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When I launched PhotoPacks.AI, I didn’t have a team or funding. Just an idea: offer studio-quality headshots, powered by AI, for a fraction of the cost of a traditional photo shoot. Today, the product works, and it’s growing steadily. But I’ve learned a lot of lessons the hard way.

Here are seven mistakes I made early on, and what I’d do differently if I had to start over.

1. I tried to build for everyone, and converted no one

At first, my startup offered everything: headshots, modeling photos, pet portraits, fantasy scenes. I figured, if AI could generate it, why not let people choose?

But when I showed it to friends and tried to market it, nobody understood what it was for. Zero conversions. The fix? I focused the product around one clear value: professional headshots. That change alone made the product click with users, and sales followed. I learned to be specific and found that a clear, focused message converts better than a broad one.

Start with a focused, singular use case. The more obvious the value, the faster you’ll get traction. You can always expand later, but don’t launch wide and vague.

2. I underpriced — and it backfired

I started with a $9.99 price point because I didn’t want to scare people away. I worried that raising prices would increase refund rates or kill momentum. But that attracted low-intent customers, increased refund requests and made the product feel cheap.

When I raised the price, sales didn’t drop — they got better. People treated the product more seriously. Refunds dropped. Revenue grew.

Test higher pricing earlier than you think. Pricing sends a signal. If you’re solving a real problem, price with confidence, not fear.

Related: Harnessing the Power of AI: 5 Game Changing Tactics for Small Businesses

3. I handled everything myself for too long

I handled support tickets, wrote copy, managed uptime, ran ads, pushed code — all in one day. It wasn’t sustainable. Eventually, I outsourced key pieces and bought back my time. It let me focus on strategy, product and growth.

Don’t confuse “solo” with “doing it all.” Delegate repetitive tasks early. Protect your cognitive bandwidth — it’s your most valuable resource.

Related: AI for the Underdog — Here’s How Small Businesses Can Thrive With Artificial Intelligence

4. I over-engineered the first version

I spent months perfecting features before launch, including ones no one had asked for. I wanted it to look polished and impressive from day one.

Looking back, I should have released a simpler version much earlier and shaped the product around real user feedback. The bells and whistles can wait. What matters most is whether people want what you’re building in the first place.

Launching lean doesn’t mean lowering standards — it means prioritizing clarity over complexity. Get a simple version live, then iterate. Early users don’t expect perfection — they want progress. Speed beats polish.

5. I bet too much on SEO, not enough on community

Early on, I hired an SEO agency to create keyword-optimized content. But most of my actual traffic came from Reddit, where I had been engaging directly with communities.

That still holds true today. My best-performing traffic continues to come from organic conversations, not blog content. The lesson? Your ideal customers are already hanging out somewhere. Find them, show up authentically, and focus on what’s actually driving results, not what’s supposed to.

Go where your users already hang out. Be useful in those spaces. Authenticity scales better than SEO tricks, especially early on.

6. I underestimated how fast AI evolves

Even after spending a year immersed in generative AI, I was still caught off guard by how fast things moved once I launched. What felt groundbreaking one month felt outdated the next.

It’s thrilling, but it’s also exhausting. Trying to keep up with every new development is a recipe for burnout.

Instead of chasing trends, I’ve learned to build around stable, lasting value. Keeping up matters — but not at the expense of your sanity or strategy.

Start simple — learn fast

If you’re a solo founder in AI, here’s my advice: Don’t try to create demand from scratch. Find an underserved audience, meet a clear need and launch fast. Don’t fall in love with your vision. Fall in love with solving problems.

You don’t need to get it all right — just get it out there, learn and keep going.

Ready to break through your revenue ceiling? Join us at Level Up, a conference for ambitious business leaders to unlock new growth opportunities.

If your email marketing doesn’t factor in Gen Z, it may not be working as well as you think. Yes, Generation Z – born between 1997 and 2012 – spends hours on social media. They binge short-form content and skip anything that doesn’t grab them in five seconds.

But they also use email more than you think. In a recent ZeroBounce survey, 36% said they check their inboxes for fear of missing out on brand deals and job offers. That makes email one of the few channels where brands like yours can still create a sense of urgency and exclusivity, without getting lost in the noise.

Here are five ways to make your emails worth opening and build loyalty with Gen Z.

Start with an audit

Auditing your email marketing performance once a quarter is a smart move, no matter which generations you’re targeting. It gives you a clear view of what works, so you can focus your efforts and budget on what counts.

When analyzing your metrics, see what stands out:

• What types of emails get the most engagement?
• Do short emails get more clicks on your calls-to-action (CTAs)?
• How do image-heavy messages perform compared to plain text?

The goal is to understand what your subscribers respond to so you can do more of that. Once you have the full picture, you can zoom in on Gen Z and think of fresh ways to make your email marketing speak to them.

Related: This one thing is the secret to higher open rates

Give them a reason to open – and do it fast

We all scan subject lines to decide whether an email is worth our time, but Gen Z takes that habit to the next level. That means you have to get their attention right away by making sure your subject lines deliver value upfront.

Are you running a discount or offering early access to a new product or service? Put that right in your subject – and don’t forget the preview text. Those extra few words that populate next to the subject can make or break your engagement.

Be clear, be specific, and lead with the benefit. “20% off ends tonight” or “Early access for subscribers only” will outperform vague, overly branded messaging every time.

Create a sense of community

Like all of us, Gen Z is always looking for a good deal. But if you want better results, use every email you send to create a sense of connection and community. Gen Z, more than other generations, wants to feel like they’re part of something, so this approach is more likely to resonate.

Give them exclusive and early access to your products and events. You can even brand your email list and name it to make it feel more like a club. Everyone loves feeling like an insider, but that sense of belonging can turn Gen Z into loyal brand advocates.

Ditch the corporate speak

Long emails packed with corporate jargon are the fastest way to get Gen Zers to unsubscribe. If you want them by your side, talk to them like a real person. That doesn’t mean you need to mimic their lingo – that can backfire if it doesn’t align with your brand voice. But dropping the buzzwords and cutting the fluff will earn you points with Gen Z.

It’s tempting to rely on AI tools to do the writing for you, but make sure your emails still sound human. If you’re not sure, test them with your team. You’ll almost always get one piece of feedback that makes it better and more authentic.

Make it easy to read (especially on mobile)

Gen Z is reading your emails on their phones – between classes, during their lunch break or while walking their dog. If your message looks like a wall of text, they may tune out within seconds.

Want to keep them moving from one sentence to the next? Don’t be afraid of short paragraphs and bold subheadings — they help guide the eye. Also, remember to test your emails and check if the layout renders nicely on mobile and that your subject lines don’t get cut off. That tiny preview window matters more than you think.

Bonus tip: Don’t send emails just to stay on schedule

Emailing your subscribers regularly is smart – it helps your brand build awareness, and it’s also healthy for your email deliverability. But before you send an email, take a moment to ask: Is this email actually worth it for my audience?

Don’t send messages just because it’s “time” to send something. You may end up sending fewer emails, but they’ll be more relevant. Do that consistently, and your brand will be more memorable and stand out in even the busiest inboxes.

Ready to break through your revenue ceiling? Join us at Level Up, a conference for ambitious business leaders to unlock new growth opportunities.

In the world of small and mid-sized businesses, every dollar counts. Leaders are constantly faced with difficult decisions about where to allocate limited resources to drive the greatest impact. With HR often viewed as a cost center for businesses, it comes as little surprise that a recent study found 64% of small to mid-sized businesses allocate less than 1% of their annual revenue to HR technology investments, and 36% are using virtually no HR technology.

Not only does this make HR teams’ jobs more difficult, requiring them to spend hours prioritizing labor-intensive back-office tasks, but it also reduces their ability to spend time on supporting employee needs and engagement initiatives that can have a real impact on a business’s bottom line.

To shift the tide, HR managers looking to make the case to leadership for technology investment in the coming year must advocate not only for the people side of the business but also do so in a way that speaks the language of bottom-line impact, operational efficiency and strategic growth.

As we approach the end of the fiscal year, now is the time to prepare a business case that resonates with executive decision-makers. Here’s how HR leaders can frame their proposals around real pain points and offer grounded, practical solutions that deliver measurable value.

Related: These HR Techs Are Making Employee Management Easier

Pain point 1: Limited budgets and uncertain returns

Small and mid-sized business owners often face a barrage of competing priorities. With limited funds, it’s not always clear which investments will stretch furthest or deliver the most meaningful results. HR, workforce management and payroll solutions can seem like overhead — until their impact is clearly articulated.

The solution:

To overcome the misconception around workforce investments, HR leaders should start by reframing HR technology as a strategic enabler rather than a cost center. By demonstrating how a unified workforce platform reduces administrative burden, alleviates compliance risk and frees up time for employees to focus on high-value work, leadership can more easily understand the business case for investing.

For example, automating time tracking and payroll reduces errors and ensures accurate compensation, which in turn boosts morale and retention. These are not abstract benefits — they translate directly into fewer costly mistakes, lower turnover and more productive teams.

Pain point 2: Difficulty connecting HR to business strategy

In many small businesses, HR is either a one-person team or a shared responsibility across multiple departments. This makes it challenging to connect people-related initiatives to broader business goals like profitability, customer satisfaction or growth.

The solution:

Use data to bridge the gap. Even basic workforce analytics can reveal patterns in absenteeism, turnover and productivity that correlate with business performance. For instance, if your busiest sales periods coincide with spikes in employee fatigue or scheduling conflicts, that’s a clear operational risk. By investing in tools that provide visibility into workforce trends, HR personnel can offer insights that help leadership make smarter, more strategic decisions.

Moreover, when employees are supported with intuitive, mobile-friendly tools that make their jobs easier, they’re more likely to go the extra mile. This often-overlooked discretionary effort is a key driver of profitability in small and mid-sized businesses.

Related: 4 Ways Technology Improves the Human Resources (and Human) Experience

Pain point 3: Lack of actionable data

Many small businesses rely on spreadsheets, manual processes or disconnected systems that don’t provide a clear picture of what’s working and what’s not. This makes it difficult to justify investments or identify areas for improvement.

The solution:

Advocate for a single source of truth. A consistent, integrated platform for HR, payroll and workforce management removes operational silos and ensures that decision-makers have access to real-time, reliable data. This enables proactive planning, whether it’s forecasting staffing needs, managing compliance risks or identifying opportunities to improve employee engagement.

With built-in reporting and AI-driven insights, even small HR teams can deliver executive-level intelligence that not only builds credibility but positions HR as a strategic partner in driving business outcomes.

Making the ROI case

To make a compelling case for investment, HR leaders must speak in terms that resonate with executives: cost savings, risk reduction and revenue impact. Here are a few data points to consider:

• According to a recent McKinsey report, organizations that make data-driven decisions are 63% more likely to adapt to changing business environments.

• A study conducted by UKG in partnership with HR.com found that HR teams equipped with the right data are five times more likely to make strategic recommendations.

• A Great Place to Work report found that prioritizing employee experience can lead to 50% less turnover and 36% higher levels of discretionary effort, while a recent Gallup report found it can lead to a 34% reduction in absenteeism and 41% fewer safety incidents.

• Addressing disengagement can yield up to $56 million in annual savings, even for mid-sized organizations, according to McKinsey.

While your business may not operate at that scale, the principles hold true. Every hour saved, every employee retained and every process improved contributes to a stronger bottom line.

Related: How Technology Will Shape The Way Startups Manage Their HR

The right investments in people and processes can transform an organization. For HR managers at small and mid-sized businesses, the key is to align your proposals with the strategic priorities of the business. Focus on outcomes, not features. Show how your recommendations will reduce friction, improve performance and support growth.

In uncertain times, there is temptation to cut back. But the businesses that thrive are those that invest wisely — especially in their people. By presenting a clear, data-backed case for HR, workforce management and payroll solutions, you’re not just asking for budget. You’re offering a roadmap to a more resilient, efficient and profitable future.

When he was 15 years old, Max Clarke would wake up to find blood pouring from his nose. The nosebleeds were relentless, sometimes happening multiple times a week. Doctors couldn’t diagnose it. By the time Clarke got to university, he was exhausted and still without answers.

So he did something about it.

He changed his diet. Started meditating. Practiced yoga. Took supplements. Focused on sleep. “I’ve never had a nosebleed since,” Max Clarke says. “Doctors were saying I needed surgery, but I knew there had to be another way.”

That experience gave him a mission — to take the guesswork out of wellness by helping people find what actually works for them, without having to sort through endless advice, or no advice at all.

Related: Nobody Was Talking About Nasal Breathing for Sleep Until This Former NFL Player Built a Brand Around It: ‘You Feel So Much Better’

From importer to innovator

Clarke launched his company, Healf, with his brother in 2021. It started with curating the best wellness products from around the world—the kinds of things he had used to heal himself—and making them available in the UK, where options were limited.

But that was just the beginning. “We were hearing the same thing again and again from customers,” Clarke says. “They’d say, These are all amazing products, but how do I know what’s right for me?'”

So, Clarke and his team built a platform called Healf Zone, which uses at-home blood testing kits and wearable integrations to help users understand what’s happening inside their bodies. Then, using AI and machine learning, the system looks at the data and recommends personalized wellness products, nutrition plans, and lifestyle tweaks.

Build a company by solving one problem at a time

Rather than setting out to launch a wellness empire, Clarke tackled challenges as they emerged. First, they addressed the lack of product quality. Then, the limited access to global products in the UK. After that, they helped customers learn which products were right for them. Each solution led to the next phase of the business.

The takeaway: Don’t try to launch the perfect company out of the gate. Build by listening and iterating. “You don’t need to know how it’s all going to come together. You just need to solve the next problem.”

Related: What This Founder Thinks Most Supplement Brands Get Wrong—and How He Fixed It With David Beckham

Be obsessed with your customer

Since launch, the business has grown to more than $100 million in annual revenue in under four years. Clarke credits this to customer obsession as a core principle. That includes same-day deliveries, hand-carrying orders to celebrities and athletes, and responding to urgent requests in real time.

One example is a billionaire aboard a yacht at the Cannes Film Festival, who urgently requested a specific product the company sold. Clarke’s team personally flew it from the UK to the French Riviera, making the delivery just in time for the party.

“We’ll do whatever it takes,” Clarke says. “One of our standards that we live by is never settle.”

Create a culture that works hard

Clarke built the company around five core principles: work harder than anyone else, never settle, obsession beats talent, stronger together, and the Healf lifestyle—a philosophy rooted in prevention over treatment and living well through movement, nutrition, mindfulness, and sleep.

Employees work seven days a week. Performance reviews are done every three months. Clarke personally does one-on-ones with team members on Sundays.

His advice for other entrepreneurs is to build your culture early and protect it. Be transparent about what you expect. Reward results, not titles.

Hire for heart, not just smarts

Clarke learned some of those lessons the hard way. Early on, he put too much weight on advice from industry veterans and occasionally hired for pedigree instead of passion. Now, he trusts his instincts and not just the depth of their resume.

And Healf has tweaked the interview process. “We were hiring people who were incredibly smart, incredibly driven, incredibly behind the mission, but they just didn’t have that depth that’s needed when things get really hard. So now we’re trying to hire people who we say have big hearts.”

Act like it’s still day one

Despite explosive growth, its ambitions are bigger than ever. The company is getting ready to expand internationally, and longer term, Clarke wants to build physical experiential wellness studios in major global cities that blend diagnostics with community.

For him, the mission hasn’t changed. It’s still about helping people feel better, faster — and giving them the tools to do it without having to guess.

“Even now, everyone in the company is very much behind this idea that it’s still day one,” Clarke says. “We’re not even scratching the surface of how much value we can add.”

Clarke doesn’t see Healf as a supplement brand, nor a biohacking platform. He sees it as a category-defining system to turn data and signals from your body into intelligent actions.

“Healf isn’t just here to play the game. We’re here to change it.”

If you’ve ever thought, I should write a book about this, but then remembered you’re also running a business, managing clients, and keeping 47 tabs open just to stay afloat—well, same. That’s why Youbooks is a stunning tool. And right now, you can use it for life for just $49.

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Youbooks doesn’t just spit out fluff—it builds full-on manuscripts up to 300,000 words, and it pulls in real-time research from the web to back up your ideas with facts, stats, and sources. Want your voice to shine through? Upload writing samples or internal documents so your final product reads like you—not like a robot.

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At the end of the day, a boutique law firm is a small business, which means that in addition to being an attorney, a founding partner is also a small business owner who must adopt a collective mindset. Our firm works because we work together; if you’re looking to level up your small business, you should be ready to wear multiple hats and rely on full-team collaboration. At Wigdor LLP, we prioritize collaboration both in and outside the courtroom. Here are four practical ways we foster a team-first culture — and why doing so is key for any founder looking to run a law firm like a business.

1. Host events outside the office

Breaking away from the office often results in breakthrough thinking. Casual, off-site environments help our team relax, which yields more creative thinking. It also fosters stronger relationships and seamless collaboration once we’re back at our desks. When people get to know each other beyond their roles at work, they’re far more effective together in high-stakes moments.

It was over a welcome lunch at a Mykonos-themed restaurant that one of our senior associates workshopped with the marketing team to craft an attention-grabbing quote about the implications of a new law that they were then able to pitch to a law journal — all springing from a discussion recapping the latest reality TV shenanigans. And we always mix up the teams at our annual summer tennis competition to balance skill levels and have found that working together on the court translates to more effortless collaboration once we’re back at the office.

Related: Why There Is No Substitute for the Annual ‘Offsite’ With Your Team

2. Make team-building events do double duty

We are quick to recognize when something can serve multiple purposes. Continuing legal education, also known as CLE, is a requirement in our field, but I encourage our attorneys to take these sessions in groups — and make sure to host at least five per year to make group learning accessible. We always host the sessions over lunch because no one ever seems to say no to a free sandwich.

We see the importance of maximizing return on effort, so we like to take the continuing education content that our attorneys work so hard on and repurpose it. A one-hour-long meeting may start as a team-building event, but it lives on as multiple blog posts on our own site as thought leadership pieces that we can pitch to national business publications and as social media content, all helping us expand our firm’s digital footprint and establish our employees as experts.

Related: How to Make Your Content 300% More Effective While Also Saving Time and Money

3. Ensure each case is a team effort

At Wigdor, each case is assigned to at least one partner, one associate and one paralegal, allowing joint problem-solving and fresh perspectives. While some attorneys like to maintain full control and resist working together with their team, our law firm is different. The more minds deliberating solutions, the better — whether it’s a law firm or a small business.

Paralegals and associates are in the trenches with partners, actively participating in the case from beginning to end. We further promote collaboration by hosting monthly status meetings so attorneys have insight into what other teams are working on, igniting ideas to benefit their own litigation. We have high expectations for everyone on the team and reward hard work. We challenge younger legal minds to participate more, from oral arguments to authoring legal news pieces. We could not do the work we do without the full team participating.

One of our recent associate hires joined Wigdor specifically looking for the opposite experience of their previous firm, which was fully remote, not collaborative and felt very isolating. The associate wanted an environment where they could roll up their sleeves in person, working on big cases and learning from a more synergetic team. Since joining, they have had a full case load and multiple opportunities to join precedent-setting matters, which is something that would perhaps be reserved for partners at other firms. This model of cross-level collaboration, where diversity of thought is valued, is a powerful tool for any small business leader who wants to develop a confident, engaged team.

Related: How to Transform Your Workplace Culture with Cross-Pollination

4. Encourage young leaders to discover their strengths

One of my favorite things to do is to help early leaders lean into their unique skills. The key is to get them talking (taking them to a one-on-one lunch usually works) until you discover their affinities and then nurture those skills into expertise. When a senior associate mentioned their partiality for deposing witnesses, I recognized that their interrogative acumen and evaluative listening skills would make them the ideal person to lead the paralegal interview and hiring process — and we’ve built our strongest paralegal team to date.

When it comes to paralegals, we hire them for two-year engagements to ensure they get full exposure to the legal process and better prepare them for law school. Once at the firm, they always have a seat at the table, literally. When we head to court for a trial, a seat at the plaintiff’s table is always reserved for the paralegal who has assisted on the case. They often spend months researching the matter — sometimes even helping to draft statements used in a briefing — and get to see their work used in action at a hearing. Offering hands-on opportunities to junior members, whether it’s a paralegal at a law firm or a first-time manager at a brick-and-mortar store, makes them feel valued and allows them to see how their hard work contributes to the team’s success.

It may be my name on the door, but my firm would never prosper if I tried to do it all on my own. Prioritizing team building is the best way to improve employee happiness and encourage collaboration, and collaboration is critical when it comes to small businesses. Whether it’s a scavenger hunt in Grand Central Terminal or structuring a cross-functional case team, developing those scenarios that foster collaboration will set your small business up for growth.

If your agency’s tech stack looks like a graveyard of subscriptions and browser tabs, you’re not alone. CRMs, funnel builders, invoicing software, schedulers—it’s a lot. And worse? None of it talks to each other.

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So what does it do? Almost everything, including websites, CRMs, email and SMS marketing, sales funnels, appointment schedulers, online courses, project management, POS, HR tools, and even AI-powered automation to tie it all together. There’s also a full-blown ERP system with client portals, contract signing, chat, and ticketing—all white labeled, so it looks like your own custom software.

For agencies, it’s a no-brainer: Sellful lets you spin up client sites, automate invoicing, manage social posts, and even onboard new leads—all from one dashboard with your branding front and center. You get 10 sites/sub-accounts included, and each can have unlimited contacts, pages, products, and users.

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Palantir stock is up nearly 500% over the past year at the time of writing. As the software and defense technology company’s value skyrockets, the question remains: How well does it pay its staff?

According to new federal filings, obtained by Business Insider, Palantir pays competitively for top tech talent. Software engineers, for example, can make anywhere from $155,000 to $240,000 in base pay.

The range aligns with what other major tech companies offer for the same role, though others have a higher ceiling. Meta pays $120,000 to $480,000, Google pays $109,180 to $340,000 and Microsoft pays $82,971 to $284,000 for software engineering talent.

Related: How Much Does Apple Pay Its Employees? Here Are the Exact Salaries of Staff Jobs, Including Developers, Engineers and Consultants.

Palantir builds platforms to help analyze and manage data, mainly for large organizations and the U.S. government and its allies. The company helps break down complex data to drive better decision-making, operations and security. Palantir’s data analysis software is considered a military intelligence tool. The company operates across the world, in North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and the Middle East, but is headquartered in the U.S., in Denver, Colorado.

^{Palantir CEO Alexander Karp. Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images}

According to its careers page, Palantir is hiring across the board, from engineering roles targeting new college graduates to product designer jobs.

The company submitted federal filings showing salary information for the first quarter of the year. The filings are required when companies hire foreign workers through the H-1B visa program, which enables highly skilled workers to take on specialty occupations.

The documents only show base annual salaries for H-1B workers and do not include signing bonuses, stock options, or other forms of compensation. They only represent one part of the compensation picture, not the entire view.

Related: Here’s How Much Money Amazon Employees — From Software Engineers to Product Managers — Make in a Year

The filings show that Palantir pays other roles as follows:

• AI Machine Learning Researcher: $210,000 to $250,000
• Deployment Strategist: $120,000 to $192,000
• Product Designer: $135,000
• Quality Engineer: $136,000
• Technical Program Manager: $165,000

According to Palantir’s proxy statement, filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in April, CEO Alexander Karp’s total compensation in 2024 was $4.63 million, while the median employee’s total compensation for the same year was $229,912. Karp made 20 times more than the mid-level worker at the company.

Related: Here’s How Much a Typical Nvidia Employee Makes in a Year

Palantir has nearly 4,000 U.S. employees.

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At 22, I’ve built two multimillion-dollar companies, raised $1.5 million while taking finals and convinced Miami University to pay me $200,000 to stay enrolled. While my classmates were buried in textbooks and partying, I was burning through sleepless nights and betting on ideas that seemed insane to everyone around me … until they started to work.

Before those bets turned into a repeatable strategy, it was easy to write me off as just another kid playing entrepreneur. Early twenty-somethings are constantly told to play it safe: Graduate, get the first decent job you can find, stash away 10% of your paycheck, and start slowly building wealth over time. Well, I did the opposite: I ignored all conventional wisdom about how young people should approach money and treated my early twenties like a one-time window to build real leverage.

I didn’t stumble into that mindset. I earned it the hard way.

Related: How 15 People in Their 20s Built Million-Dollar Businesses

Your biggest advantages aren’t what you think

When I was 19, I borrowed hundreds of thousands of dollars to launch Step Up Social (now Candid Network) with no credit score, no assets and no real backup plan. You could say I was reckless, and I wouldn’t disagree with you in theory, but I would add that the riskiest time to take a swing is also the safest. Had it all gone up in flames, what were they going to take? My dorm room furniture? My favorite sneakers? When you have nothing to lose, you can afford to take the kind of risks that would terrify someone with a mortgage and family.

That freedom is an incredibly precious window of opportunity, and I believe it’s the single most overlooked advantage young entrepreneurs have. Everyone talks about surface-level elements like youthful energy or fewer responsibilities, but the real edge is asymmetric risk tolerance. Every year you wait, you accumulate more to lose: relationships, reputation, lifestyle expectations.

The second thing I learned is that diversification protects existing wealth, but what you need to focus on to create new wealth in your early twenties (or anytime!) is concentration. The world tells you to keep your options open? I closed mine — deliberately. I could have spent college doing internships at different companies, building a broad network and exploring various career paths, but instead, I spent four years going deeper into social media marketing and workforce development than anyone my age. That obsessive focus made me better at those things than anyone else my age, which gave me a clear edge when I launched companies in both spaces.

Related: Why Your 20s Is the Perfect Time to Start a Business

The negotiation framework that paid me $200,000

Traditional career advice also gets negotiation wrong. Most people think negotiation is about being aggressive or having leverage, when it’s actually about understanding what the other side values and delivering it better than their next-best option.

When I negotiated with Miami University to cover my tuition and pay me for additional work, I didn’t lead with what I wanted, but focused on their need for credible student entrepreneurs to showcase their program to donors and media. I knew I could provide that more authentically than any marketing agency because I was actually building companies on campus. I gave them what agencies couldn’t — real credibility — and that alone was worth the $200,000 they paid me to stay enrolled.

Most young entrepreneurs undervalue what they can uniquely provide, but the best opportunities always come from thinking like a solution provider, not a supplicant. This works whether you’re negotiating with universities, clients or investors, and it works whether you’re 21 or 99 years old.

All of this comes down to a different kind of math. The standard path grows linearly: $60K job, 3% raises, maybe $200K if you’re a standout by your thirties. Entrepreneurship doesn’t follow that curve. You might make $0 for two years and then $500K in one, so while the average return is not dissimilar to that of the traditional job-seeker, the distribution is completely different. Most people can’t stomach those early zeros, but young people can.

If you’re 22 and living on ramen for two years while building something, that’s just an extension of college. If you’re 34 with a family, that same scenario is understandably impossible for you to replicate.

Related: What’s the Biggest Lesson to Learn As a Young Entrepreneur?

The compounding effect nobody mentions

Wealth doesn’t come from predictability, and the biggest mental shift I had to make as a young entrepreneur just starting out was to get comfortable choosing optionality over certainty every time I could.

Instead of optimizing for certainty and steady progress — which leads to building income, not real wealth — the model that twenty-somethings should follow is one that sees them chase optionality and asymmetric outcomes while they can still afford to. Because the biggest advantage of starting wealth-building early isn’t compound interest on investments, but compound learning on business skills.

Every deal I pitched at 19 made me better at raising money at 21. Every bad hire I made in college taught me how to build stronger teams later. Every mistake I made early on saved me from making bigger ones when the stakes became impossibly higher. These experiences stack up, transfer across every business you’ll ever build and can speed up your growth in ways no traditional job ever could.

Don’t expect it to be easy, because it’s not. I gained 80 pounds my first year, slept three hours a night and took on projects that could have crushed me if things went wrong. But that’s exactly why choosing the uncomfortable path can be so rewarding.

If you ever question betting on yourself as a young entrepreneur, consider that the traditional path will always be there, but the asymmetric opportunities won’t. In that sense, your early twenties aren’t just a good time to start, but they’re the best shot you’re going to get.

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