How I Built Nothing and Learned Everything
⏳ Time to Read: 6 Min |⏱️ Time Saved: 2 Years
To start an entrepreneurial effort, you have to be smart and silly.
Smart people overthink themselves into a corner.
Silly people stumble into progress by accident.
Somewhere between the two is the real beginning.
If you’ve done everything “right” but still haven’t launched, read this.
During a recent move, I discovered a pristine 2016 business plan for a landscape photography business in a drawer.
Every detail was meticulously mapped out.
Never executed.
Back then, I lived dual lives—doctor and professor by obligation, wilderness photographer by choice.
Behind the camera, time disappeared.
I convinced myself these worlds could merge.
It all started.
Courses. Coaching. Copywriting worksheets.
Define your ideal customer.
Pinpoint the pain.
Solve with precision.
I did all of it.
None of it touched the market.
Beautiful documents. Dead ends.
Today, I run a business with a minimum written plan.
I write drafts.
Test assumptions.
And follow the part that moves.
No template predicted the life I have now.
Most breakout companies didn’t start with brilliance.
They started with motion.
Twitter began as a podcasting pivot.
Airbnb sold breakfast cereal before bookings.
Slack was a failed game wrapped around a team chat tool.
Trying to engineer perfect business plans without market exposure is a fool’s game.
None of these were the plan.
They were discovered.
The pattern is clear: You don’t need foresight to start.
You need:
Contact.
You can hire the best coach. Follow every system.
But nothing substitutes putting your offer in front of someone who can say yes—or no.
The entrepreneurial paradox: you need just enough recklessness to start and just enough intelligence to adapt when reality hits.
There’s a hidden gift in being a beginner: you don’t know enough to be scared.
The Dunning–Kruger Effect creates an interesting paradox in entrepreneurship.
Beginners consistently overestimate their capabilities.
Experts consistently underestimate theirs.
For first-time founders, this cognitive distortion provides the necessary confidence to start.
In soccer, goalkeepers dive on penalty kicks—even though staying put improves their odds.
It just feels wrong to do nothing.
This demonstrates Action Bias: our fundamental drive to take action over inaction, even when doing nothing produces better outcomes.
Early entrepreneurs often need motion more than information.
Perfect information arrives through iteration, not contemplation.
It’s something I break down in detail in The Next Step—why clarity comes after action, not before.
“If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.”
— Reid Hoffman
You can’t Google contact or ask your AI about it.
It exists only in the space between your product and its users.
Because some things can’t be learned through study.
Not all data is searchable.
Not every answer is AI-queryable.
You have to bump into it.
That’s what happened with Twitter.
Odeo failed. Morale tanked.
During a team reset, a silly idea floated: SMS-based status updates.
Jack Dorsey’s first post?
“just setting up my twttr.”
No deck. No vision board. Just motion.
Even the experts rarely see success coming.
Research shows investors are barely better than chance at picking winners.
Why? Because product–market fit hides until contact.
At my day job leading innovation, even with massive datasets, interviews, and simulations, we rarely predict success with over 20% certainty.
It doesn’t mean go blind.
It means put a 2–7 day boundary around planning.
Then move.
Then get your creation in front of real people.
No extensions.
No endless research or tutorial hell.
Make contact with your market as rapidly as possible.
This single change multiplies your chances of success tenfold.
The feedback loop between your idea and actual users contains all the education you need.
And if you are curious:
That photography business?
What worked had nothing to do with what I mapped out.
Some lessons don’t live in plans.
They wait in motion.
P.S. One idea a week to help you build what doesn’t exist yet.
Join for free: rezamotaghi.substack.com
