Your product is ten percent of the work
Two of Nomiki's businesses died in three months. The fifth one stuck.
You can build the thing now. A weekend of prompts gets you an interface, a landing page, something real enough to put in front of people. Then comes the part nobody warned you about, where the product turns out to be the smallest piece of the work.
has started five businesses, and she puts a number on that piece.
She got a D minus in economics, restarted college from scratch, and spent a decade running a consulting practice alongside a full-time career that ended with her leading product at an AI company. Next, she started two drop-shipping companies that died in three months each. Then, she launched a one-on-one coaching practice for women founders that has become the blueprint for Theanna, her fifth business, a community-and-software platform that has worked with roughly 300 founders, sixteen months in.
Here are the things she says she’s learned: the product has become the easy ten percent, and the other ninety is selling, distribution, and knowing what to double down on.
Here are 5 take aways from Nomiki
1. The product is about ten percent of the business.
For a long time the hard part of starting a company was making the thing exist. That constraint is has basically been removed now, and the rest of building the business became even harder. Most founders find out the hard way after six months during a launch, when the product works and almost nobody is using it.
Nomiki spends her days with founders at exactly that stage, and she has watched the same misread happen over and over.
“People are illusioned with building a product equals building a business, and it’s simply not the same thing. The product is like 10% of the business.”
AI “is not lying to us,” she says, but it does put “a facade around what it means to build and operate a true growing business.” Drumming up some prompts and creating an interface really is easy now. The part where you find customers, serve them, and run the operation underneath is where the company gets made.
Easier building means more people building, which means more noise between you and the same customer. As she puts it, “the building might have become easier, but everything else has actually gotten ten times harder.” Distribution was always challenge and now with a noisier market, it’s more crucial.
To Coach yourself:
Look at where your hours actually went last week:
What share went to the product itself, and what share went to selling, serving, and operating?
How can you prioritize based on the goals of the business and not just goals of building a product?
2. Solve it today with what is already in front of you.
When we think about building a product, we tend to envision a finished version of the product in our heads: the full platform with every feature working. Holding it there makes starting feel impossible, because a year of work sits between where you are and the version you might be picturing in your head.
Nomiki had a call with five or six founders stuck in exactly that gap. One of them wanted to build a whole application. Her answer was much smaller than the question.
“Why don’t you just start with a WhatsApp group with 10 people and just see if that works?”
Use the tools you already have today to solve for the problem to see how invested your users are in a solution. If it works, “then you can be like, all right, hey, we’re actually building a place for this,” and the building starts from evidence. She turns this into a question she puts to every founder she works with: “Look right in front of you. If you could solve it today, right in front of you, with the tools you have at your disposal, what would you do? Start there.”
She also names the trap waiting on the other side. With every tool available, “you can build into an abyss and create this fancy thing,” and lose the core intent somewhere in the process. What makes people buy, in her experience, is “a feeling of relief that they’ve been able to offload something.” That feeling comes from one thing that works.
To Coach yourself:
What is the smallest piece of it you could put in front of ten real people this week, using only what you already have?
What would you need to see from them to know the rest is worth building?
What are you afraid that test would tell you?
3. Selling is a different skill from building, and it is the hardest one.
Most of building a company happens where nobody can see it. You can write the code, redo the pricing page, rebuild the onboarding, all of it in private, at your own pace, on your own terms. Selling ends is where you have to become visible and share what you’ve built with someone.
When I asked Nomiki what her customers keep running into that has no clean solution, she answered before I finished the question.
“Getting customers is the hardest part. Getting that first customer, that first one, and selling is really hard.”
The questions underneath it are the ones founders rarely say out loud. “How do I get them to believe that I can help? And then how do I have the confidence that I can actually help?” The moment you sell, “you have to literally put your life’s work, your work into someone else’s hands and convince them that it can provide value.”
What she offers is a reframe of what a sale even is: “Sales is relationship driven. It’s not transactional.” The B2B licensing deal she is closing now with a venture studio started more than a year ago, while they watched what she was building from a distance. On the automated outreach filling every founder’s inbox, her verdict is four words: “people buy from people.” Building is a skill you can practice alone. Selling is a skill you can only practice in front of someone.
To Coach yourself:
How are you building relationships with your potential customers today?
How are you communicating what you can help with and why they should work with you?
What is the one problem you solve for your customers? Is this clear to them through your pitch, content, and communication?
4. Distribution is the job no tool will do for you.
Every founder eventually discovers that the market does not come looking. The tools that made building fast did nothing for the part where a stranger has to hear about you, believe you, and decide.
Nomiki built her own distribution through founder-led content, and she is blunt about why most founders skip it.
“Don’t be lazy. Don’t rely on these tools to actually solve your problem, because they don’t solve the problem of distribution.”
Her case is that the traditional channels are diluting as fast as the tools improve. “If you think about cold outbound emails, everyone’s using AI. They want human interaction now.” The arithmetic she works with is long: “the amount of touch points it takes to go from I just learned of this person to sales is long. It’s hundreds of touch points and months of time.” Which leaves the founder’s own visibility, perspective, and point of view as the channel that still moves.
What stops most people is the first stretch, where you are bad at it in public. She is direct about that too: “you have to suck. No one started being amazing at this.” She started with no experience and no fallback, calls content her life raft, and still describes her own output as word vomit onto the camera. The thing that gets you through is volume. “If you’re consistent and you do it often, you’ll get over yourself a little bit faster.” Getting over yourself is the actual prerequisite, and reps are the only route to it.
To Coach yourself:
Who would need to know about you for this to work, and what would they need to hear to trust you?
What perspective do you hold that you have been keeping to yourself because you are not sure it will land?
How can you start today? What’s the smallest step forward you could take in building your distribution channels?
5. Pushing through the signal benefits no one.
Hustle culture and the backlash against it both hand you the same kind of thing: a rule about how hard to work, set by somebody else. The founders who last seem to run on something more specific, a read on their own state, taken often enough to act on.
Nomiki takes a position here that does not sit comfortably in either camp.
“I am pro hustle. I think you have to hustle to build anything great in life. If you don’t, you’re just gonna be mediocre. I stand by that. Do I think that you should do it to the point of burnout because you think that’s how you’re going to win? No.”
What holds those two halves together is self-awareness, which she describes as the piece most founders are missing. “They’re not listening to their signals to be like, I have to make a different decision before I come back. They don’t know how to put the fork in the road themselves.” On the morning we recorded, she had woken up feeling sick, dropped her kids at school, came home, and slept until 9:30. She considered rescheduling with me. She took a shower, made coffee, drove a cup over to her sister-in-law, and came back to her desk feeling much better.
Her question for anyone about to push through is this: “Most people will try to hustle through those feelings. What benefit does that have for you, your family, your business, your customers? That doesn’t benefit anyone.” It fits the larger shift she has made. She used to put founders who raised millions on a pedestal, “the creme de la creme,” and years and life experience moved her somewhere else: “I realize that that’s not success.” You set the scoreboard, and you set the hour you stop.
To Coach yourself:
Think back to the last time your body or your mood told you something and you worked straight through it.
What did that cost, and what did it buy?
What is the signal you are best at ignoring? The next time it shows up this week, what would listening to it actually look like?
Resources Nomiki mentioned
Theanna, her community-and-software platform for women founders, now being rebuilt into a guided journey from roadmap to community.
Obsidian, her example of how far a very small team can go. She raised it while making the case that solo and near-solo companies are about to get much more common.
Wispr Flow, the voice-to-text tool she named as a case where the AI feature genuinely is the product.
Claude Code, what she uses to build, right up to the growth point where she decided she should stop being the engineer.
Slack, her entire task system. She messages herself the list and treats it as the check mark.
Leaving you with this question: If the product is only ten percent, what is the ninety you have been putting off? Share it with me.
If anything in this article resonated with you, share it with one more person that could also use these insights.
Ways to work with me
I’m Dar Patel, an ICF-certified executive coach (PCC), I have worked with founders and executives, and am the writer behind The Inner Game, the weekly newsletter of Little Pursuits.
My goal is to support founders, executives, and individuals doing one of the hardest things we can do: build and scale something from the ground up.
1:1 executive coaching: Book a 30-minute discovery call.
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Watch the full episode here
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