There is a piece of business advice that gets repeated so often that it has almost become a law:
“This is what worked for us.”
Good. Listen to it. Write it down. And then forget about following it blindly.
Business advice for founders is useful only when it survives contact with your own customers, economics and context. Because just because something worked for someone else doesn’t mean it will work for you. It also doesn’t mean it won’t.
The discounting trap
When we were selling apple cider vinegar, we ran into this ourselves.
We had already changed our packaging from plastic to glass, and sales had started improving. Then came another very common piece of advice:
Discount your product. More people will buy it.
So we did. And yes, people bought it.
The problem was that we were barely making any money. Once you factored in discounts, returns and breakages, there were products where we were effectively paying to make the sale.
Discounting wasn’t bad advice. It works for plenty of businesses. It simply wasn’t working for ours.
So we stopped.
Instead, we raised our prices and positioned the product as a more premium offering. What had previously left us with something like ₹20–₹30 per sale eventually started leaving us with ₹100–₹250 depending on the variant.
The interesting part wasn’t that we discovered some secret pricing trick.
We simply stopped assuming that someone else’s successful tactic had to be our successful tactic.
Advice is an input, not an instruction
Compare the context before you copy the tactic
This is something I’ve learnt over the years.
Whenever someone gives me advice, I don’t immediately ask whether they’re right or wrong. I ask whether their situation was comparable to mine.
- Were they selling the same product?
- Did they have the same customers?
- Were they operating in the same market?
- Did they have similar economics?
- Did they have the same resources?
- And perhaps most importantly: were they doing it at the same time?
Someone who successfully sold the same product twenty years ago may have tremendous experience. But twenty years ago, social media barely existed. Customer behaviour was different. Distribution was different. Advertising was different.
Experience is valuable. Context is equally valuable.
Don’t reinvent the wheel. Just check if it’s your wheel.
I am not suggesting that founders ignore experience and figure everything out from scratch. That would be ridiculous.
If someone has already spent five years learning something the hard way, use that knowledge. Don’t reinvent the wheel simply to prove that you can.
But before putting that wheel on your own business, check whether it fits.
I like to keep ideas on the table rather than throwing them away immediately. Then I run my own diagnostics.
Sometimes the advice fits perfectly. Sometimes it needs to be modified. Sometimes it belongs in the bin. And sometimes the supposedly “wrong” idea turns out to work surprisingly well in a different context.
Experience is still the final test
Make the experiment safer before you run it
There are times when you simply want to try something.
Do it.
Use whatever prior knowledge is available. Understand the risks. Build some structure around the experiment. And then experience it yourself.
You might fail. That’s okay.
Failure isn’t the end of the conversation. Failure is feedback. You learn something, adjust, and try again if the business can afford another attempt.
This is also where a lot of my work with founders happens. If someone wants to try something new, I don’t necessarily want to tell them not to.
I’d rather help them build enough structure around the experiment that, if it doesn’t work, the landing is softer.
Because trying something and failing is very different from trying something blindly and getting hit by a truck you never saw coming.
There is no universal playbook
Every business has its own combination of customers, products, economics, people, resources, timing and constraints.
So I don’t believe there is one universal way to build a business.
There are ideas worth considering. There are experiences worth learning from. There are mistakes worth avoiding.
And then there is your business.
Put everything on the table. Study it. Try what makes sense. Keep what works. Change what doesn’t.
That’s usually a better strategy than blindly following someone else’s recipe.