It's never been easier to create a startup. But making it real, making it into a business requires contorted thinking which can dilute the entrepreneur's true goals. The model for standard businesses used to be simpler. Let's say you were an entrepreneur and wanted to start a gym. You could walk into your local bank with a business plan, put up some collateral and get a loan.

Those businesses today (the successful ones) look more like tech companies and getting a loan isn't enough -- you also need technology expertise, because business has become digital-first. That gym needs a social media heartbeat from day one. Their digital touch points are where most of their customers will check first to consider the value proposition. That gym now has an e-comm store to sell merch, they have fitness classes you can stream online if you're not in person, they have personal trainers, massage therapists that can be booked online, they have content and events. They might even have an app to manage subscriptions and notifications.

Now let's look at entrepreneurs today with software businesses. They have been given standard paths: Raise venture capital to build your MVP while simultaneously validating it and turning it into a profitable business at scale. Or, bootstrap your product by subsisting through friends and family donations, or go through incubators until the business is ready to raise venture capital and scale. If you're independently wealthy you can go straight to paying dev shops to build your product and hire engineers to maintain it until you're ready to raise and scale.

Entrepreneurs have been conditioned to think and execute towards these paths but not all of them should pursue these paths. There are many people today who want to start a business that is profitable, with a regional addressable market, and adds value to the community they reside in.

This is why we started villagers. We wanted to design a crystal clear path for entrepreneurs to build businesses that are not necessarily venture backable, but still successful.

For these entrepreneurs, more than artificial deadlines and forced accountability, they want to focus on progress and know they have support when they need it. More than money, they want their product to exist. They want to design features and services that invigorate their communities, not chase brand new user groups with unrelated business lines.

Does this sound like you? Visit the village, why don't you?