The sentence your customer says that you would never say: that's the one worth Millions $$

Today's Space was special.

I brought on Riley — someone who's helped startups generate $1.3 million collectively, failed five of his own startups before cracking the code, and has been in rooms with people like Steve Ballmer.

He's not a theorist. He's a practitioner who bled for these lessons.

The topic: First Dollar to First System. Two phases every builder has to go through.

Riley taught Phase 1 — how you actually get someone to pay you.

I taught Phase 2 — what happens after the first dollar, and why most people hit a wall there.

Here's what we learned.

43% of startups fail because they build something nobody wants. (Riley opened with this.)

Nearly half. And the shocking part — this number hasn't improved despite every free course, masterclass, and AI tool available in 2026. People are making the exact same mistakes Riley made 15 years ago, when TikTok didn't exist, LinkedIn was just a job board, and YouTube was barely born.

Why? Three compounding mistakes.

• They start from an idea instead of a problem.

• An idea lives in your head and convinces you it's right.

• A problem lives in the market and people will pay to solve it.

Then they build in the dark.

Riley's consulting example from last week:

3 founders, 13 months of building, $250,000 burned. Zero customers. Zero users.

Then they never validate with real money. Likes, comments, follows — none of that counts. Someone handing you their credit card counts.

The navigate interview — the thing most builders skip.

Riley's method for finding what to build: sit down with a potential customer for 30 to 60 minutes. You talk 20% of the time. They talk 80%.

You ask about four things: desires, frustrations, pain, and dreams. And you dig deeper on every single answer. Not surface level. You keep going until you hit something surprising.

The goal isn't to pitch. The goal is to collect what Riley calls verbatims — the exact sentences people use to describe their problems, in their words, not yours.

This is where the real gold is.

Riley demonstrated this live in the Space.

Jay, one of our listeners, came on stage and said: "I feel like I'm selling myself when I have to do marketing."

And Riley stopped everything.

He said — if I wanted to create an offer for people like Jay, I would write content that says: "If you feel like you're selling yourself when you do marketing, I can help." Then he asked Jay: "Would you click on that?"

Jay said yes immediately.

That's the verbatim goldmine.

Riley didn't invent a clever hook. He used Jay's exact words back to him. Behind Jay, there's a forest of Jays — thousands of introverted builders who feel the same way but would never describe it the way a marketer would.

The sentence your customer says that you would never say — that's the one worth millions.

Jay's marketing trauma — and the reframe that changed everything.

Jay's backstory matters. His first job was timeshare sales. Hardcore, script-reading, high-pressure selling. As an introvert, it traumatized him. From that point forward, marketing and sales became the same word in his brain. Both meant manipulation.

He said: "I know what I would have to do. I just refuse to do it."

Riley stripped it down to basics.

"Forget the word marketing. Forget the word sales. You have a product that can help people. Those people exist. But they don't know your product exists. What would you do?"

Jay: "Tell people about it."

Riley: "That's what marketing is. It's telling people something exists. That's all it is."

Jay had been carrying timeshare trauma for years, conflating informing with manipulating. One reframe in a live Space cracked it open.

If you're reading this and you feel like Jay — like marketing means selling your soul — sit with Riley's reframe. Marketing isn't convincing someone to buy what they don't need. It's telling someone who already has the problem that a solution exists.

Simon's DJ visualization tool — the pitch correction.

Simon builds web-based visualization software for DJs and musicians. When Riley asked him to describe it, Simon said: "It's a visualization tool that works on the web instead of desktop."

Riley stopped him immediately. "You started from the feature. That's the classic mistake. You lost me. I don't know what problem you're solving or who you're solving it for. Redo your pitch."

After some back and forth, Riley reframed it for him.

"What you're doing is saving time and mental space to DJs when they prepare for a show. Ask them: how long does it take you to set up visuals? Two hours? What's your hourly rate? $500? So my solution saves you $1,000 per show."

That's value-based pricing versus feature pricing. Simon was saying "it's a visualization tool." Riley turned it into "it saves DJs $1,000 per show." Same product. Completely different conversation.

You're not selling features. You're selling the gap between where someone is and where they want to be.

The live sales close — what actually happens when someone says "I need to think about it."

Riley ran a live roleplay. He pitched a solution at $2,000. The customer said the classic objection: "I need to think about it."

Most builders panic here or back off. Riley leaned in.

"When you say you need to think about it — what specifically do you need to think about?"

The real objection surfaced: the customer had been burned before. They bought a solution from someone else, it didn't work, they lost money, and they had to explain the failure to their co-founder.

That's not a price objection. That's a trust wound.

Riley designed a guarantee on the spot: 14-day trial, 100% refundable, one follow-up call to check in. The customer agreed.

The lesson: objections are blessings. They tell you exactly what the person needs to hear in order to say yes. Most builders treat objections as rejection. Skilled sellers treat them as navigation — dig into the real objection, address it, and close.

Phase 2 — what happens after the first dollar.

This is where I took over. Because making your first sale is not the hard part. Keeping the business running after the sale is.

Three walls hit you almost immediately.

Wall 1: You become the delivery bottleneck. Every client needs you personally. You can't delegate because nothing is documented. You're doing everything from onboarding to delivery to support.

Wall 2: You can't take a day off. The business stops when you stop. There's no system running while you sleep. If you get sick, nobody gets served.

Wall 3: You can't scale. Even if demand increases, your capacity doesn't. You're doing the same manual work for every client.

I shared the BCG study that changed how I think about this. 800 consultants at Boston Consulting Group tested two modes of working with AI.

Centaur mode: the human decides what to delegate and what to keep. They maintain judgment. They use AI as a tool for specific tasks they've identified.

Cyborg mode: the human and AI are fully intertwined in everything. AI touches every step. No clear boundary between human judgment and AI execution.

Result: consultants were 37% faster with AI. But on tasks that fell outside AI's reliable range, the Cyborg users performed worse than people using no AI at all.

The takeaway for solopreneurs: don't hand everything to AI and hope it works. Start by documenting what you do.

Categorize your tasks — what only you can do, what AI can assist with, and what AI can handle entirely. Then systematize one category at a time.

That's the difference between Phase 1 and Phase 2.

Phase 1 is messy, manual, human. Phase 2 is where you build the system that frees you from the mess.

If you missed this Space, the recording is live on X. We go deep — nearly four hours of live teaching, real coaching, and real objection handling.

And if you're sitting on knowledge you haven't turned into income yet — the kind of expertise that lives in your head but doesn't show up in your bank account — that's exactly what the 2-Week Operating System Sprint is built for.

DM me on X if you want the details.

Tomorrow, 9:30 AM IST. Same place.

— Vaibhav