Entrepreneur Magazine March 2022

REMEMBER WHEN “inbox zero” was everyone’s goal? The idea was that, someway and somehow, it was possible to clear your thoughts by clearing your inbox. As I write this, I have 131 unopened emails waiting for me. Inbox zero is a fantasy, and I accept that. I have come to believe that we should not define our success by (or tie our sanity to) things we cannot control ourselves. If anyone can email us—you could email me right now!—then the number of emails in our inbox at any given moment is out of our control. So instead of shooting for inbox zero, I have shifted my goal to something that is within my grasp. It’s called “Calendar Zero.” This is my term for a day without meetings. It is a day to do…

What do a dating app, Uber, a nightclub, and Airbnb all have in common? “If your customers come to this product, and there aren’t enough other people around, then they’re just going to bounce,” says Andrew Chen, a general partner at the high-profile Silicon Valley VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, who sits on the boards of Clubhouse, Substack, and a dozen other buzzy tech startups. These companies require what’s called a network effect: They become more valuable as more people use them. (After all, nobody hangs out at an empty club.) That means founders need to attract an active and connected base of users quickly, or they may fail to attract anyone at all. This isn’t easy, but it is possible—and one strategy to make it happen applies to any business aiming…

1 Go with what you know. “After a year in business, we broke even without spending much on advertising. So I looked at the media landscape. The digital and paid social spaces were saturated by DTCs. TV and print would be hard to break through. But radio was a channel I’d had great experiences building brand equity on. So we went all in. I remortgaged my house five times, but by the end of our second year, we had grown 10 times.” —SCOTT TANNEN, cofounder and CEO, Boll & Branch 2 Trust your vision. “When I was 21, I raised capital to build a six-story megahostel in Eastern Europe. Days before we broke ground, the Russian ruble crashed. Suddenly we had 30% of the $3 million budget in investor commitments and a 25-plus-year lease…

Look up from your office desk, and there’s a lamb gamboling by in a diaper … Uh, are you dreaming? Not if you’re working at FarmHouse Fresh. The multinational botanical skin-care company, which launched 17 years ago from Shannon McLinden’s kitchen sink (where she made its first foot scrub), did $40 million in retail sales last year with products in thousands of spas, salons, and resort hotels. But the staff is equally inspired by “colleagues” like Flower (that’s the lamb’s name), whom employees have been bottle-feeding after his mother rejected him. FarmHouse Fresh didn’t originally intend to run an actual farm. But that changed 10 years ago, when McLinden and her sisterin-law Delia McLinden, who serves as vice president of sales and business development, took part in a common practice: They…

When I launched Kettle & Fire with my brother, Nick, I knew nothing about retail. Like a lot of entrepreneurs, we just set out to make something we couldn’t buy—in our case, an organic bone broth made from grass-fed, grassfinished animals, with no additives, and cooked for a long time. In 2015, after Google Trends and Keyword Planner showed us that other people were also searching for something like this, we introduced our first product. This was three years before bone broth became a thing, with celebrities like Halle Berry and Chrissy Teigen swearing by it. But we found this group called PaleoHacks, which had some 800,000 members at the time, and these people were into all the health benefits. Once we let the group know about Kettle & Fire, we…

Everyone makes decisions. But entrepreneurs have an especially challenging time of it because so often we must make decisions based on incomplete, inconclusive, and often contradictory data. In my four-decade career as an entrepreneur, I have learned a few things about how to make those decisions, including the most important thing of all: Just make a decision. It may sound trite, but it’s also just plain true. When so much feels like it’s on the line, it’s easy to become paralyzed, unable to choose which direction to take. But even a wrong decision is better than no decision because at the very least, by implementing a wrong decision you’ll learn a little more about the problem you’re trying to solve, making it easier to know which way to go next time. That’s…