The Original Idea for Mylance Was a Fool's Errand - Here's What That Cost Me

If you can't say what your business does and who you do it for in one sentence, you don't have a startup. You have a research project wearing a startup costume.

I know that because for the first three years of building Mylance, that's exactly what I had. A research project, a deck, and a lot of ambition. What I didn't have was focus - and that's the same mistake I see fractional executives and consultants make over and over again when they try to build a real business out of their expertise.

Here's what I pitched in January 2020, what I built instead, and the painful lesson it took me years to internalize.

The Original Pitch: "HR for Freelancers"

The original Mylance idea was that independent consultants and high-end freelancers had to handle everything an employer used to handle for them: legal entity setup, financial accounts, legal advice, bookkeeping, taxes, insurance, contracts, expenses. We'd wrap all of it into one monthly subscription and save them a ton of time, money, and headaches.

I had a slide - a real slide, in a real deck - that said: "Once we acquire users through our bookkeeping and tax offering, we'll expand the offering to the other challenges freelancers face." Then I listed them. Legal coverage. Bookkeeping. Expense tracking. Taxes. Proposals and contracts. Insurance. The V2 was demand generation. Coaching to help freelancers find contracts. The list kept going.

Each one of those bullets is a full company. Not a feature. A company. And inside each category, there are already dozens of companies competing for enterprise, SMB, startups, and solo operators. I was, in effect, signing up to build a holding company from scratch with no funding, while solving zero problems deeply.

If you're reading that pitch and waiting for it to go wrong - congratulations, you already see what I didn't.

What I Actually Built (And Kept Building)

In year one, the product that was actually selling was a coaching program that helped people launch and grow their consulting business. Customers had success, then came back asking for help with bookkeeping, invoicing, and taxes. So I built a bookkeeping arm.

Then - fresh off Uber, where I'd seen what technology can do at scale - I decided coaching doesn't scale and bookkeeping barely does. I needed software. So I raised a few hundred thousand dollars, hired a CTO, built a dev team, and started running customer research to figure out what to build.

The answer kept coming back to client acquisition. So we built a custom ZoomInfo-style tool that handed consultants the right 20 target companies and the right 50 people inside them, complete with names, LinkedIn profiles, and emails. Genuinely good software. The problem? Our customers weren't B2B sales reps. They didn't know how to use it.

So we built an agency on top of it to do the outreach for them. Then we learned outbound only works alongside content, so we added content creation services too. Now we had: a coaching program, a bookkeeping business, a community for lead gen, software, an agency, outbound, and content production. All running at the same time. All for "consultants."

The business made money. We were profitable for stretches. It wasn't a failure on the income statement. It was a failure of focus.

The Mistake Hiding Inside the Hustle

Every time a customer asked for something, I added it. Addition felt like progress. I had built things I was proud of, real customers were using them, and I didn't want to cut anything because cutting felt like going backwards.

The addition was the going-backwards. I was solving a million problems at medium depth instead of one problem at extraordinary depth. The moment you do that, you stop being the obvious choice for anyone. The enterprise consultant doesn't want generalist bookkeeping - they want bookkeeping for enterprise consultants. The SMB doesn't want a generic agency - they want one that lives inside their world. Niching down isn't a marketing tactic. It's the entire game.

I had advisors during all of this. Smart, accomplished people I gave equity to and met with monthly. Not one of them told me I was solving too many problems. My read in hindsight: they were senior operators at big companies, or at startups that had already found product-market fit. None of them had built from zero. They couldn't see the failure mode I was inside of, because they'd never lived it.

That's a lesson on its own - be careful who you take advice from in the earliest, messiest stage of a business. Big-company brilliance and zero-to-one brilliance are not the same skill.

What "Starting Over" Actually Looked Like

When AI started reshaping the landscape, I finally admitted what I think I'd known for a while: our solution was good, not great. Customers were happy, not ecstatic. And I'm not interested in running a business where customers are merely happy.

So I cut everything. Back to user interviews. Instead of treating "client acquisition" as the problem, I broke it into pieces and pressure-tested each one. The signal that came through clearly: consultants and fractionals knew LinkedIn mattered, but they didn't know what to post, how to sound authentic, or how to make any of it feel like them.

I built the first version in Notion, Google Sheets, and Zapier. No code. No app. I told customers, "I'll send you a Notion doc each week telling you exactly what to post." They paid $134.50 a month for it - happily - because the problem was solved. Nobody asked for a polished interface. They asked for an outcome.

That experience reshaped how I think about building. The simpler the thing, the better, as long as it solves the problem. Complexity is not a value-add. It's almost always a tax you're paying because you couldn't bring yourself to cut.

The Part I Have to Re-Learn Every Day

If you're a fractional executive or consultant trying to grow, here's what I want you to take from all of this:

The work isn't picking a niche once. The work is staying in it when customers ask you for things outside it. Every "yes" to an adjacent problem is a "no" to the depth that would have made you the obvious choice. I made that trade hundreds of times before I understood what it was costing me.

There's enormous emotional pull toward addition. You built the thing. Real customers use the thing. Cutting feels like betrayal. It isn't. Cutting is how you stop running a research project and start running a company.

If you can't say what your business does and who you do it for in one sentence, the answer isn't more strategy offsites. The answer is to pick. One customer. One problem. Build the smallest thing that solves it. Charge for it. Iterate from there. Everything else, even the things you're proud of, even the things that work a little, is in your way.

I learned this the slow, expensive, ego-bruising way. You don't have to.

Mylance

This article was written by Mylance, the LinkedIn content system built for founders and experts who want consistent, high-quality posts that attract clients. We help you lock in your positioning, clarify your ideal customer, and build a content strategy that actually resonates. Then our system gives you a content calendar, drafts posts in your authentic voice, and keeps you accountable - so you stay visible and attract the right clients while saving hours each week!If you’re ready to grow your presence and pipeline on LinkedIn, sign up at Mylance.co.