Builder Methods: The Story (so far)
"It was a fluke. My last win was my last. Party's over."
A few decades on the entrepreneurial rollercoaster creates a weird form of anxiety: a distrust of success. Objectively good things happen in my business all the time, but my mind is convinced they're too good to be true.
I can accept that a customer found value in something I created—they proved it with their wallet. But every time I make a sale, a timer resets. I watch it tick by, constantly aware of how long it's been since my last one.
The longer that timer runs, the more anxious I become. I grow irrationally convinced that my most recent sale was my last. There are no more customers who will ever buy my thing. I've found them all. Party's over.
As sales come more frequently, my anxiety sets in sooner. I don't need to wait 24 hours—I'm sweating when just an hour goes by without a sale.
Obsessively checking the inbox doesn't help, no matter how much I tap refresh.
The way past this anxiety is to stop feeling lucky. Stop believing it's a fluke. Start believing the true story.
So what's the story?
I'm 5 months into my Builder Methods business and it's been crushing every expectation I had for it. Repeatedly.
It's early days. But I've logged enough consecutive "successful" days now that I should start telling the story and identify the key factors at play—so I can build on it.
Distribution (duh)
My YouTube views, email list, and website traffic have reached levels I'd never seen before, certainly not this fast and consistent.
Obviously, when you have a distribution channel that brings good-fit customers in consistently, good things happen. Everybody knows that.
Unfortunately, you can't hustle a magic distribution channel into existence. You can't buy it.
Can you hustle to make sales? Of course. Can you buy clicks? Sure. These can juice growth around the edges.
But what we really want is a distribution flywheel—one that feels easy and unrelenting. I believe that's found, not created. You have to stumble into it. And that can take a while.
I spent 18 months hammering on YouTube. It only started working 4 months ago.
What made it click was a combination of factors:
- I started covering a topic where there's a wave of demand.
- I'm personally invested and fascinated by this topic.
- I developed my craft as a YouTube creator.
I'm convinced this channel wouldn't exist without all three.
You can serve a popular niche, but if you're not personally invested, you won't unlock the creativity required to break through the noise. You can talk about what you're passionate about, but without a growing wave of demand, you're spinning your wheels.
Free Value
I never thought I'd be in the business of free & open source, but here I am.
On a scratch-my-own-itch whim, I hacked together Agent OS to give my AI product development more structure. I released it as a free open source project on GitHub and told its story on YouTube.
It resonated big time. At first, I wasn't sure what to make of this. The interest and support inquiries kept coming and I didn't know how to handle it sustainably.
I was already plotting to launch Builder Methods Pro as a paid membership for education and community. But as a happy accident, this also served as a perfect vehicle for paid support around Agent OS—and I believe this drives a lot of Pro subscriptions.
Now I'm running that playbook back with my next free open source project, Design OS. That too was born as a scratch-my-own-itch idea but fits perfectly with my core audience and business model.
The takeaway: "Free" doesn't have to mean free content or a free trial or freemium. It can be just free, solely for the purpose of creating something valuable. Free can unlock monetization in other ways.
Not Zero Sum
This gets to "founder-fit" and something I learned about myself:
I tend to prefer and be more successful in businesses that are non-zero-sum value propositions.
SaaS—as I learned through years of failed or middling attempts—tends to be zero-sum: Customers must choose to buy my product and choose not to buy any alternatives.
That's difficult enough from a sales, retention, and competition perspective. But it challenges me personally too, and I don't like it. I can ignore competitors all I want (which I try to), but my customers won't. So sales and churn-prevention often required me to think about competitors' flaws and how we're "better." I don't think in those terms, which makes me a poor fit for this game.
Builder Methods is not zero-sum. People who buy my membership or workshop tickets often buy other similar programs too. People who use my free tools use others too. My products don't need to be "better"—they just need to be valuable.
This means I don't need to ignore or avoid my "competitors." I can dig them. I can learn from them. I can celebrate their achievements. When they do well, our mutual customers do well, and I do well.
I like this game better. Which makes me a better player.