What I Wish I Had Known Before Starting a Business

I am not a business expert. I did not have a mentor who had done it before. I did not have a trust fund or a safety net or a clear roadmap.

What I had was an idea, a business partner I trusted, and a willingness to figure it out as we went.

Bait Dogs Apparel launched in July of 2025. We have learned a lot in the time since. Some of it we figured out on our own. Some of it came from good advice we were smart enough to listen to. Some of it came from stumbling into walls we did not know were there.

This post is my attempt to pass some of that along. Not polished business school wisdom. Just honest stuff from someone who is still in the middle of it.

It Is All Going to Take Longer Than You Think

If there is one thing I could go back and tell myself the day before we launched, it is this.

Be patient. Everything is going to take way longer than you think.

The milestones you imagined hitting in month three will come in month nine. The clarity you thought you would have by now will still be a work in progress. The audience you pictured having will take longer to build than any entrepreneur content on the internet will prepare you for.

This is not a reason not to start. It is just the truth about what you are getting into.

And while you are at it, listen to all the advice you get. Even the advice that sounds bad. You do not have to implement all of it. In fact you really should ignore some of it in the long run. But do not dismiss anything before you have actually heard it out. Some of the best nudges we got came from directions we almost did not listen to.

You Cannot See Your Own Brand Clearly

One of the hardest things about building something from scratch is that you cannot look at it with fresh eyes.

I know what Bait Dogs stands for. I know what Bite Back means. I came up with all of it. To me it has always been crystal clear.

What I could not see was whether it was clear to anyone else.

You know too much. You have too much context. You cannot unsee what you built or unknow why you built it. And that makes it genuinely difficult to assess whether someone finding you for the first time has any idea what you are about.

Feedback from other people has been invaluable for this. People pointing out what was and was not landing helped us figure out what needed to be clearer. The content library we have built over the last year has done a lot to close that gap. People can now read ten posts and understand exactly who we are and what we stand for.

But it took time to get there. And we could have been clearer sooner if we had sought that feedback earlier.

Little Baby Businessmen

Jack, my Co-Founder, and I started this thing as two guys with day jobs, a vision, and a lot of things we did not know yet.

We were little baby businessmen working on our Fisher Price laptops and sipping bubbly grape juice from sippy cups. I can forgive us for not knowing everything we know now. We would not have known it beforehand. The only way to learn most of what matters in business is to actually be in business.

The early days were not as fast paced as I imagined. There were stretches where we were not doing a whole lot, still figuring out what the next step was supposed to be. Knowing where you want to end up does not come with a roadmap for getting there. That part you have to build yourself, usually by trial and error, with help from people who are willing to give you a nudge in the right direction.

We were fortunate to have friends and family who did that for us. Accept that help when it comes.

Pick Your People Carefully

Jack and I always had a standing agreement that we would go into business together when the right idea came along. We had tried something in college that never got off the ground but even that experience showed us that our skills complemented each other naturally. He is detail oriented about the things I am not and vice versa. He thinks ahead in areas where I fall short. It just works.

I did not interview him. I just knew before I ever started that I wanted him as a partner.

Our CTO Chad came in a different way. About a month after we launched I ran into him at a family reunion and we ended up talking for about an hour about SEO and digital strategy. Honestly most of what he was saying sounded like Mandarin to me at the time. But it all sounded like great ideas.

For almost a year he would hop on calls and drop nuggets of advice here and there. Then one day Jack and I both called each other with the exact same thought. We should bring him on officially.

Jack handles logistics, operations, and accounting. I handle brand development, messaging, product creation, and marketing. Chad handles our web presence and digital strategy. As an online brand, that third piece was the one we were missing and we did not fully realize it until we had someone who could fill it.

Find people who cover your blind spots. Then actually listen to them.

Marketing Is a Science Not a Magic Trick

When I said I would handle marketing at the start of this, I basically knew nothing about marketing. I understood the vibe we were going for. I had a vision for the look and feel. Beyond that I was flying by the seat of my pants.

What I thought marketing was, someone who just knows exactly what to say to get people interested, turned out to be wrong. Marketing is more scientific and trial based than I ever imagined.

Right now we are testing UGC video ads. A friend and customer of ours named Jenna shot several different hooks, bodies, and calls to action for us. We edited her footage into versions of the same ad with different hooks and tested them against each other to see which kept people watching. Next we test the bodies and then test the calls to action.

It sounds simple when I describe it but it took us a long time to get to a place where we were approaching it this way. We are still figuring out how to communicate most effectively to the people who need to find us.

If you are starting a brand, go in knowing that marketing is something you test and learn, not something you intuit. The sooner you start treating it like an experiment the faster you will figure out what works.

Sell Something You Would Use Yourself

From the very beginning I knew I wanted to sell quality apparel. Even with bigger name brands, quality seems to be going down while prices keep going up. That is the nature of business. Sell the cheapest thing for the most money.

I will not do that.

We went through several potential suppliers before finding the one we use now. I wear our stuff all the time. It is genuinely my favorite clothing I own and yes I am biased but seriously it is good.

If you are going to sell people something you would not use yourself, do not sell it. Sell something you are proud of.

To date we have not had a single quality complaint from a customer. That means something.

Nobody Warns You About the Mental Side

The emotional reality of running a brand is something most business content does not prepare you for.

Learning to create boundaries between work and personal life is harder than it sounds when the business lives on your phone and your laptop and in your head at all times. I am still not perfect at knowing when to stop. I have come close to burning out hard this year.

And there is this weird feeling that happens sometimes. Someone will tell me I am being obsessive and I get that “I am an angsty teenager and my mom does not understand why I need a Cannibal Corpse poster in my bedroom” feeling. The thing is, they are usually right. I am still working on finding that balance.

The other thing nobody warned me about is living on the daily sales rollercoaster. One good day and you feel like you are building something real. One quiet day and the doubt creeps in. Learning to zoom out, to look at month over month trends instead of yesterday versus today, is one of the most important mental shifts I have made. Pan back a little bit and the growth is there. It just does not always feel like it day to day.

Learn to live on the average. The average is usually telling you something more true than any single day is.

Keep It Simple and Keep Overhead Low

Here is some practical advice that I do not think gets said enough in entrepreneur content.

You do not have to go all in and grind sixteen hours a day seven days a week to build something real. That content exists and some people are genuinely built for that. Most people are not and there is no shame in that. You can go slow and steady, keep your overhead low, and get there all the same.

Overhead, for anyone who has not heard the term, is your ongoing indirect expenses. Rent, utilities, subscriptions, recurring costs. If you are not careful these add up and can crush a small business before it ever finds its footing. We have kept ours lean from the beginning and it has made everything significantly less stressful. We are not a few bad sales days away from collapse.

Also form an LLC. Yes you get taxed twice, once as a business and once on the proceeds you receive from it. But it also means that if someone ever sues you they cannot come take your house. That is entry level advice but if nobody told you before now you are welcome.

The Most Important Business Advice I Can Give

When people ask me about starting a brand I always tell them the same thing.

Get to a point where you have three things. A product. A way to sell it. A way to get it to people.

Everything else is fluff.

When we started I wanted t-shirts, hoodies, sweatpants, beanies, hats, lifting straps, gym bags, water bottles. If we had tried to launch with everything on my original wishlist we would probably still be working on getting launched.

Strip away everything that is not essential. Start with the basic structure. From there you can expand because you have something to build from.

You Can Do This

I am nothing special. I am a guy with a day job in data analytics who wanted to build something meaningful and started doing it.

If you have been thinking about starting something, I hope this post makes it feel a little more doable. Because it is doable. It just takes longer than you think, requires more patience than you expect, and teaches you more about yourself than almost anything else you will ever do.

Pull back the curtain a little on whatever you are building. Let people in. Ask for feedback. Listen to advice even when it sounds wrong. Keep your overhead low. Sell something you are proud of.

And then just start.

We are the underdogs. We don't stay down, we bite back.