Alejandro Rioja.
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Guide to Becoming an Entrepreneur: Useful Tips

Alejandro Rioja
Alejandro Rioja
11 min read
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Who is an Entrepreneur?

According to Investopedia, an entrepreneur is someone who creates and runs their own business — often defined as “an innovator of new ideas, products, or procedures.” The word traces back to the French entreprendre, meaning “to undertake.”

What that definition misses: entrepreneurs are people who voluntarily take on uncertainty in exchange for upside. In 2026, the uncertainty hasn’t changed — markets are still unpredictable, customers still surprise you, and execution still separates good ideas from real businesses. What has changed is that the cost to test your idea is now close to zero.

How to Become an Entrepreneur

Here are nine steps that map to how I’ve actually launched and grown businesses.

1. Get in the Right Mindset

Mindset isn’t fluffy — it’s practical. Here are the shifts that mattered most for me:

Design your life first, then pick the business. Starting something you don’t care about is a recipe for quitting when it gets hard. The question “How do I want my life to look in five years?” should inform which business you build — not the other way around.

Own your inner strength. Every founder hits stretches where the business looks broken. The ability to keep going, separate the moment from the trend, and find what’s actually wrong is a skill you build by doing.

Quality over quantity. One meaningful customer relationship is worth more than ten shallow ones. One well-built product is worth more than five half-finished ones. This is especially true as a solo or lean founder — your attention is the constraint.

Value others as much as yourself. The founders who last are the ones who obsess over the customer’s actual problem — not over their own clever solution. Losing sight of what the customer wants is the most common reason early products fail.

Accept failure early. Mistakes are information. When I launched Flux Chargers, I made pricing mistakes, packaging mistakes, and sourcing mistakes. Moving fast meant learning fast. The goal is to fail small and early, not never.

Know your “why.” This one is trite but real. When things are hard — and they will be — the founders who stay in the game are the ones with a clear answer to why this business, why now, why them. Write it down before you’re in the middle of a crisis.

2. Find the Right Business

There are three durable paths:

Build on what you know. A skill from a previous job, a hobby, a domain you’ve spent years in — these give you an unfair advantage. You see opportunities that outsiders miss and can move faster because you don’t need to learn the fundamentals.

Copy the model, differentiate the execution. Most successful businesses aren’t original ideas — they’re better versions of existing ones. If you see a business model working somewhere and you can serve a different market, add a meaningful improvement, or reach customers more efficiently, that’s a real opportunity.

Solve a need you’ve experienced. The highest-conviction businesses come from founders who lived the problem. It also carries more early risk — you need to validate that others have the same pain before investing heavily.

In 2026, a fourth path has become viable for more people: wrap AI around an existing workflow. If you can identify a high-value manual process in a market you understand and automate or dramatically accelerate it, that is a business. The barrier to building that kind of product has dropped significantly.

3. Plan It — But Don’t Over-Plan

Learn the domain quickly. Online courses, competitor teardowns, talking to people already in the space — all of this is faster now than it was five years ago. Use AI tools (Claude, Perplexity, etc.) to compress your research phase, but remember: the goal is to get to a real customer as fast as possible, not to achieve perfect clarity in a spreadsheet.

Think about future trends. The businesses that win are the ones that position in front of where the market is going — not just where it is today. In most industries right now, the relevant trend is AI adoption. What changes in your target market over the next two to three years? Build for that.

Check product-market fit ruthlessly. Product-market fit is the balance between who you’re serving, what you’re offering, and how you’re reaching them. Three things matter:

Test before you build. This has never been easier. Before I built the Flux Chargers product fully, I mapped out the user flow — what does a customer need to do to order, learn about us, and reach us? I ran through that flow with real people. Their feedback shaped the product. Do this before you spend money.

4. Get Resourceful About Funding

Before executing any part of your plan, make sure you understand your cash needs — and be honest about the minimum viable version of your business.

A lifestyle business (consulting, freelancing, content) can often be started with near-zero capital. A physical product requires inventory. A high-tech platform requires engineering time. Know which you’re building and size your funding accordingly.

In 2026, the realistic options for most early-stage founders:

AI tools have reduced the capital required to build software significantly. If your idea involves software, the MVP cost is lower than it was two years ago. Take advantage of that.

5. Build Your Network

Your network is leverage. Here’s how I actually use it:

  1. Attend focused events. Conferences like industry-specific ones in your space, local founder meetups, and online communities (especially those organized around specific tools or business models) are more valuable than massive generic events. Quality of attendees beats quantity.
  2. Go in with a goal. Before any event: who do I want to meet, what do I want to learn, what value can I offer? Networking without a goal is expensive socializing.
  3. Build relationships off-hours. Some of my best introductions came from conversations that had nothing to do with business. People do business with people they like and trust.
  4. Have a clear pitch. A one-sentence description of what you do and who you help — not a paragraph. Practice it until it’s effortless.
  5. Stay in touch. Most people drop connections after the first meeting. Following up with a useful article, a relevant introduction, or a genuine check-in is how you convert an acquaintance into a real relationship.

Avoid the three relationship killers: talking negatively about competitors, taking without giving, and treating people as transactional.

Relevant: All you need to know about relationship marketing

6. Sell Before You’re Ready

Most founders wait too long to sell. Here’s what I’ve learned:

Lead with benefits, not features. A feature is what your product does. A benefit is the change it creates in your customer’s life. Customers buy the benefit — they don’t care about your tech stack or methodology.

Use plain language. The clearest pitch wins. If you’re using industry jargon to describe your product, translate it. Anyone should be able to understand what you do and why it matters in thirty seconds.

Show proof, not promises. Testimonials, case studies, before/after results — these close deals faster than any sales copy. Build proof into your process from the first customer.

7. Invest in Distribution

The biggest mistake I see new founders make is building something nobody finds. Marketing isn’t optional — it’s how your business gets oxygen.

Tell a story. Don’t describe your product; describe the world your customer lives in with your product in it. What’s possible for them that wasn’t before?

Pick one channel and go deep. Trying to be everywhere kills focus. Pick the distribution channel where your customers actually are — whether that’s a specific social platform, SEO, outbound, partnerships, or community — and own it before expanding.

Be consistent. Showing up once and disappearing is worse than never showing up. Consistent presence builds familiarity, and familiarity builds trust.

Name it well. A memorable product or company name reduces your marketing burden. When people can easily recall and share your name, every satisfied customer becomes a referral source.

Promise only what you can deliver. Overpromising and underdelivering destroys businesses faster than any competitor. Make a specific, honest promise — then exceed it.

Relevant: Understanding integrated marketing communication

8. Accept Mistakes and Move On

Every founder I respect has a list of expensive mistakes. What separates the ones who last is the speed of their recovery — and their willingness to acknowledge what went wrong publicly.

Customers forgive mistakes. They don’t forgive cover-ups or silence. When something breaks, acknowledge it fast, fix it, and tell people what you changed.

9. Iterate

The hardest part of building a company isn’t the launch — it’s keeping the loop going. The pattern is always the same: build something, ship it, get feedback, improve it, repeat.

What changes is the scale of the loop and the stakes of each decision. Early on, you’re iterating on the product. Later, you’re iterating on the business model, the team, the positioning.

The founder who wins is usually not the one with the best original idea — it’s the one who iterates fastest and learns most per cycle.

A Note on AI and Starting Businesses in 2026

Something has genuinely changed. The cost to go from idea to working product has dropped by an order of magnitude in the last two years. A solo founder today can:

This doesn’t mean starting a business is easy — it means the early barriers have changed. The market is more crowded at the “anyone can build it” level. What remains hard — and differentiating — is judgment: knowing which problem to solve, how to reach customers, and what to build next. Those skills are still yours to develop.

Entrepreneurship — 2026 FAQ

Do I need a co-founder?

No — but be honest about your gaps. A co-founder helps if you’re missing a critical skill and can’t hire or contract for it yet. Picking the wrong co-founder is one of the most painful and expensive mistakes you can make. Better to start solo and add people who are clearly additive than to split equity out of anxiety.

How much money do I need to start?

Depends entirely on the model. A services or consulting business can start with near zero — just your time and a way to get paid. A physical product needs inventory capital. A software product in 2026 needs far less engineering time than it did two years ago, which lowers the cost significantly. Start with the minimum viable version and prove the model before raising or spending more.

Should I quit my job first?

Not necessarily. Many successful businesses were built evenings and weekends until they generated enough revenue to replace the salary. The exception: if your idea requires full-time focus from day one and you have enough runway to sustain yourself, then going all-in makes sense. Don’t quit based on enthusiasm — quit based on proof.

How do I know when I have product-market fit?

The clearest signal: customers are coming back without being chased, and they’re bringing others. Secondary signals include low churn, unsolicited referrals, and customers who are disappointed when you’re unavailable. Until you see those signals, you’re still validating — not scaling.

Related reading: Growth hacking stories · Psychology tricks in marketing · Top marketing books

The shorter version

If you’re reading this because the workflow it describes is eating your week, that’s the kind of loop I build AI agents for. Two build slots open at a time.

Updated for May 2026

A short note from May 2026: the workflow this post describes was checked against the current state of the underlying tools and platforms. Where specific tools, UIs, or features have evolved, the structural advice still holds — the implementation will look slightly different in 2026. If you hit a step that doesn’t match what you see on screen, that’s likely a UI refresh, not a fundamental change in approach. Drop a note via the contact form and I’ll patch it explicitly.

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