If you're reading this, chances are high that you haven’t started your company yet.
Let’s get into the "hustling and selling a startup" dream that is mostly unhealthy glorification of entrepreneurship, and a different way how to approach and achieve this dream.
By glorification, I mean the hundreds of self-proclaimed gurus and hustle preachers flooding the internet that made it. Whatever "it" is.
Their goal?
To convince you to follow their lead and ultimately buy their products.
It’s a strategy as old as marketing itself.
To be straight with you — most sales gurus and hustle preachers talk a load of bullshit.
You know, the sort of "Here is how to get from 0 - 2343452 Linkedin followers in a month" by a guy who has 200 followers.
The Hustle Machine: Cults and Courses
Let’s look at hustle influencers. What do most of them have in common? They’re not running scalable businesses — no startups in sight.
Maybe they had one once. Fine.
But now? They run agencies. And not just any agency — a content-driven machine with a team that films, edits, and markets their persona as a brand.
What they really sell isn’t innovation or products.
It’s influence.
Here’s the playbook: create a cult-like following and sell, sell, sell.
Time vs. money, grind culture, and “proven methods.” They’ll tell you, "We made it, so can you." What follows is a relentless pitch:
"Join our course—it’ll unlock your potential!"
"Need more tips? Grab our paid newsletter—gold nuggets only!"
"Feeling stuck? Buy a ticket to our next event and meet other grinders like you!"
The promise? Success.
The reality? Most crash and burn, with the blame squarely on their shoulders for not “working hard enough.”
The cycle? Endless.
Which leads to my first point: startups are bloody hard.
If you want to hustle and get rich, do what is proven to work and known by a lot of people, don't try to innovate anything.
A small, stable business built around your expertise is simpler, healthier, and more sustainable.
---
Start Small, Start Smart
Say you’ve been working in finance or insurance for 10-20 years. That’s gold.
Start a consulting firm. Build some content around your knowledge so people can binge you.
Maybe it doesn’t scale like a startup, but it’s stable, profitable, and yours.
You control your time, you build a business that serves your life—not the other way around.
Now, does that mean startups are a bad idea? No. But here’s the thing—startups are built for scalability. They’re designed for high growth, which makes them incredibly challenging.
Once you have that agency going, you start to have freedom to productise your services. Create services as a software using ai, create tools and products that scale. And you can bootstrap it because you have a company in the back to bootstrap it until it is profitable.
---
Why Startups Are Harder than an agency - turned - startup
The entire premise of a startup revolves around designing everything—product, team, and business model—for scalability. That means iterating, testing, and refining every element until you sell a single scalable unit.
It’s a brutal process, which is why most startups need so much funding.
You can’t hire people without paying them. And often, core founders work for free—paid in equity until funding or revenue comes through.
Thus, it makes sense to find a way to pay yourself a salary from day one, to have revenue from day one on.
That is rough.
(Would have saved me a lot of headaches if someone would have told me when I started meloby into the blue, with no knowledge about entrepreneurship at all.)
But the payoff, selling the startup, becomes much more reasonable if your foundation has cashflow from day one.
As a founder, you do own a significant chunk of equity, giving you the right to sell that share later.
That’s the dream influencers sell you—the “You made it” moment.
But here’s the reality: dilution, funding rounds, and investor expectations often leave founders with less than they hoped for.
Just, saying. We are not Steve Jobs.
Your chunk is worth more if you can bring in revenue from day one. In fact, it is a massive gamechanger, for everyone, including you.
---
The "Sell Your Startup" Fantasy
So let’s talk about selling. The ideal scenario? You bootstrap your business, grow it profitably, and sell it for lots of cash.
Platforms like Acquire or Flippa make it possible to sell smaller businesses. For larger startups with multiple founders, things get complex—diluted shares, investor rights, and deal negotiations all reduce your payday.
Worst case? You’ve diluted so much equity, failed to scale, or sold for less than anticipated. Your time, energy, and effort might leave you with pennies per hour.
Which brings me back to the small business - turned startup model.
A niche, well-built business with a modest goal is often way more valuable to the founders than a flashy startup that struggles to sell.
With tools like AI, scaling niche projects has never been faster. And if you don't need to dilute when scaling, you can amp your worth a lot when selling, because you have no debts of any sort and all the equity is yours.
Just remember, if you pour 500 hours into a side project and sell it for $10,000, your hourly rate ends up below minimum wage. Thus, sell once it's worth it or try to make it into a cashcow before selling. Just... saying.
---
What’s Missing from the Hustle Narrative
Here’s what no one tells you: your second venture is almost always stronger.
Now I am preaching.
Failing sucks, but the skills, network, and experience you build in your first effort will 100% set you up for long-term success.
So, start small, iterate fast, and don’t buy into the hustle preacher hype. If it fails, let go, reset yourself, and then go again.
So hustle and get rich while you're at it.
Your path is yours to define.
---
If you want to workshop your idea or product with me, visit kiniroo.com and shoot me a mail, I have helped dozens of SMB, freelancers and startups with GTM (gotomarket) and am considering to start an agency again specialising on go to market engineeing and then building a product around that - doing exactly what I told you in this article. :D
Cheers.
Kommentare