You don’t need to know with certainty upfront exactly what type of business you want to build, but it is important to realise that you do get to decide this!
You get to choose what type of business you want to build.
There are many different types of business to choose from, a small set of examples include:
- Self-employed / services / freelance: ambitions to work independently
- Solopreneur / creator: ambitions to own all aspects of the creative process
- Bootstrapped: ambitions to build a successful business on your own terms
- VC-backed: ambitions of becoming a $billion+ business
The type of business you wish to build will determine the type of opportunities you explore and pursue
- While you do have a choice about what type of business you want to build, you don’t decide this in a vacuum. Certain opportunities require certain types of business; your preferences on business type will impact the ideas you explore and ultimately pursue
- After a brief investigation it will become clear that some opportunities require a lot of capital, necessitating VC funding; they may require building advanced tech or operating in a winner-takes-all market. Other attractive opportunities may have a relatively small available market size that immediately rules out this type of capital. Having a sense for what type of business you want to build will enable you to decide which opportunities and directions to explore
Explicitly considering business type options, acknowledging your preferences and setting constraints will greatly assist your exploration process
- It’s often easier to set initial constraints based on what you definitely don’t want. You may feel entirely ambivalent about the type of business you build: you just want to find an exciting opportunity. On the other hand, you might already know with certainty what you don’t want to build. Maybe you have no interest in growing a team (which likely rules out building a VC business), or maybe any role without that leadership aspect just won’t cut it for you (solopreneurship is not an option)
- Ruling out entire classes of the wrong type of opportunity will help you find the right type a lot faster!
Q: What type of business are you most excited to build?