(Especially When You’re Building as a Quiet, Neurodivergent, or Capacity-Conscious Creator)
There’s a question I keep coming back to—both for myself and for the creatives I work with:
What does a business actually need to function?
Not to impress.
Not to scale.
Not to hit six figures by next Thursday.
But to function—in the true sense of the word: to work, to hold, to support, and to give something back without draining the person who built it.
It’s an especially important question for solo business owners who identify as introverted, neurodivergent, or chronically low-capacity. What gets sold as “how to run a business” is often just how to exhaust yourself fast.
The traditional answers are usually loud and complex, optimized for someone with more time, energy, and adrenaline than most of us have.
But when you peel away the noise, the truth is a lot of that hoola is unnecessary.
At the core, every business, regardless of niche, needs just six things to function. These six things make up a solid foundation when aligned with the founder. What I mean by that is anyone could create a plan that includes all 6 pieces. However, if each piece doesn’t consider the person (or people) that will ensure each piece functions, all that’s been accomplished is a business model design that is great for someone but not necessarily the person running the business.
That’s something that often gets missed during the enthusiasm of starting a business (but it’s always the thing that ensures a business doesn’t get off the ground, eventually folds, or has the founder walking away from entrepreneurship for good).
While the 6 core pieces may seem deceptively simple on the surface and even straightforward on paper, they can take time to sort out. For my own ventures and businesses I’ve been asked to audit, these 6 pieces are a quick litmus test for what type of foundation the whole business (or nonprofit) is resting on.
Let’s walk through them.
1. Something to Sell
A clear offer people can say yes to.
This sounds obvious, but many solo business owners skip it entirely. We pour ourselves into content, community-building, or education without ever deciding exactly what we’re inviting people to pay for.
And if we have something to sell, we’re often unsure how to describe it, price it, or explain its value without spiralling into imposter syndrome, overwhelm, or decision fatigue.
At its most functional, “something to sell” means:
- You have a specific offer.
- You can explain it simply.
- You know what problem it solves or what desire it supports.
- You’ve made peace with the energy and capacity it takes to deliver it.
Tara McMullin emphasizes that having a clear value proposition is essential, but it’s most effective when shaped by understanding your customer’s perspective rather than relying solely on your assumptions. Your offer doesn’t need to be extravagant or completely unique; what matters is that it genuinely addresses someone’s needs and aligns with what you can authentically provide.
It’s also okay to start small. One offer. One problem. One way to help. Naomi Dunford would call that “minimalist business” thinking—focusing on what truly moves the needle instead of building out a whole empire before you’ve tested what works.
So if you’re stuck here, ask:
What’s the simplest, most helpful thing I can offer that I’d still choose to do even on a bad day?
That’s where your business starts.
2. Someone to Sell It To
A specific group of people you understand and want to help.
A business needs an audience, but not in the influencer sense. You don’t need to be liked by thousands. You need a right-fit group of people who see what you do and say, “Yes. That’s for me.”
Seth Godin calls this the “smallest viable audience”—a counter to the idea that bigger is always better. And he’s right: if you focus on resonating deeply with a few, your work becomes more impactful (and more sustainable) than trying to reach everyone.
This piece isn’t just about market research. It’s about care. It’s about being genuinely curious about the people you’re trying to help. As Sarah R. Painter puts it, connection and empathy can fuel clarity and momentum when strategy alone stalls.
Ask yourself:
- Who am I building this for?
- What are they navigating or searching for?
- Why do I care?
This is less about avatars and more about alignment. It’s also one of the reasons so many neurodivergent and chronically ill entrepreneurs build businesses around lived experience—it’s not just relatable, it’s rooted in genuine empathy.
3. A Way to Reach Them
A consistent, doable method for helping people find out you exist.
This is the piece that usually gets overcomplicated, especially for introverts or creatives who’ve been told that visibility requires constant performance.
You don’t need to post every day. You don’t need to be everywhere. You don’t need to dance on Instagram to prove you have a business.
What you do need is a way for the right people to find you reliably.
For some, that might be through content: long-form blog posts that build trust over time, SEO that helps right-fit readers discover you months or years after you’ve written something, or newsletters that gently nurture your audience behind the scenes. If writing or teaching feels natural, building an evergreen content system can make your marketing feel lighter, slower-paced, and more sustainable over time. Essentially, you’re building assets, not feeding the algorithm.
But content creation isn’t the only way to be visible.
Relational marketing may be a better fit if writing regularly feels impossible or showing up online feels draining. That could mean quiet conversations behind the scenes, word-of-mouth referrals, small group collaborations, thoughtful outreach, or simply being part of the communities where your people already spend time. It’s not about traffic—it’s about building trust with folks you genuinely want to connect with. And trust often spreads person to person.
The format doesn’t matter as much as the function. Your visibility method should:
- Be something you can do consistently (not constantly)
- Feel aligned with how you naturally connect
- Create clear, low-friction pathways back to your offers
What matters most is that you have some way to be findable—and that the method you choose respects your energy, your strengths, and your capacity.
So instead of asking, “Where should I show up this week?” try:
- How do I naturally connect with others?
- What method of visibility feels doable in this season?
- If someone found me today—or six months from now—would they know how to take the next step?
Visibility doesn’t have to be loud to be effective. Whether through traffic to your content or relationships built over one-to-one conversations, quiet, intentional marketing works—especially when it’s based around shared values and interests.
4. A Way to Sell It
A clear path to payment that doesn’t burn you out.
This piece is often ignored or overcomplicated. But the reality is, if someone wants to buy from you, you need a way for them to do that easily.
That could be a sales page, an Etsy listing, a one-click checkout, or even a simple email back-and-forth if you don’t need a lot of sales to meet your goals. What matters most is that the process is clear, works for you and your customer, and doesn’t require constant real-time energy.
As Denise Duffield-Thomas and Leonie Dawson (two neurodivergent business rebels I love) emphasize, ease and boundaries are non-negotiable in your sales systems. You can design a business that doesn’t require you to be “on” or working in real time to make money.
Ask yourself:
- Can someone say yes without needing to book a call?
- Is your sales page (or proposal, or checkout flow) doing the heavy lifting for you?
- Do you feel confident describing the value of your offer, or does that still feel murky?
If you haven’t tweaked or optimized your sales process, that’s okay. But your business does need some way for someone to say “I’m in” without friction.
5. A Way to Deliver It
A delivery method that works with your energy and communicates clear expectations.
Once someone buys, the business isn’t done. You need to fulfill the promise you made and do it without draining yourself or unnecessary drama.
So many founders run into trouble here: they’ve built an offer they can’t sustainably deliver. Maybe it’s too dependent on live interaction, or it requires energy or time they just don’t have.
The last thing we want to do is put in all the hard work to build a business only to find ourselves in a position we would have never agreed to if it were a job working for someone else.
What would it say if you were to write a job posting for what you’re doing right now in your business? What would it specifically say about the delivery stage of the sales process? Would it have too many deliverables, unclear expectations, or workdays that ask more than you can give?
This is a common scenario for solopreneurs and indie business owners. I’ve seen it happen with so many of my peers and experienced it myself. We set out to have time freedom, only to find ourselves working more than we do for someone else. Left unchecked, this leads to burnout and resentment toward the very thing we created. Ouch!
That’s why this piece is about more than logistics. It’s about clarity, boundaries, and designing your business model with the customer and the founder’s experience in mind.
Questions to consider:
- Is your delivery method sustainable (especially on low-capacity weeks)?
- Do your clients or customers know what to expect and when?
- Have you built in the boundaries (scope, timing, support windows) you need to protect your energy?
You don’t have to deliver fast. As the saying goes, you can only have 2: cheap, fast, or easy. Which two will you pick? I know myself well enough to know that fast delivery or turnaround needs careful consideration if the execution or delivery depends on me. Speed isn’t in my wheelhouse as a double-sun/moon Taurus unless I’ve systematized the delivery.
For you, this might look different. You know you have this piece figured out when you can deliver your promise to your customers or clients in a clear, consistent way that works well for you and delights your peeps.
6. A Way to Keep It All Going
A business that is sustainable to maintain even when life happens.
This final piece is often the most overlooked. But it’s also the most important if you want your business to last.
Running a business requires more than strategy. It requires capacity. That means rest, resilience, systems, and clarity—not just so you can grow, but so you don’t burn out trying to maintain what you’ve already built.
Those of us living with chronic illness, caregiving responsibilities, or unpredictable mental health (raising my hand on all 3), sustainability has to be baked in—not tacked on.
To check this piece, ask:
- Do you have systems or routines that keep things moving even when your energy dips?
- Do you know where your money is coming from next month?
- Are you earning enough to pay yourself (even a little)?
- Can you take a break without your business crumbling?
This is also where you build in rest, community, and flexibility. The takeaway is that business should support your life—not the other way around.
The overarching question is whether you have founder-fit + the most important nuts and bolts in place in your business.
Plenty of people talk about what a business needs but most skip over the part that matters most: you.
- You are the engine that keeps your business running.
- You decide how much time, energy, and creativity you can sustainably invest.
- You are allowed to build a business around what actually works for your brain, your capacity, and your values.
Founder fit can be the hardest part to sort out – which is why I like to start tackling that first over starting with “ideal customer avatars” or content schedules. The beauty of knowing the six fundational pieces is that once you know what core pieces make up a solid business model, you have free rein to pick the pieces that work for you (aka founder fit!)
The full puzzle can be built a dozen ways using different pieces that service the same function. Essentially, picking a business model that fits you means although there will be work involved, you’re picking the work you want to do, with the people you want to do it with (or for).
If you already have a business, or want to start looking at the types of questions taht need to be anwers to satisfy each core piece of a solid buinsess model, this will help:
If You’re Just Starting Out
You don’t have to build all six pieces at once.
Start with an audit of what you have in place using my DIY audit.
If your audit shows more to work on than you had hoped for, start by asking where the most friction is in your business model right now and investigate what might help.
If you haven’t started a business yet, or want to re-design your business model from the ground up (maybe keeping some parts while figuring out the rest), check out The Strategy Studio.