(01) Entrepreneur

Jonathan Endicott, entrepreneur.

Jonathan Endicott, full name Jonathan Weston Endicott, is an entrepreneur. This page sets out how he thinks about building a business: what he looks for, how he decides and what he refuses to do. It does not list his ventures. It describes the operating logic behind them.

Start with the problem, not the product

Most failed ventures do not die from bad execution. They die from building something nobody urgently needed. Jonathan Endicott's first filter is simple: is the problem painful, frequent and already costing someone time or money? If people are not improvising clumsy workarounds today, a polished solution tomorrow will rarely change their behaviour. Real demand shows up as friction before it shows up as revenue.

That means talking to customers before writing a business plan. A plan is a forecast. A conversation is evidence. The entrepreneur's job in the early stage is to swap assumptions for evidence as quickly and cheaply as possible.

Speed on reversible decisions, patience on irreversible ones

Not every decision deserves the same care. Pricing tests, landing pages, outreach scripts and small product changes can all be undone, so they should be made fast and corrected faster. Hiring, partnerships, equity and brand positioning are harder to reverse, and they deserve slower, quieter thought.

Founders get into trouble when they reverse this: they agonise over a button colour and rush a partnership. Jonathan sorts decisions by how easily they can be undone before deciding how long to spend on them.

Distribution is part of the product

A product nobody hears about is a hobby. Jonathan Weston Endicott treats distribution as a design problem from day one: where do the right customers already gather, what do they trust, and what would make them tell someone else? Channels, partnerships and content are not marketing afterthoughts. They are structural choices that shape what the product should be.

This is also why he writes in public. Clear writing builds trust before a sales conversation starts, and it compounds: an essay published once keeps working for years.

Incentives explain outcomes

When a team, a market or a partnership behaves strangely, the explanation is usually in the incentives. People respond to how they are measured and rewarded far more reliably than to mission statements. Designing good incentives for customers, partners and collaborators is one of the highest-leverage things an entrepreneur can do, and one of the most neglected.

Subtract before you add

Every new feature, product line or initiative carries a hidden cost: maintenance, attention, complexity and the opportunity cost of what was not done instead. Before adding something, Jonathan asks what can be removed. Focus is not a slogan. It is the daily discipline of saying no to good ideas so the important one gets done properly.

Compounding over spikes

Spikes of attention feel like progress but rarely last. Compounding systems do: a reputation for delivering, a body of public work, a repeatable sales motion, relationships that deepen over time. Jonathan Endicott favours moves that make the next move easier, even when they look slower in the short term.

Start before you're ready

The central idea in his writing applies directly to business. Waiting for certainty is a decision too, and usually an expensive one. Markets move, windows close and the knowledge needed to succeed mostly arrives through doing the work. The answer is not recklessness. It is small, deliberate starts that produce feedback, followed by honest adjustment.

He develops that argument in the essay "Start Before You're Ready", available on Medium and Substack.

What this looks like in practice

In practice, the approach is unglamorous. Define the problem in one sentence. Find the people who feel it most. Ship the smallest version that tests the core assumption. Measure what people do, not what they say. Keep what works, cut what does not, and repeat with slightly more ambition each cycle. Over time, that loop builds both the business and the judgment of the person running it.

That is the entrepreneurial philosophy of Jonathan Endicott: evidence over opinion, focus over breadth, and momentum over the perfect plan.

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