Jeff Bezos did not set out to become the king of home-delivered paperback books. 

But we're at a point in history when an entire generation knows Amazon only as the dominant player in e-commerce, and doesn't remember the time when Amazon was that scrappy little startup that pioneered the shipping of words-on-paper to your door.

I can assure you, that was an amazing innovation at the time.

Today, when you think of Amazon, you think of it as the place to get everything you need – right now. But it wasn't always this way. At one point, Bezos had his mind fully focused on books. Everything that came later was the result of a startup strategy of thinking big and acting small. 

I'll use Amazon as the late-stage example for using the same think-big-act-small strategy – like a cake I baked earlier to show you the gorgeous final product. And I'll use two of my own startup experiences to show you the way.

From Books to Those Little Creamer Cups

So when I sat down to write this article, I had just ordered coffee pods and those little creamer cups (an indulgence) on Prime, and they arrived at my door less than 90 minutes later – before I finished my first draft. 

I can picture Jeff, circa 1994, thinking, "Joe is writing. He needs his coffee. Not in five days or even two days. He needs it now. That's how I'm going to make him and everyone else a customer for life. It's worth the extra spend to make it happen."

It most definitely cost Amazon more money to fulfill my order than I paid, and it's not a mistake, and it's not random loss leadership. I ordered golf gloves too (Amazon does everything) and those won't be here until tomorrow. But the coffee and the creamer got here right now. 

What blows my mind is the creamer cups. That's next-level data gathering and planning. 

"Coffee? Right now? We can do that. But doesn't he take it with a little splash of cream?" 

This is a micro example of the end result of a company strategy that made the company massively successful by thinking big and acting big. 

And Amazon is far from finished when it comes to thinking big. The same strategic mindset that brought about two-day shipping, Amazon Web Services, and the Delivery Service Partner program is foraging its way into the NFL on Prime Video, brick-and-mortar groceries, health care, and allegedly even mobile phone service (again).

How does this apply to you? To answer that, we go back to 1994 and delivering books – because they were flat and relatively standardized to ship, and the margins were amazing.

And to think big and act big, Amazon first had to act small. Then perfect everything.

Washing Cars to Mobile Auto Repair

So if Amazon is the pre-baked cake, this is the growth stage example. 

In 2017, Automated Insights, an NLG tech startup I had sunk seven years and all of my brains and guts into, was almost three years past having been successfully acquired by a private equity firm. My partner, the founder, had left some months prior, and the writing was kind of on the wall for me to figure out my next thing.

I decided to go wash cars.

Scot Wingo, the former founder and CEO of Channel Advisor, a company that aggregated e-commerce data that he had taken public, had been on our board through our acquisition. He had co-founded Spiffy a couple years earlier, a mobile car wash and detail company. 

I'd known Scot for about 15 years at that point, so he was the first person I sat down with to brainstorm my options. By the end of that meeting, I knew that washing cars was the books and CDs of mobile service, and I didn't want to do anything else.

In 2017, Spiffy had a couple of dozen vans and maybe 50 mobile-wash technicians, offering service in four cities. But we were collecting data, perfecting the process, building out our own vans and software. We were using some of the same strategies Amazon used when they were selling books – thinking big, acting small, and perfecting the process. 

In 2018, we started offering oil changes, then we started working with fleets, and then we added on tires, brakes, and other light repairs. Today, we're no longer mobile car wash, we're "mobile vehicle care and maintenance," in 50 cities, with 500 techs, and always hiring. 

Startup Education and Advisement Sucks

To be fair, the startup capital costs to get into the automotive space are extremely high. Spiffy has raised over $30 million to get to where we are today. 

So yeah, that's not a path most entrepreneurs can take. What about the early stagers?

Spiffy isn't my first rodeo. In fact, I've founded or been ground floor at over a dozen startups, including a few founded and funded out of my own pocket, for less than $1,000 in startup costs. 

Not long after my first startup success, over 20 years ago, I started advising other founders, because the path I had to walk was difficult and risky and stressful and the education and advice I had received was awful. 

Soon, I was being offered obscene amounts of money to advise growth-stage and late-stage startups. I was still advising early-stagers, who were mostly broke, and still writing articles like these to put out as much free, real, tactical startup advice and education as I could. 

Then my free time started drying up, and the opportunity cost of doing "free and cheap" started to compound. It occurred to me that there was a huge space between free advice, which helps a lot of people a little bit, and super-expensive paid advice, which helps a couple of people quite a lot. 

I founded Teaching Startup to bridge that gap, recruiting experienced entrepreneurs to answer questions from other entrepreneurs (experienced or not), via email. I literally started the whole thing on Mailchimp, using that platform as the product, the CRM, the subscription model – everything but the credit card swipe for the paltry $10 a month I was asking. 

And then it blew up, in a good way. I was told to go edtech, to use video consultations, to do seminars and webinars, to write books. In other words, to act big now that I was thinking big. 

But three years in, I'm still perfecting the process. I'm not trying to be the next Gary Vee or one of those people who can fill hotel ballrooms or convention centers with motivational goodness. I'm trying to make more and better entrepreneurs, as many as I can. It's boring. It's sluggish. It's not "sexy."

But neither is delivering books. 

I'm thinking big, trying to figure out how to "get people their coffee right now" by making the startup founding and leading process less painful, less expensive, and more available. But I'm acting small, sticking to email and content, real answers, and slow growth to get me to a much larger goal. 

This is how you build it like Bezos. Whether you raise millions of dollars for the latest flavor of AI technology or customize bikes in your backyard, you should be thinking big, acting small, and perfecting the process. 

 

Inc