If I Started A Business in 2026, I'd Do This | Ep 919

In 2016, I had $1,000 to my name sleeping on a gym floor. Nine years later, I broke the Guinness World Records of the fastest-selling nonfiction book and generated over $106 million in sales in a weekend. I'm going to show you how I'd build a business if I started all over. So first, either sell extremely expensive stuff to a select few or sell something super cheap. to everyone.

The middle is where people die. So fundamentally all businesses have the cost of getting customers and what you make from those customers is the core economic arbitrage that makes a business a business. You have a more efficient way of taking resources and allocating them to get superior throughput on the other side. That's literally what a business is. Why did I start with sell really expensive stuff or sell really cheap stuff?

Let's dive in. So having worked with thousands of businesses now, I can tell you that it is significantly easier when you're starting to sell extremely expensive to a select few. And the reason for that is that you have to make enough money to be able to serve the masses. So if you look at Tesla as a great case study for this, Tesla started with a $250,000 roadster, clearly selling to a select few. And it was like a beta test car.

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