution of his own company, Mode, which pivoted from music aggregation to a paid‑for‑phone‑system service after listening to early users. He highlights that AI now makes rapid prototyping easier, but stresses that revenue and cash flow are the true oxygen of a business—branding, fundraising, and viral growth are secondary. Novaes also recommends buying an existing business with proven product‑market fit as a faster route than building from zero. Finally, he emphasizes building repeatable systems for acquisition, delivery, and retention so the company can run without the founder, and outlines the founder’s early need to master every function before delegating. The five‑point playbook he offers is: solve a real problem, validate demand before building, start simple and fast, prioritize revenue, and build scalable systems.
Chapters
There's a lot of advice out there about starting a business. Most of it comes from people who never actually scaled a business, but actually just scaled ways to sell you courses. I'm not here to talk theory. We've built a company that does mid-eight figures in revenue. And right now we're actually preparing to take that company public. And today I'm going to walk you through how to actually start a business, what to focus on, what to ignore, and how to avoid the mistakes that drain most first-time founders before they even get off the ground. Let's get into it. Most businesses do not fail because of competition. They fail because of confusion. Here are the top 3 reasons that most businesses fail. They build something that no one wants. They run out of cash before they can figure it out. And they chase being a founder more than actually solving a real problem. That's not going to be a business. That's going to be a distraction, and it's going to lead you off course. Don't start with an app idea or a product. Start with a pain point. What problem do people already have that they're willing to spend money to solve? What's broken or frustrating about the current solutions? Who would benefit the most if this was fixed? If you solve something real, you don't need to convince people to buy. They're already looking for that help. Oftentimes, the best founders find problems that actually impact them. Maybe they grew up a specific way or they have a certain problem in their life and they build a company around it. That's one of the best ways to start a business. Most people spend months building and then launch to crickets. Here's how you validate your business before you actually build it. Go out and talk to potential customers. Anyone can build a deck and talk to people about something they're actually building. You do not need a whole business in order to do that. You can create a prototype and just tell people about what you're building and see if they're interested or not. Ask about these pain points, not just your solution. Put up a landing page that allows them to click if they're interested or not and sign up. How many people are you getting? What does it cost you to actually get those people on your page? Is this something that you likely can make more money than it costs you to get those users? You can actually even charge money before you write a single line of code. If your product is that valuable, people might be willing to pay $1, $10, $100 for it as a preorder. Think about what Tesla did for the Cybertruck. It was 3, 4, or 5 years away for it to actually be built, and people could put down a deposit for $100 to show their interest. Even the largest companies in the world are doing it. Why shouldn't you? If nobody wants to pay for your idea today, building it is not going to change that concept for tomorrow. When we first started out building what ultimately became Mode, we had built a product and we did everything wrong. We actually built something that we thought people were going to want. We did not do enough customer insights. And ultimately, when we launched the product, we had only one type of user using it. Had we not talked to that user to figure out why they were using the Mode product at the time, which at the time we were aggregating music services, we would not have found out that they tended to be more budget-conscious consumers. And the reason that they were using our services is because they wouldn't pay for other premium music services, and we aggregated all the music services in one place. So when we found that out, we asked the question, well, what if we paid you to listen to music? And automatically, people really dug that idea. So the next day, we literally came up with the idea to launch a landing page to say, hey, get paid to play music. And over the course of the next 2 or 3 weeks, we had over 250,000 people sign up for a service that allowed them to make money while they played music. We launched that into the market, had our initial product-market fit. The thing is, is that then we learned it was really hard to monetize people to play music, and so we started exploring into other things that they might want to do. We learned that they were interested in playing games. We then incorporated games and started generating from games. Revenue from games and other services. And ultimately, that's the idea of how Mode became a music media service streaming product to ultimately what it is today, which is a phone system, an app that pays you as you use your phone system. So the idea came through a metamorphosis of being able to talk to those consumers, finding who those customers are, and then also focusing on the types of things that they wanted to do. Forget the perfect launch. The first version of your business should be embarrassingly simple. You don't need a full website. You don't need a team. You don't need investors. You need a solution that works for one person. Get someone to pay you, solve their problem, use the feedback, then do it again. That's how you find product-market fit, and that's how it actually happens. With AI today, it's easier than it's ever been to be able to create a version 1 of a product. The AIs practically make it for you, and you can almost show anyone something that you are building with an idea that you have and try and get them to become your customer. At the minimum, you will learn what resonates, how you sell them, and what they're interested in, which allows you to take that idea back and ultimately create a business for it. One caveat that I'll talk about here is that ultimately a lot of people really focus on new business ideas, and starting a new business is great, but it's also the hardest thing you could possibly do. You are much better off buying a business as opposed to starting a business. These businesses already have product-market fit and often are using outdated systems on how they operate. You can go in there, revamp the business, put a new coat on it, and then ultimately increase revenue as opposed to starting your company from 0 to 1. This is something I highly, highly recommend if I can go back and starting my career is potentially buying a business as opposed to starting from 0 because it is very hard to start a business from 0 to 1. Before you worry about your logos and perfecting your branding and raising money, you need to worry about your revenue. Revenue proves demand, and revenue funds growth. Revenue's gonna get you leverage, and whether it's a SaaS product, a physical good, a service, or content, cash is the oxygen. You cannot scale without having a revenue model that actually makes sense, and the faster that you can get your revenue in and the faster that you can get that product out, you will create a network effect that'll continue compounding over time. You can always improve your branding, you can always improve your marketing channels, but you need to understand your business model first and foremost. A real business doesn't rely on you working 18-hour days. It relies on systems. Systems to acquire customers, systems to deliver value, systems to support and retain users. If you're the only one who can run it, it's not a business. It's going to be a job. From day one, you want to think, how can this work without me in the middle of every task? Now, it's important that you take the caveat here that when you're starting the business, you should know every single part of it. You're doing the customer support, you're talking to the investors, you're understanding what users want. So that is a time and place at the beginning of that company. And when you are starting that, you want to learn every part of it because in order for you to delegate that task, you need to know someone that can ultimately own it and do it better than you. But if you don't have those early insights, you're going to have a really difficult time building your early product. So this is something to think about is that when you're starting, you are going to be the master of everything. But eventually, you don't want to be the master of none. You want to hire people that ultimately can do it better for you, delegate those tasks, and that's how you go from 0 to 1, from 1 to 10. When I started, I didn't have a roadmap. I learned through expensive mistakes, missed signals, and trial by fire. So here's a playbook I wish someone would have handed me from day 1. Solve a real problem. Validate your demand before you build. Start simple and fast. Prioritize your revenue and build systems that scale without you. If you do these 5 things, you're already ahead of 90% of founders. Do not get caught up in the founder startup culture of what everyone else is doing. You're going to read headlines about how big other companies are growing, how much money they're spending. Do not allow that to deviate you from building a sustainable foundation because that ultimately will crush your dreams and will make it so that your business won't even get started off the ground. You do not need to go viral. You need to go narrow, focused, and fast. This is universal basic knowledge. Knowledge.
