616: (Solo) 5 Honest Business Lessons I’m Taking Into 2026

Hey, founder fam. I want to talk to you about something super exciting. We're officially partnered with Omnisend, the email marketing and SMS platform built specifically for ecommerce founders. We've been recommending Omnisend to founder students for a while now because it just works. Whether you're launching your first store or you're scaling to 7 figures, it really helps you automate your marketing and get real results. Did you know on average, Omnisend customers make $68 for every $1 they spend, which is an insanely good return on investment? And because you're part of the founder community, you get 50% off your first three months with the code founder 50. Just head to omnisend.com/founder without the e to get started. Alright? Now let's jump back into the show. Hey, guys. Nathan here. Welcome back to another solo episode. Let's be honest. 2025 has been one of the most eye opening years in business for me. You know, whether you're building your first product or you're scaling, I think it's important to share real lessons, not just a highlight reel. So today, I just wanna really talk to you about, like, the five biggest lessons that I've learned this year and kind of my reflections. I love that Hamozi does his end of year reflections. I'm trying to kinda take a bit off that. So some of these are strategic, some are personal, but all of them have moved the needle for me in a massive way. So So let's jump in. Hear the stories. Learn the proven methods and accelerate your growth and future through entrepreneurship. Welcome to the founder podcast with Nathan Chen. The first one that hit me hard more than ever is, I found out, if you don't have repeat customers, you don't have a business. You have a promotion. And if you don't build a repeat business, you're just renting growth. And I was reminded of this by the conversation I had with John Paul, our good friend, JP. He's the founder of Paul Mitchell Systems and Patron Tequila, and he said something to me so powerful. He said the real money is in the second sale. Alright? And I want you to imagine when you're building your business, imagine if your business, on the first day of every month, you didn't even need one new customer to be profitable. That's what he built with both of his companies. Right? It's all about the repeat business. And you can have the best marketing funnel in the world, but if you're not building something people come back for, it's a leaky bucket. But now every product, every campaign, even the content we build is run through one lens. Does this help build a long term customer relationship or is it a spike? And that's what I'm thinking about. That's how I'm looking at our business model. That's how I'm looking at our products. That's how I'm looking at everything we're doing. Our next one, AI and automation …