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She created a product that filled a gap in an industry — and scaled it to a seven-figure business. 

That’s the trajectory Jessica Liao Mayers took over the course of 11 years. Mayers grew up outside Dallas in a family of medical professionals. Fashion was not an obvious career choice. Still, a high school fashion class, one she initially took because she thought it would be easy, changed her path. 

“I ended up really, really loving it,” Mayers says. She competed in state and national fashion design and construction competitions, then moved to Los Angeles to attend the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising, where she studied product development.

After graduating in 2014, Mayers quickly found work as a designer and product developer at lifestyle brand BCBG. She learned fashion design at the company, then switched gears, jumping to apparel company Tobi as a buyer and learning the wholesale retail side of the industry.

At Tobi, Mayers encountered a problem that was good to have: She was quickly completing work. 

“I was very quick,” she says in a new interview with Entrepreneur. “My boss would give me the week’s worth of work on a Monday, and I would finish it in a few hours. I’d be so bored. So I was like, What do I do? I started my own business.”

Identifying a gap in the market

Mayers started Slate Swim in her home in November 2015. She spent $300 on fabric, then made products to order using a sewing machine she already owned.

Mayers would work on Slate on the side during lunches, running around the Fashion District to purchase fabric. Then she would sew when she got home. She was just 21 years old.

“I needed to start the brand because I needed something for myself,” Mayers says. “I got the idea because when I would go to buy swimsuits, I never really found something that was super comfortable.”

Mayers identified a gap in the swimwear market. Mass-produced, thick nylon swimsuits on one end, and high-end, trendy brands on the other. She found nothing minimalist. 

“There wasn’t anything more cool and reserved, and that’s very much my style,” Mayers says. “I like to wear very clean silhouettes, neutrals. I didn’t want to put on a swimsuit and not feel like myself.”

She differentiated her brand from the start. Slate offers swimsuits with minimal seaming, so everything lays flat and smooth on the body. The company uses a thin, soft fabric that feels like a second skin. The first fabrics she experimented with were actually lining fabrics, which was unusual at the time.

Mayers says that in the 11 years she has led Slate, she has seen the industry change tremendously. 

“I think I came in at a really good time when social media really wasn’t being used for brands,” she says. “I think that’s part of why we grew so quickly as well.”

A major leap

Before Mayers had inventory or a manufacturer, Agenda Trade Show discovered Slate’s early Instagram account, which Mayers used to share inspiration and teasers. The surf- and skate-focused show wanted to bring in swim brands and invited her to exhibit. 

Mayers accepted. She signed up for the show even though she was actually supposed to go to that same show as a buyer for her company, Tobi. She had to tell her employer with a week’s notice that she had to quit because she was going to be showing there as a brand.

“They had no idea,” Mayers said. “It was really insane.”

However, the timing of the show created a problem.

Mayers had no production operation in place. To prepare, she made 30 samples herself in her apartment, cutting and sewing every one. At the trade show, Slate landed in 22 retailers, including Diane’s Beachwear.

The orders were a major validation, but they also introduced an immediate operational challenge. Mayers didn’t have a manufacturer yet. At the show, she met someone who connected her with a small Los Angeles production shop. That arrangement helped Slate fulfill its early wholesale orders.

Eventually, Mayers moved production overseas and partnered with a small, family-owned manufacturer run by a contact she already knew through Tobi. The relationship became central to Slate’s growth. Unlike the first local factory, which could be inconsistent, the overseas partner provided more dependable quality and production capacity.

The business expanded gradually. Mayers reinvested revenue into better production, branding, photography and ecommerce rather than trying to build every capability at once.

That deliberate pace was a feature. “Everything kind of grew at a slower pace, but very, very manageable,” she says.

Why she chose focus over expansion

For 11 years, Slate stayed in its lane. Mayers resisted suggestions to expand into menswear, resortwear or other adjacent categories. She believed the brand would be stronger by specializing.

“I would much rather be successful at one thing than mediocre at many things,” she says.

That focus also protected the brand’s identity. Slate was founded around a specific aesthetic: minimalist silhouettes, neutral tones and flattering fits. Mayers learned firsthand that chasing trends could dilute that point of view. She recalls experimenting with trend-forward colors, including neon yellow, in one collection. The products performed poorly.

“After that, I was like, Okay, never again. I’m just going to do my thing,” she says.

Her marketing approach followed the same principle. In Slate’s earliest days, photographers reached out to pull suits for beach shoots and test shoots. Mayers received high-quality imagery in exchange for credit and tags, allowing her to establish an elevated visual identity before she could afford major campaigns.

One influencer posted a photo wearing Slate, which generated 30 orders overnight, an enormous moment for a tiny, early-stage company. Mayers also began gifting products to people who fit the brand, building relationships one by one rather than chasing a single viral breakthrough.

“It didn’t really go so viral in a sense of one thing that happened or blew it up,” she says. “I think it was just consistently investing in those small relationships.”

The compounding effect of that strategy helped lay the groundwork for later growth.

Where she waited too long

Mayers now says she waited too long to embrace paid advertising.

Until 2021, Slate had not invested in ads. When Mayers finally hired an advertising team, the business accelerated. She says in the first year using paid marketing, Slate grew about 76%. The ads used polished campaign imagery to sell the feeling and world of the brand.

Her first outside hire was an ad team with an engineering background, an unconventional choice that appealed to Mayers because of their ability to understand Meta’s systems and data.

In retrospect, she says, “doing ads way sooner” is the one thing she would change about her business journey.

The growth from paid marketing created a chain reaction. More orders required a warehouse or third-party logistics provider. More fulfillment capacity made it easier to handle larger wholesale orders. Delegating allowed Mayers to build beyond the limits of a one-person operation.

Bootstrapping a sellable business

Slate’s financial model remained simple: selling swimwear directly to consumers and through wholesale partners. Mayers says 92% of the business came from direct-to-consumer sales and 8% from wholesale.

More notably, she never raised outside capital. Instead, she reinvested what the company earned. This meant moving carefully with inventory and avoiding premature expansion into too many stock-keeping units. It also gave Mayers more ownership and flexibility when it came time to sell.

Over Slate’s final three years under her ownership, the company grew 36% year over year, she says. In July 2026, Mayers completed a seven-figure acquisition after listing the brand with an online brokerage shortly after Slate’s 10-year anniversary.

The decision to sell was not just financial. Mayers had long thought of Slate as her “baby,” but she also felt ready to pursue her original passion: contemporary womenswear. She wanted a buyer who would understand the business, value its identity and maintain the relationships she had built.

She found that in a buyer with a swim background, fashion knowledge and strong instincts for marketing and media. Mayers says the fit brought a sense of calm.

“It was like an inner peace,” she says.

Because Slate was organized, profitable and supported by contractors rather than full-time salaried employees, the acquisition moved quickly. Her lawyer, she says, described it as the fastest acquisition he had seen.

Plans to launch a new brand

Mayers is staying involved with Slate to support the transition, but she’s turning her attention to Knitte, a contemporary minimalist womenswear brand she plans to launch in spring 2027.

“Womenswear and clothing is where I think my creativity shines the most, because I’m able to create without bounds,” she says. “With swim, it’s been so incredible, but there’s only so much fit-wise you can do with swimwear because it all has to be tight and formed to your figure.”

Mayers is going to be playing with silhouettes and different materials and fabrics that she wasn’t able to do for so many years. “I’m extremely excited about that,” she says. 

Her advice for founders reflects the way she built Slate: Start with a genuine point of view, be resourceful and stay committed for the long haul.

“You have to have that passion that’s going to wake you up every morning,” Mayers says. “If you don’t have that, you’re just not going to get far.”

A founder I backed once raised capital, set the vision and then disappeared.

There were no updates, no emails and no sign of what was happening inside the company. Months went by. Then one day, I came across his LinkedIn profile and saw he had started a new job. That was how I learned the company I’d invested in was effectively over. No note. No explanation. No reflection on what went wrong.

That experience stuck with me because the problem had nothing to do with money. The company had funding. What it lacked was communication, accountability and a willingness to lean on the people who were there to help. A short monthly update or one honest conversation could have changed the outcome, or at least preserved trust.

I’ve seen versions of this play out more than once. Founders chase capital hard, then go quiet the moment they get it. They treat investors as a transaction instead of a resource, and that’s where things start to break.

Cash solves one problem at a time

Capital helps you hire, test, market and extend your runway. Those are real advantages, and every founder should respect them. But money can create a false sense of progress when it arrives before the company has built the habits to use it well.

I’ve watched founders celebrate a closed round as if the hardest part were behind them. In reality, the stakes rise the moment the money lands. Every decision carries more weight. Hiring mistakes cost more. Strategic drift burns more time. Silence creates more confusion. Cash gives you the ability to act. It doesn’t tell you what the right action is.

Guidance shapes how decisions get made

Every founder faces moments when the next step feels unclear. Do you double down on your current strategy or change course? Hire ahead of revenue or wait? Prioritize growth or efficiency?

These decisions rarely come with perfect data, and that’s where experienced guidance matters. The right investor or mentor helps you think through tradeoffs, pressure-test your assumptions and focus your energy where it actually moves the business forward. There’s also a difference between criticism and coaching. Anyone can point out what’s wrong. Far fewer people can help you fix it in a way that builds confidence and momentum. Founders need people who can turn problems into next steps.

I think of it like working with a personal trainer. One trainer tells you you’re out of shape. Another shows you what to do next, how often to do it and how to measure progress. The first discourages you; the second builds discipline.

Every founder needs someone to call

Building a company can be isolating. Founders are expected to project confidence even when things feel uncertain behind the scenes, and that gap between appearance and reality is where mistakes tend to grow.

The strongest founders I work with make room for honest conversations. They have people they can call when something breaks, a deal falls through or they need a second opinion. That might be an investor, an advisor or a mentor who has been through something similar.

Those conversations aren’t about having someone else run the company. They’re about gaining clarity faster. Sometimes a short discussion is all it takes to reframe a problem and find the next move. Without that outlet, founders often get stuck in their own heads. They delay decisions, overcorrect or avoid issues that need immediate attention.

Choose investors you can actually work with

Founders spend a lot of time optimizing for valuation, brand name or check size. Those factors matter, but they skip a more practical question: When things get hard, is this someone you’d actually want to work through problems with?

The right investor relationship feels like a working partnership, built on trust, mutual respect and a shared interest in solving problems. You can be direct about what’s going wrong without worrying about how it will be perceived.

I’ve worked with founders who stay engaged, send clear updates and ask for help when they need it. Those are the founders I naturally want to support more. Their communication shows they care about the business and the relationship, and it makes it easier for me to offer useful input because I have context.

I’ve also seen founders disappear after funding. They skip updates, avoid conversations and resurface only when they need something. That pattern erodes trust quickly and limits how much any investor can help.

Set a rhythm for guidance early

One simple habit can make a big difference: Schedule recurring time with your key investors or advisors before you think you need it. A standing monthly or biweekly check-in creates consistency. It gives you a natural place to share updates, ask questions and think through decisions, and it removes the awkwardness of reaching out only when something goes wrong.

These conversations don’t need to be long or formal. What matters is that they happen consistently. Over time, they build a track record of communication and a deeper understanding of the business. Guidance works best as part of the process, not as an emergency response.

Turn capital into progress

Cash is a tool. It extends your runway and expands your options. What determines success is how you use that time and those options. Guidance helps you focus, avoid preventable mistakes and stay accountable when momentum slows. Most importantly, it keeps you moving in the right direction when the path ahead is unclear.

If you’re building a company, ask yourself: Do you have people around you who can challenge your thinking, support your decisions and help you through the hard moments? If the answer is no, that’s the gap to fix.

A founder I backed once raised capital, set the vision and then disappeared.

There were no updates, no emails and no sign of what was happening inside the company. Months went by. Then one day, I came across his LinkedIn profile and saw he had started a new job. That was how I learned the company I’d invested in was effectively over. No note. No explanation. No reflection on what went wrong.

That experience stuck with me because the problem had nothing to do with money. The company had funding. What it lacked was communication, accountability and a willingness to lean on the people who were there to help. A short monthly update or one honest conversation could have changed the outcome, or at least preserved trust.

Ask any hiring manager what makes a “safe” candidate, and you’ll get the same list: steady career progression, no unexplained gaps, the right degree, a resume that follows the rules. Ask them why those things predict success, and the list gets a lot shorter. Most hiring practices grew out of habit, then got repeated until they felt like law.

That’s not automatically a problem — some rules earned their place. But few companies ever go back and check which ones still do. Careers are getting less linear. Hiring technology is getting more automated. That makes this question overdue: What evidence do we have that this practice helps us make a better hire?

Your hiring rules started as habit, not evidence

Resume conventions, degree cutoffs, years-of-experience minimums, expectations about steady upward movement — most of these became “standard” simply because they were repeated for long enough. Few leaders ever revisit them once they’re written into a job description or an applicant tracking system. In my experience, that’s rarely a deliberate choice; it’s inertia. Nobody owns the question of whether a rule still works, so nobody asks it.

Screening technology is no different. A 2026 audit of 14 mainstream AI models used to screen resumes found real movement: the oldest model, built in 2023, still favored “white-sounding” names in callbacks, while models built from 2024 onward showed no gap, or reversed it. Assumptions built into a process don’t disappear until someone tests them.

Presentation isn’t the same as ability

Presentation and ability aren’t the same thing, though hiring often treats them as interchangeable. Resume structure, job titles and career history are conventions — signals of how someone packaged their experience, not proof of what they can do.

Enhancv’s own research into resume photos found something similar: Candidates who included a photo, even in markets like the U.S. and Canada where the practice is discouraged, landed jobs at a higher rate, especially in senior, client-facing roles. The rule most recruiters treat as settled measured almost nothing about the candidate. It measured how comfortable the reviewer felt.

Unconventional candidates aren’t the risk you think

Career gaps, industry switches, non-linear progression and candidates applying below their previous seniority all tend to read as red flags. The evidence doesn’t back that up as consistently as hiring teams assume.

Research from the Burning Glass Institute and Harvard Business School found that employees hired without a degree into roles that previously required one had a two-year retention rate 10 percentage points higher than their degree-holding peers. The candidates who looked riskier on paper stayed longer in practice.

The screening process was never neutral

ATS filters and scoring rubrics get sold as neutral, but they’re not. They’re someone’s assumption, coded once and rarely revisited, applied to every resume that hits the pile. Add AI to that process, and the assumption gets automated at scale.

University of Washington researchers found that when an AI tool recommended candidates from a particular racial group, human reviewers followed that recommendation up to 90% of the time, even when they rated the AI’s suggestions as low-quality or unimportant. Nobody chose that outcome. The system did, and nobody was checking.

Policy changes rarely change who gets hired

Adopting a new policy and changing what happens in hiring are two different things. The same Burning Glass Institute research examined more than 11,000 roles at large firms that had removed degree requirements, then tracked roughly 65 million career histories to see if hiring behavior changed.

It mostly didn’t — fewer than one in 700 new hires in 2023 benefited from the reform. Some companies changed who they hired, but most just edited the job description. The only way to know which one your company is doing is to compare who you screen out against who performs once hired.

Recruiters need permission to push back

None of this sticks without hiring managers feeling authorized to say a requirement doesn’t make sense. NACE’s Job Outlook 2026 survey found 70% of employers now use skills-based hiring, up from 65% the year before, and GPA screening has dropped to 42% of employers from 73% in 2019. More than half of U.S. state governments have adopted similar policies. 

The shift is already underway. Most companies already have the technology and the templates. What’s missing is a recruiter with standing to say a requirement doesn’t hold up and a manager willing to back them.

Make your hiring criteria earn their keep

Treat hiring criteria the way you’d treat any other business process — something you check on a regular schedule rather than defend on instinct. Look at who your filters reject, and ask whether you’re protecting hire quality or protecting yourself from a bad hire. Follow the people who made it through far enough to see whether the requirement predicted anything about how they performed. When it didn’t, retire it.

Employers already doing this lean on behavior-based interviews, competency-based job descriptions, targeted resume scans and structured interview rubrics, aimed at replacing untested criteria with ones that have been checked.

A final word

I’ve spent years helping candidates get past exactly these filters, and I keep seeing the same pattern. Most hiring criteria were never built to find the best person. They were built to give whoever’s hiring an easy answer if someone asks why later.

Treating those two jobs as the same is how companies lose candidates who would have worked out fine. The leaders willing to ask what a requirement predicts, and drop the ones that fail, end up hiring the people their competitors screened out for reasons that had nothing to do with ability.

Ask any hiring manager what makes a “safe” candidate, and you’ll get the same list: steady career progression, no unexplained gaps, the right degree, a resume that follows the rules. Ask them why those things predict success, and the list gets a lot shorter. Most hiring practices grew out of habit, then got repeated until they felt like law.

That’s not automatically a problem — some rules earned their place. But few companies ever go back and check which ones still do. Careers are getting less linear. Hiring technology is getting more automated. That makes this question overdue: What evidence do we have that this practice helps us make a better hire?

Your hiring rules started as habit, not evidence

Resume conventions, degree cutoffs, years-of-experience minimums, expectations about steady upward movement — most of these became “standard” simply because they were repeated for long enough. Few leaders ever revisit them once they’re written into a job description or an applicant tracking system. In my experience, that’s rarely a deliberate choice; it’s inertia. Nobody owns the question of whether a rule still works, so nobody asks it.

In small business, every customer interaction is a marketing opportunity. While attracting new customers is essential, long-term growth emerges from the experiences that keep people coming back.

From strong first impressions and seamless service to operational excellence and lasting loyalty, small moments that shape the customer journey can become your greatest competitive advantage. Read on, small business owners, for strategies to strengthen your customer experience and turn awareness into preference.

Exploring the rise of ‘micro-expectations’

Before you can even think about the customer experience, consider your business “front door” of sorts. Whether your business offers a brick-and-mortar location or connects to customers in virtual spaces, first impressions are everything, no matter if they happen in the physical environment or online.

For a storefront, for instance, simple things like dirty windows, broken fixtures or wilting plants may seem insignificant in the broader scheme of things. But they immediately suggest to prospective customers that their welcome is an afterthought. In the digital world, websites that are difficult to navigate for customer service or “about us” information pose a similar problem. Experiences that were once “nice-to-haves” have migrated to something much bigger: the baseline of the customer experience.

Any brand space needs dedicated attention from you and your team to send the right signals to your prospective and current customers from the start. Customers expect personalized experiences and speed from all businesses now, regardless of size. In fact, McKinsey reports that 80% of consumers expect personalized interactions, and 71% get frustrated if they don’t receive them. That personalization polish can start with your front door signaling in both what customers see and how they’re greeted. The moment a customer walks through your door or lands on your website, they’re already forming opinions about whether you value their time and business.

Identifying friction

Even the most resilient businesses can experience setbacks when misfires happen. These missteps are often small moments rather than dramatic situations, where a customer’s experience stumbles due to unclear processes, slow responses, repeat information or gatekept access to real people when the situation requires it. The key here is to unpack the entire experience or product life cycle and uncover where friction could be hiding rather than assuming where it exists.

Consider common friction points: A customer places an order but receives no tracking number or confirmation email, leaving them wondering if their transaction went through. A returning customer calls your business and has to repeat their account information to multiple employees because there is a lack of information-sharing across your team. Your FAQ page answers generic questions but not the common problem a customer could experience. A customer service line puts them on hold indefinitely during your busiest hours. These small moments compound, and research finds that 92% of customers will abandon a company after negative experiences like these.

The transactions between you and your customer could be flawless, but lack of a confirmation email could result in a missed shipment or back-end organizational issue. The same goes for internal departments. If your teams fail to receive an important announcement about a change to your service offerings, your customers, partners and stakeholders may experience misaligned messaging in simple interactions.

Providing end-to-end communication eliminates friction. When you establish processes and ways of working that share critical information between your teams, customers and other stakeholders, you create operational excellence built on connection. Start by documenting your processes — how orders flow, how customer information is tracked, how issues are escalated. When a process only exists in your head, you become the bottleneck. When it’s written down, anyone can follow it, and your customer is on the receiving end of a quality workflow.

Turning operational excellence in your marketing advantage

Seamless experiences warrant positive attention, and efficient operations are the foundation. When processes are seamless — when customers know what to expect, when your team can solve problems, when clarity removes friction — something shifts. Customers feel valued. That earned trust comes from predictability, clarity and empowerment, all of which compounds into loyalty.

In practice, businesses approach this in multiple ways. Sometimes it’s through culturally relevant campaigns that resonate with customers in a fresh way. One example is our recent introduction of Blu, our first-ever brand character, whose friendly, helpful and uplifting personality brings to life the personalized service, local expertise and breadth of resources that The UPS Store franchisees provide to small business owners in their communities. Other times, it’s amplifying the world-class, repeatable customer service that earns recognition and trust.

What remains constant across both: Service speaks for itself. When your operations are solid, you can afford to take bigger risks because you have confidence in flawless delivery.

For local business owners especially, this is an advantage. Many customers think of “their” local business as exactly that — theirs — because they’ve experienced consistent, reliable service from people they know. This investment in operational excellence creates a foundation that allows them to take creative risks and stay top of mind with customers.

Building loyalty through consistency, reliability and memorable service

Customer trust relies on accountability, consistency and memorable moments. Consistency means delivering the same quality and experience every time, whether it’s your busiest day or your slowest. Reliability means owning your brand commitments even when it requires extra hours and difficult conversations to ensure every touch point meets expectations.  

Memorable service goes deeper: from personalization, like remembering a customer’s name or preferences, to serving as a proactive problem-solver, to small gestures that show appreciation like a handwritten note. Meaningful wins create authentic connections that are often more valuable than grand gestures or expensive rewards.

That’s what loyalty looks like: the quiet confidence that comes from being consistently, reliably cared for in small moments throughout the customer journey itself. They’re what transforms awareness into preference, and preference into the kind of lasting loyalty that drives real growth.

In small business, every customer interaction is a marketing opportunity. While attracting new customers is essential, long-term growth emerges from the experiences that keep people coming back.

From strong first impressions and seamless service to operational excellence and lasting loyalty, small moments that shape the customer journey can become your greatest competitive advantage. Read on, small business owners, for strategies to strengthen your customer experience and turn awareness into preference.

Exploring the rise of ‘micro-expectations’

Before you can even think about the customer experience, consider your business “front door” of sorts. Whether your business offers a brick-and-mortar location or connects to customers in virtual spaces, first impressions are everything, no matter if they happen in the physical environment or online.

Every founder gets advice, and most of it comes with conviction. Find a clear market gap. Raise as much as you can. Get a technical co-founder. Much of it is useful, but very little of it comes with the context that made it true in the first place.

I learned this firsthand while building a company in real estate technology. When we were raising our Series A, an investor told us the market was too competitive and already had too many players. Standard advice for early-stage startups is to find an open lane before going in. That advice made sense in the situations the investor had seen succeed. It didn’t make sense for ours.

Real estate tech was crowded, but it was crowded with mediocre software. There was no clear winner, which meant there was still room to win.

We focused on a segment most people had written off as too small, the top 1% of agents, and built premium software and service for them first. We bootstrapped to $1 million in revenue before raising anything. By the time we took investor money, we understood our customers well enough to know which conventional wisdom applied to us and which didn’t.

That distinction, between advice that’s generally true and advice that’s true for your situation, is something I come back to whenever I talk with founders, whatever their industry.

Why startup advice turns into rules

Most startup advice comes from pattern matching. Someone succeeded doing X, so X becomes gospel. The advice travels faster than the context behind it. The problem isn’t that the advice is wrong; it’s that it stops being advice and becomes instruction.

Wisdom specific to one situation gets turned into a rule everyone follows, whether it fits or not. We chose our own route, knowing we didn’t fit the pattern the advice was designed for. Here are five startup “rules” we broke.

1. Raise at the highest valuation you can get

The conventional wisdom is to take the best terms available. There’s logic to that, but raising at 200 times revenue means spending years trying to grow into numbers that were never grounded in your actual business.

We raised at valuations that let us keep the right partners, limit dilution and run a company that worked. Some companies in our market raised too much at valuations that were too high, and they’re now stuck because their last round set a bar that may take a decade to clear. We didn’t want that to be us.

2. Raise as much as you can

This is a related trap. The argument is that more capital means more runway and more options. In many cases, it actually produces waste and a company that never has to make the hard choices that force you to understand what matters. We raised what we needed to reach the next milestone, plus a buffer, and that discipline paid off.

3. You need a technical co-founder

I’m a solo founder who hired great engineers instead. For a long time, investors flagged that as a structural weakness. I don’t think it is, and with what AI makes possible now, the argument has only gotten weaker. You do need strong technical talent, but you can hire for it.

4. Move fast and break things

This piece of startup doctrine has aged poorly faster than almost any other. With AI coding tools, anyone can ship software quickly, so the supply of mediocre products is now essentially unlimited. The only way to win is to build things that are actually great: well-designed, well-tested and genuinely useful.

That’s especially true in high-trust industries. In real estate, customers are making the largest financial decisions of their lives, so the tolerance for broken things was never high. Trust takes years to build and can be lost quickly. Moving carefully where it matters isn’t a concession. It’s a product strategy.

5. Disrupt from the low end

The classic playbook says to enter at the bottom of the market, undercut on price and work your way up. We started at the top and built from there. Those early customers gave us deep product knowledge, a strong reputation and references that eventually carried us further into the market than a low-end entry would have.

None of this was the “right” approach according to startup playbooks. It worked because we understood our customers and market well enough to know where the standard rules applied and where they didn’t.

The better question to ask

When you’re early in building a company, you’re surrounded by people with strong opinions about what you should do: investors, advisors and other founders. Much of that advice is offered in good faith. But a lot of it is based on situations that look similar to yours on the surface and are actually quite different. Listening is smart. Accepting it without question, as if context didn’t matter, is the mistake.

A better habit is to treat advice as a prompt for questions rather than a directive. Why does this advice exist? What conditions made it true? Do those conditions apply to my business, my market and my customers? Sometimes they will, and sometimes they won’t. The answer is almost always more valuable than the advice itself.

My recommendation: Find people who have done the specific thing you’re trying to do, in conditions that resemble yours. Ask them why they made their choices, not just what those choices were. The context is the useful part. Without it, you’re following someone else’s map through terrain that may look nothing like theirs.

Every founder gets advice, and most of it comes with conviction. Find a clear market gap. Raise as much as you can. Get a technical co-founder. Much of it is useful, but very little of it comes with the context that made it true in the first place.

I learned this firsthand while building a company in real estate technology. When we were raising our Series A, an investor told us the market was too competitive and already had too many players. Standard advice for early-stage startups is to find an open lane before going in. That advice made sense in the situations the investor had seen succeed. It didn’t make sense for ours.

Real estate tech was crowded, but it was crowded with mediocre software. There was no clear winner, which meant there was still room to win.

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Many AI startups launch first in English because the models, benchmarks, developer tools and enterprise buyers are easiest to find there. That approach can help a company reach the market quickly, but it can also cause founders to overlook a much larger multilingual opportunity.

According to the International Telecommunication Union, 2.2 billion people remained offline in 2025, most of them in low- and middle-income countries. As more of these users come online, many will expect digital products to work in the languages they use every day — not merely offer translated versions of English-first experiences. They represent a significant growth opportunity for companies prepared to build multilingual products.

But founders cannot simply plug a translation API into an English-based model and instantly go global. Many general-purpose models provide uneven performance across languages. Some languages are represented by more tokens for equivalent content, which can increase cost and reduce the effective amount of text that fits into a context window. Lower-resource languages may also receive weaker results because they have less high-quality training and evaluation data.

I have seen this challenge firsthand through my contributions to the Government of India’s BHASHINI and BhashaDaan initiatives and as an expert contributor to C-DAC’s Vikaspedia. BhashaDaan crowdsources speech, text, translation and image-labeling contributions for Indian-language technologies, while Vikaspedia provides knowledge across social-development sectors in India’s scheduled languages. Contributing to these initiatives reinforced a consistent lesson: You cannot serve a multilingual market by treating language support as a translation feature added at the end.

Stop paying the invisible language tax

“Tokens” are the fundamental billing unit of generative AI. Tokenization varies by model, and even English words do not always map to one token. However, multilingual studies have found that equivalent content can require materially different numbers of tokens across languages. When a tokenizer fragments a target language more heavily, the application may pay for more input and output tokens to communicate the same meaning.

A simple first estimate is: Estimated multilingual text cost = Comparable English text cost × Token-count multiplier.

This estimate does not include differences in model pricing, caching, output length or infrastructure. A language-focused tokenizer or model may materially reduce inference costs, but founders should benchmark it using representative conversations in each target language before making a platform decision.

Engineering teams should compare general-purpose and language-focused models using representative regional inputs. Evaluate token count, response quality, latency, safety, licensing and total cost together. A model that uses fewer tokens is not a better business choice if it produces less reliable answers.

Leverage sovereign and institutional language resources

High-quality digital and training resources are distributed unevenly across languages, leaving many lower-resource languages with less material for model training, retrieval and evaluation. When startups implement Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) for regional languages, their systems may produce weaker or less grounded results when suitable localized retrieval and evaluation data is sparse, outdated or poorly translated.

Founders should evaluate sovereign and institutional language resources before paying to recreate equivalent data. Before using any resource for retrieval, fine-tuning or commercial deployment, verify its license, provenance, update history, quality, privacy conditions and permitted uses. Government backing should not replace technical and legal due diligence.

Properly licensed, relevant resources can improve language coverage and reduce the amount of data a startup must collect independently, but their quality and suitability must still be tested.

Architect for vernacular-first interfaces

When building for the U.S. enterprise market, the default user interface is often a text box and a keyboard. However, mobile-internet research indicates that reading, writing and digital-literacy difficulties are major barriers to mobile-internet adoption.

In markets where user research identifies typing, literacy or script entry as meaningful barriers, founders should evaluate voice-enabled and visual interfaces rather than assuming that a text box is sufficient. As I explained in my earlier analysis of conversational AI and “Zero-UI” systems, reaching the next billion users often requires fitting technology into their existing communication habits rather than forcing them to navigate a conventional app

If voice is central to the target workflow, design and test the audio pipeline early. It should be evaluated using representative accents, dialects, noisy environments and code-mixed speech rather than added as an untested wrapper at launch.

Multilingual expansion should also begin with one narrowly defined market rather than a simultaneous global launch. Choose a high-value workflow, test it with native speakers, measure task completion and support costs, then use that evidence to decide whether the architecture is ready for the next language.

The real opportunity is outside the echo chamber

Multilingual markets contain users whose needs are poorly served by English-first products. Capturing this opportunity requires treating localized AI as a core engineering and product discipline.

Audit your token economics to protect your margins, verify the legal and technical quality of regional datasets and design interfaces around how target users actually communicate. An English-only architecture may prevent an otherwise strong AI company from reaching users who prefer to speak, search and transact in other languages.

Many AI startups launch first in English because the models, benchmarks, developer tools and enterprise buyers are easiest to find there. That approach can help a company reach the market quickly, but it can also cause founders to overlook a much larger multilingual opportunity.

According to the International Telecommunication Union, 2.2 billion people remained offline in 2025, most of them in low- and middle-income countries. As more of these users come online, many will expect digital products to work in the languages they use every day — not merely offer translated versions of English-first experiences. They represent a significant growth opportunity for companies prepared to build multilingual products.

But founders cannot simply plug a translation API into an English-based model and instantly go global. Many general-purpose models provide uneven performance across languages. Some languages are represented by more tokens for equivalent content, which can increase cost and reduce the effective amount of text that fits into a context window. Lower-resource languages may also receive weaker results because they have less high-quality training and evaluation data.

Netflix has a major problem, according to the $281 billion company’s co-CEO, Ted Sarandos. 

“Overall, we’re not growing as fast as I want us to, and we’re working on making that move faster,” Sarandos said at a Bloomberg conference in Los Angeles this week. “We are, though, also doing things that create a lot of headwind to that number.”

Sarandos disclosed that Netflix’s global engagement rose just 2% in its latest reported period, even though revenue continued to grow at double-digit rates in every region. Netflix is the world’s largest streaming service, according to Forbes. 

To rekindle growth, Sarandos told Bloomberg that Netflix is pushing beyond its traditional on-demand mix of scripted films and television and pushing into live entertainment, including sports, wrestling, comedy and major cultural events. He said that the company devotes 5% of its approximately $20 billion annual content budget, about $1 billion, to live programming.

The strategy is not designed to maximize hours watched; live shows account for only about 1% of Netflix viewing. Instead, Sarandos said that they serve a different commercial purpose. They attract new subscribers, give existing customers a reason to stay and create more valuable inventory for advertisers.

Live shows can help Netflix feel less like a library people visit intermittently. They offer a potential way to reduce churn and broaden the business beyond its historical reliance on movies and series. 

Other aspects of Netflix’s strategy to grow quickly

Netflix is also widening its theatrical ambitions and promoting movies with major built-in audiences. 

Sarandos said Greta Gerwig’s Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew will receive a wide theatrical release in 2027 before arriving on Netflix, followed later that year by the animated Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. 

According to Deadline, Netflix has planned longer periods of time that movies will be exclusively showing in theaters before they become available on the streaming platform. Netflix plans to exclusively show Narnia in theaters for 50 days and Charlie for 47 days, substantially longer than the limited runs traditionally associated with Netflix originals. 

Sarandos said the sequel to KPop Demon Hunters will get an even larger rollout. He told Deadline that audiences should expect a “very broad” theatrical debut for the follow-up, which he said would be a “big, broad, global” release.

Netflix appears to see four-quadrant movies, or films capable of attracting children, parents, younger adults and older viewers, as especially suited to the big screen. KPop Demon Hunters falls under that category, Sarandos told Variety last month. 

He added that Netflix released more than 30 films in theaters last year, tailoring each run by title, city, marketing spend and number of days in theaters. 

AI investments

Netflix is expanding its use of AI to make film and TV production faster and less expensive.

In March, the company acquired InterPositive, an AI filmmaking technology firm founded by Ben Affleck, for $587 million. The technology targets mainly post-production work, such as adjusting color, adding visual effects and reframing shots. It isn’t capable of generating an entire film from scratch. 

On Netflix’s second-quarter earnings call in July, Sarandos said Netflix had used AI on about 300 titles for planning and visual effects.

Netflix has a major problem, according to the $281 billion company’s co-CEO, Ted Sarandos. 

“Overall, we’re not growing as fast as I want us to, and we’re working on making that move faster,” Sarandos said at a Bloomberg conference in Los Angeles this week. “We are, though, also doing things that create a lot of headwind to that number.”

Sarandos disclosed that Netflix’s global engagement rose just 2% in its latest reported period, even though revenue continued to grow at double-digit rates in every region. Netflix is the world’s largest streaming service, according to Forbes. 

A forklift tips over in the warehouse. A customer slips on a wet floor. A company van rear-ends someone on the highway. In the moment, these events feel like isolated crises, but the fallout rarely stays contained. Downtime piles up, revenue stalls, key employees are suddenly unavailable, and insurance adjusters start asking questions the business wasn’t ready to answer.

That’s what owners often miss: An accident isn’t just a safety problem; it’s a continuity problem. Treating legal preparedness as one piece of a broader risk management strategy, alongside safety compliance, gives a company a real shot at bouncing back quickly instead of scrambling for months.

Understand the legal risks before an accident happens

You can’t prepare for a risk you haven’t named. Start by mapping out where accidents are most likely to originate in your business:

• Employees performing daily tasks or operating equipment
• Customers and visitors on company property
• Company-owned or leased vehicles
• Contractors and vendors working on-site
• The physical premises itself, including parking lots and entrances

A periodic liability and safety assessment, done annually or after any major operational change, helps surface blind spots before they turn into claims. Bring in an insurance broker, safety consultant or attorney to walk through your actual exposure rather than guessing.

Create a clear accident response plan

Once you know your risks, build a plan employees can follow without hesitating. Panic makes people forget procedures they’ve never practiced, so assign responsibilities ahead of time rather than figuring it out mid-crisis.

A solid plan should cover securing the scene, reporting the incident internally and to regulators when required, contacting emergency services, preserving evidence and documenting what happened before details fade. Beyond the ethical obligation to your team, neglecting workplace safety carries real financial risk, including penalties steep enough to strain a small business’s cash flow.

The goal isn’t a binder nobody reads. Run through the plan during onboarding and safety meetings so employees know their role before anything goes wrong.

Document everything after an incident

Good documentation is what separates a manageable claim from a drawn-out dispute. Immediately after an incident, gather:

• Photographs and video of the scene
• Contact information for witnesses
• A written incident report
• Maintenance and inspection records tied to the equipment or property involved
• Employee training records
• Any relevant emails, texts or internal communications

Resist the urge to speculate about fault while you’re gathering facts. Assigning blame too early, even informally, can complicate things later if the incident escalates.

Know when to seek legal guidance

Not every scraped knee or fender bender needs a lawyer involved. But serious injuries, disputed liability, multiple affected parties or any hint of pending litigation changes the calculus fast.

That’s the point where it pays to know when to seek legal guidance, since companies facing significant injury claims are often better served by consulting attorneys experienced in the litigation process rather than navigating it alone. This isn’t about lawyering up defensively; it’s about understanding how these cases unfold before the other side does.

Coordinate legal preparedness with insurance coverage

Legal strategy and insurance coverage should move in step, not in separate lanes. Review your policies before an accident, not after, so you actually know what’s covered and what isn’t. Pay close attention to notification deadlines: Many policies require prompt written notice of a claim, and missing that window can jeopardize coverage regardless of how valid the underlying claim is, a point emphasized in the American Bar Association’s claim-filing guidance.

Keep policy documents, claim correspondence and adjuster contacts organized in one place so nothing slips through during a stressful week.

Protect business continuity during recovery

While legal and insurance matters unfold, the business still has to run. Build contingency plans before you need them: Line up backup suppliers and transportation options in advance, identify which processes are truly critical versus which can pause temporarily, and prepare a communication plan for employees, customers and vendors.

Companies that treat business continuity planning as a standing practice, rather than something invented on the fly, tend to recover with far less financial damage.

Review what went wrong, and improve

Once the dust settles, resist the temptation to move on without a real post-incident review. Look honestly at gaps in safety procedures, training, documentation habits and emergency response, using resources like OSHA’s incident reporting guidance as a benchmark for what should have been in place.

Every accident, however unwelcome, is also a data point. Businesses that mine it for lessons tend to face fewer repeat incidents down the road.

Prepared businesses recover faster

Accidents will happen. No amount of planning eliminates that reality entirely. What legal preparedness changes is what happens next: how fast the business stabilizes, how well it protects employees and customers, and how much control it keeps over the outcome.

Pairing solid safety procedures with documentation habits, insurance coordination and a clear sense of when to call a lawyer doesn’t just limit damage. It keeps the business operating while everything else gets sorted out, which is really the whole point.

A forklift tips over in the warehouse. A customer slips on a wet floor. A company van rear-ends someone on the highway. In the moment, these events feel like isolated crises, but the fallout rarely stays contained. Downtime piles up, revenue stalls, key employees are suddenly unavailable, and insurance adjusters start asking questions the business wasn’t ready to answer.

That’s what owners often miss: An accident isn’t just a safety problem; it’s a continuity problem. Treating legal preparedness as one piece of a broader risk management strategy, alongside safety compliance, gives a company a real shot at bouncing back quickly instead of scrambling for months.

Understand the legal risks before an accident happens

You can’t prepare for a risk you haven’t named. Start by mapping out where accidents are most likely to originate in your business:

When growth stalls, almost every business owner reaches for the same levers. You know the ones. More content, more ads, more discount codes. Maybe even more texts blasted to a list that stopped opening them months ago. 

In my practice, these tactics are effective. But could they be more effective? Yes, they could. Not by spending more, but by clarifying what you already have.

Before you spend an additional dime on more marketing, examine your brand’s positioning first.

The root problem that looks like a marketing problem

A marketing problem and a positioning problem can look very similar. Growth plateaus, and your cost to acquire a new customer increases. But the fixes are completely different, and mixing them up wastes time and money.

A marketing problem means people understand who you are and what you offer. They just are not hearing about it enough, or in the right places. The message works, and it thrives on distribution, frequency and targeting.

A positioning problem is quieter and more stubborn. People are hearing about you, but it does not elicit an action, because they cannot answer two questions fast enough: What do you actually do, and why does that matter coming from you instead of the next person?

If a stranger cannot repeat your value back to you in one sentence after landing on your website from an ad, you do not have a visibility gap. You have a clarity gap. More content will not fix that problem.

Meet the surgeon who did not need a bigger budget

A few years ago, a cosmetic surgeon, Dr. Gina Maccarone of The Surgeonista, came to my agency wanting to grow her new practice more quickly. Her website was strong. Her content calendar was full. Her social presence looked, by every surface measure, like it was doing everything right. People were seeing her brand. Now what she needed were consultations.

We spent our first week together on one question: Why choose this surgeon over the 20 others within a 50-mile radius?

In a saturated market, differentiation is key to elevating your brand. More noise isn’t going to differentiate you. Better positioning will. We uncovered that her messaging described procedures instead of describing why she was uniquely positioned to solve her patients’ root problem: not feeling confident in their own skin.

A peer-reviewed study tested different positioning strategies using real brands. Researchers evaluated them based on brand favorability, differentiation and credibility. The findings showed that benefit-based positioning and user-based positioning generally performed better than feature-based positioning.

It took a few conversations to get there, but we uncovered her category of one. She was the only female surgeon in the region who was triple board certified in her specialty. Once we repositioned around that one fact, everything else got easier: the content, the press pitches, the partnerships — because for the first time there was something specific for people to remember her by. 

The signals that mean it is time to reposition

I have started noticing the same handful of signals everywhere, not just in medicine. If you are constantly explaining what you do as a job instead of mirroring that you understand your clients’ problem and educating them on the best solution for that problem, positioning might be the issue — not your marketing.

If your sales process feels heavier than it should, that is another signal that positioning can be improved. If you keep attracting people who like you but are not quite right, pay attention to that too. And if your business has grown but your messaging has not caught up with it yet, that is usually the biggest tell of all.

None of that means you failed. Most of the time it means you grew faster than your positioning could keep up with. Repositioning is a growth strategy.

What happened when I applied this to my own business

My agency has been around for a decade. For years, our positioning stayed broad, because it could. We worked across beauty, home and wellness, and the work was good. But sales conversations could run long. Proposals got customized over and over. We were explaining ourselves constantly instead of being instantly understood — the exact signal I now tell clients to watch for. That is usually the first sign that something is not broken. It has just outgrown its container.

So last year we repositioned the whole company. Instead of trying to be a great agency for a lot of categories, we decided to become a category of one for a very specific audience. We stopped saying we offered public relations services and started owning a specific, named framework instead, called our Path to PRominence. We narrowed our focus from beauty, home and wellness down to women’s health, wellness and aesthetics, full stop. 

What happened next? Qualified leads went up. Competition went down. Sales conversations got shorter, because people showed up already understanding what we did and why it mattered to them specifically. Inquiries through AI became warmer (if you can call anything from artificial intelligence “warm!”). That did not happen with vague positioning. It happens when your expertise is obvious enough for a machine to place you correctly, let alone a person. And best of all, our revenue doubled in one year.

How to find your category of one

If you think you have a positioning problem rather than a marketing problem, start smaller than feels comfortable. Write down the one thing you want to be known for. Something true, specific and hard for a competitor to claim. Not your mission statement. Not your list of services. The one line a client could repeat back to you, word for word, six months after working with you.

Then pull up your last 10 pieces of content, your homepage and your bio, and hold them up against that one sentence. If most of what you find is generic or interchangeable with a competitor’s, you have found your answer.

Our client did not need a bigger ad budget. She needed sharper positioning — one that attracted her ideal patients, enhancing her efforts when pursuing them. My own agency did not need a new marketing plan. It needed a narrower, truer answer to the question every buyer is asking: Why you, and why now?

Before you spend another dollar on visibility, ask whether what you already have is clear enough to be worth seeing.

When growth stalls, almost every business owner reaches for the same levers. You know the ones. More content, more ads, more discount codes. Maybe even more texts blasted to a list that stopped opening them months ago. 

In my practice, these tactics are effective. But could they be more effective? Yes, they could. Not by spending more, but by clarifying what you already have.

Before you spend an additional dime on more marketing, examine your brand’s positioning first.