The Only Two Things That Matter When You're Starting

The Framework

Early on, almost everything feels urgent. Incorporate properly, file the trademark, set up the perfect stack, get advisors. Most of it is a distraction dressed up as diligence.

Danny Jenkins runs a brutal filter against all of it. When you are starting a business, "you need two things. You need a product that solves a real problem, and you need the customers to know the product exists. You need the buyers to know the product exists. Everything else is white noise."

That is the whole framework. Two jobs. Spend on those, and starve everything else until it actually threatens the business.

The Two Jobs

1. Build a product that solves a real problem. Not a feature, a problem someone feels. Danny's test for this is ruthless: get it in front of a buyer and see if they pay. Market research and surveys do not count.

2. Make buyers know it exists. This is the one founders skip. Danny's entire early strategy was just getting in front of people: cold calls, then "10 smaller trade shows" plus RSA, because "people aren't searching for what we're selling." If nobody knows, the best product dies quietly.

Everything else is white noise until it isn't.

Real Numbers

Danny lived the cost of this filter. Early on, an accelerator pushed him to file a trademark properly. The quote: "the lawyer says it's going to cost us 12 grand to file a trademark." He had about $50K in the bank and had not yet hit credit cards.

He did it himself for a few hundred dollars and put the money toward getting customers. It bit him later: "it cost me at least $50,000 three years later because we filed the trademark wrong." His own verdict: it was still the right call. "The $50,000 at the point in time I spent it was irrelevant because we had a lot more money in the bank."

Trademark: $12K "proper" cost avoided early, ~$50K to fix later, paid when the money was irrelevant.

When It Fails

This breaks if you use "white noise" as an excuse to ignore something that will actually kill you now: a real compliance requirement to land your buyer, a security review that gates every enterprise deal, a co-founder agreement. The test is timing. If skipping it stops you from getting a paying customer this quarter, it is not white noise. If it only matters in a hypothetical future, it is.

Your First Move

List everything you think you "need to do" this month. Next to each item write one of two labels: "helps build the product" or "helps buyers find out we exist." Anything that gets neither label goes to a someday list. Then spend this week only on the labeled items. You will likely cut half your list.