Stop Building a Business Like a Situationship: Entrepreneurship Basics That Actually Matter
By Nina — I'm the friend who tells you what you need to hear about your situationship. ·
Look, I’ve spent the better part of the last year watching my friends—and honestly, myself—treat their side hustles and startup ideas exactly like they treat the guy they’re seeing on Hinge. They’re putting in all the emotional labor, they’re waiting for a ‘text back’ (read: a sale or a sign of validation), and they’re terrified to DTR (Define The Revenue).
If your business plan looks like a desperate manifesto to prove you’re ‘enough’ for the market, we need to talk. Entrepreneurship isn’t a romantic comedy where everything falls into place because you worked really hard and had a vision board. It’s a series of tactical decisions. Let’s cut the fluff and get into the actual entrepreneurship basics you need to stop ignoring.
Stop Waiting for ‘The Spark’ and Start Solving a Headache
Everyone wants to start a business based on their ‘passion.’ I love that for you, I really do. But passion is fleeting, like a summer fling in the Lower East Side. If you want a business that lasts, you need to find a problem that people are actually annoyed enough to pay to solve.
I see so many people spending months designing a logo for a service that nobody asked for. Stop. If you’re building something, ask yourself: What is the specific, annoying, recurring problem my customer has, and why does my solution make their life objectively easier? If you can’t answer that in two sentences, you don’t have a business; you have a hobby that’s going to cost you a lot of money and give you nothing but anxiety.
Stop Over-Investing Before You’ve Even Gone on a Date
In dating, we call this ‘future-tripping’—talking about your imaginary wedding before the second date. In business, this is buying a $5,000 course, hiring a branding agency, and filing for an LLC before you’ve made a single dollar.
My advice? Keep it lean. Validate your idea with the absolute minimum amount of effort. Can you sell your service via a Google Doc and a Venmo link? Do it. If you can’t get one person to pay you for your idea in its roughest form, a fancy website isn’t going to save you. Validate the demand first, then spend the money. Don’t try to buy success with aesthetics.
Stop Ghosting Your Finances
I know, looking at spreadsheets gives you the same level of dread as checking your bank account after a messy weekend. But you cannot be an entrepreneur if you’re financially illiterate. You need to know your numbers. What is your cost of acquisition? What is your profit margin? If you’re just ‘hoping it works out,’ you’re not a business owner; you’re a gambler.
Open a business bank account. Keep your personal and professional money separate. If you can’t look at your P&L statement without wanting to delete your life, you need to either learn how to read it or hire someone who can. Treating your finances like a ‘situationship’—where you just don’t bring up the hard stuff—is exactly how you end up broke and burnt out.
Stop Seeking Validation from the Wrong People
When I broke up with my ex, I realized I’d been asking the wrong people for advice—people who wanted me to stay ‘comfortable’ rather than people who wanted me to grow. Your friends and family are going to be biased. They either want to protect you (so they’ll tell you it’s too risky) or they want to be supportive (so they’ll tell you your bad idea is ‘so cool’).
Ignore them. Go find your actual customers. The only validation that counts is a transaction. When someone swipes their card, your idea is validated. Everything else is just noise. You don’t need a cheering section; you need a market that needs what you’re selling.
The Reality Check on ‘The Hustle’
I’ve written about this before, but it bears repeating: stop romanticizing the grind. Entrepreneurship isn’t about pulling all-nighters or drinking cold brew until your heart palpitates. It’s about building sustainable systems. If your business requires you to be a martyr to stay afloat, you’ve built a cage, not a career.
Build processes. Automate the boring stuff. Document your workflows. When you take the emotion out of the daily operations—when you stop treating every customer complaint like a personal rejection—you free up your brain to actually strategize.
Listen, building something from scratch is hard, and it’s going to trigger every insecurity you have. It’s going to feel personal when things go wrong. But you’re not a fragile thing—you’re capable of handling the feedback, the pivots, and the long road ahead. Just stop trying to make it a fairytale and start making it a business.
Are you currently building something that’s actually a business, or are you just busy playing house with an idea? If you’re ready for some real talk on where you’re stuck, you know where to find me. Let’s grab a coffee and actually map this out.