How to get unstuck when you’re starting a business or struggling to connect with your audience

That advice is not necessarily wrong, but I think there is one step that often gets skipped before all of that. Before you close, you need to open.

You need to explore different possibilities, different audiences, different ways of solving the problem, and different ways of talking about what you are building. Not because you should develop everything at once, but because you need enough information to understand what is actually worth developing.

This is something design thinking gets very right. The process does not begin by narrowing immediately. It expands first, then it chooses. It expands again, then it chooses again. This is essentially the logic behind the Double Diamond: diverge, converge, diverge, converge.

I think businesses should work more like this too, especially in the beginning. If you decide your niche, your ICP, your positioning and your product too early, you may be making a very focused decision based on very little information. You may be choosing before the market has had any chance to tell you whether that choice actually makes sense.

And that is the important distinction: I am not saying that you should build five businesses at the same time. I am saying that you can test five possibilities without fully building any of them.

You can create a landing page for one idea, a simple funnel for another, test a different message with a different audience, create a prototype, or frame the same offer in a different way. Then you put those things in front of real people and see what happens.

You start to notice who reacts, who asks questions, what creates conversations, what gets ignored, what people understand immediately, and what they completely misunderstand. You also start to see what they are willing to pay for, and sometimes even more importantly, what they are asking for that you had not considered at all.

That is usually where the interesting part begins.

Maybe you thought your product was perfect for one niche, but another type of customer starts responding much more strongly. Maybe you thought one part of the offer was the most important, but people keep asking for something else. Maybe two ideas that seemed unrelated start making sense together.

You only understand these things when the idea leaves your head and enters the market.

This is also why I tend to prefer agile thinking over the old waterfall way of building projects. In a waterfall process, you plan, define, build and complete the project before testing the final result. The problem is that by the time you learn whether the idea actually works, you may already have invested months of work, money, systems and people around it.

And the further a project goes, the more expensive it becomes to change.

At the beginning, changing direction is cheap. You can change a landing page, rewrite the message, test another audience or remove a feature. But after six months or a year, when you have a team, processes, contracts, systems and investment around that decision, changing is still possible, but it becomes much more costly.

That is why going to market early matters so much. You test, you learn, you adjust, and you test again. Instead of waiting until everything is finished before asking reality what it thinks, reality becomes part of the development process.

AI makes this even more interesting because it has dramatically reduced the cost and time required to test an idea.

Today, you can build a landing page in a few hours, create a funnel in a day, prototype a service, build a simple tool, or sometimes even create a basic platform before deciding whether that platform deserves serious investment.

I did this recently. I built a platform in around an hour.

The point was not that I had created a finished company in one hour. The point was that I could see the idea working. I could put something in front of people, understand how it behaved, and learn what made sense before adding developers, money, people and more complex resources around it.

That changes the way we can approach entrepreneurship.

You do not always need to make a huge bet in order to learn whether an idea has potential. Sometimes you can make a very small bet and buy yourself information. And early information is incredibly valuable.

The image I keep coming back to is mining.

If you were looking for something valuable underground, you would not randomly choose one place and immediately dig a hundred metres deep just because someone told you that focus is important. First, you would explore the terrain. You would test different areas, look for signals, take samples and try to understand where there is actually something worth digging for.

That is how I think about focus in business.

The problem is not focus. Focus is powerful. The problem is focusing before you have enough information to know what deserves your focus.

And this matters especially when people feel stuck, because the instinct is often to close even more doors. You start thinking that maybe you need to be more specific, maybe you need to talk only about one thing, maybe you need a narrower niche, maybe you need to remove everything else.

Sometimes that is exactly the right answer.

But sometimes the reason you are stuck is that you closed the doors too early.

You decided what the market should want before allowing the market to show you what it actually responds to.

There is value in letting part of the process unfold. Not in a passive way, and not in a “let’s just see what happens” way. You still need effort, discipline and intentional testing. But you also need enough openness to let reality surprise you.

Because opportunities often appear next to the thing you were originally looking for, not exactly where you expected them to be.

And if your attention is too narrow from the beginning, you may never notice them.

Eventually, of course, you need to choose. You cannot stay forever in exploration mode. At some point, you need to identify where the strongest signal is and concentrate your resources there.

That is when focus becomes powerful.

The order matters.

You explore. You test. You observe. You learn. Then you choose.

And once you choose, you go deep.

So maybe the better question when you are starting a business, or when you feel stuck in the one you already have, is not simply:

What should I focus on?

Maybe it is: