Building a business “backwards”

Someone could look at where I’m at now in business building with an entirely unimpressive number of social followers and a small email list, and say, “she’s just starting out”.

But that’s not my truth, 5 years into building a business.

And it’s why a lot of advice for building a business that I see now seems 90% irrelevant. Because it’s assumed that you should start your business from what people want and work towards a product to sell them.

When I hired coaches who taught that, I tried, really hard, to do it that way. But it went entirely against the grain of what’s true for me.

Now if your goal for starting a business is just to make money, by all means follow that conventional advice. The way I went didn’t look or feel glamorous, ever. Through many serendipities, I never ran out of money, 5 years after quitting my job. But I do live small and light, in an RV a family member loaned me, and I’ve experienced lots of months with $0 budget to do anything “fun”, though the necessities were always managed.

But what was more meaningful and highly valued than doing all those “fun” things was continuing the path that was unfolding from my inside.

With now ~4 ineffective business attempts behind me, along with years of learning and growth around what it takes to build an effective business, I wouldn’t call that just starting out. Instead I’d call it building backwards.

Or maybe building forwards. From inner to outer. Why is that to be considered the “backwards” way?

Isn’t it backwards to start out there, from what people are currently craving, and then create a product that shallowly meets that? And then if you try to do better and offer more and be more real, you’ll add a bit more depth and value to your offer — build down a little ways.

But could it be that a lot of the dissatisfaction people feel with their work happens because they built the whole thing backwards, outside in, instead of inside out?

When I tried to follow coaches' advice or imitate what "everyone else" was doing, it just added confusion and unnecessary pressure. I didn’t really ever care about having the instant external tangible results they were trying to get me, because by the time I started this path back in 2018, I already knew that I was going for following my inner soul calling, not external accolades or even money.

If anything, all that pressure to build something quick out in human land made me even more determined to work from the inside out, and potentially to hide my work from external expression, until the time would come for the internal direction to reach the point of bringing it all out there.

It’s like if you were going to put up a house in hurricane alley, and everyone around you were saying, build fast; you just need the walls, and then you can get paid for the job. I guess the construction industry is a bit farther along than the creator one, because they already know that a vast amount of the house building process needs to be completed before a single bit of the wall framing goes up. And they’re not inviting the family to go live in the house and invite their friends to a barbecue while they’re sawing and pounding and haven’t even put a roof on yet.

Because if they did, the hurricane may come, and that house without a foundation would fall over.

I knew from my Christian background that Jesus talked about building on the rock, not shifting sand. I found that rock, that inner place of utter stability regardless of external factors and mental opinions. And that’s where I placed the foundation of the business that’s emerging through me.

And it’s not around helping minds achieve what they want.

But there does need to be a meeting point.

Now when I set something out through the business, there’s a feeling that’s a bit like setting a mountain down. There’s a vast amount of inner work and inner voice wisdom behind anything I write.

In an ocean littered with floating bits of stuck-together trash that may be wide but only go a few feet deep, looking here you’ll see what may appear smaller, but it’s really just the top of a massive mountain that goes all the way down to the ocean floor.

That feeling of depth expressing outwardly is what I’ve been experiencing recently. After years of very little inspired action around posting on social media, there’s been an unexpected unleashing into this realm over the last week. In the past, when I did try audience building on a social platform, it felt pressured, and soon faltered and failed.

But when the time came, and there was a knowing that expressing in a social context was about ready, a brand new mega platform “magically” appeared that meets my style of sharing through writing where expression feels most natural for me, yet where there’s more of a vibe of space for spiritual content.

If you missed the news this week, that’s Threads. And though I don’t know if it will take off, and it could look like building a business there is risky since it’s new, that’s not even where my business is being built. It’s a mountain that emerges from source, curated and crafted through the human Eva capacities.

And then if that mountain top pushes through the surface of the waters on Threads, that’s merely a place to see it. It may start (again) by showing up there, but who knows where other expressions of that mountain may appear. But none of them are the mountain. None are where I build. They’re where what’s already been built emerges to be seen.

This thread appeared in my feed the day after I drafted this post:

So um, no. I decidedly do not agree. In fact neither approach is what I’m advocating here. Their “old way” of starting from building a product may be merely a mental effort that’s not necessarily rooted in source. Rather, what I’m exploring is growing a business out of the depths of being, through the human, until it emerges into semi-form in the human world, and then the exact shape it takes can indeed be informed by the audience it comes to.

But if you do their “new way” of going to the audience first, who is even going to be the audience? Whoever randomly happens to be in front of you in that moment, and then you make whatever they happen to want? That was always my question, and every time the coaches would advocate that I need to start by defining my audience, my mind would spin out into a never ending cycle of confusion.

Instead, my “forwards business building” method has been to develop the work from inside first, and now I go about bringing that work to where it may be seen, so an audience that’s ready to meet that and be transformed through it can naturally emerge. Then the work itself can also be colored with a hue the audience can receive.

This thing of backwards business building from outside to inside is merely one of a myriad of examples of how humans these days seem to be living backwards in pretty much every sphere of life. And with all that backwards living going on, it’s no wonder we’ve felt pretty unsatisfied with a life that seems shallow and relatively meaningless.

In fact, I would hypothesize that any place that does feel more meaningful may have that sense of meaning precisely to the extent that it’s built from inside to outside.

Summarized from inner voice:

Life has no meaning if LIFE is not meaning to act. There is not much meaning in the mind’s way of life that’s searching for goals created from a sense of separation. But there is extraordinary meaning and purpose in our expansion of love. True meaning and purpose must come from us, bringing our life into flourishing creation.