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Hi, it's Sharan.

Last week a reader replied to this newsletter. Not with a question. With a complaint.

"Why have you sent me this? I'm not interested in the marketplace business and I'm confused."

So I checked. This person had come to enatega.com, filled in the registration form with their name, email, phone number and business type, and submitted it. A few weeks later an email from Enatega showed up in their inbox, and that was the confusing part.

It didn't make much sense to me either. Everyone on this list got here the same way. You filled in a form and gave me your details.

But the line that stuck with me was "not interested in the marketplace business", because this newsletter was never really about marketplaces. It's about business. Mostly about what it costs to launch something and where founders waste money before the first order comes in. Ownership versus renting is the thread that runs through all of it, because I've watched too many businesses get switched off by a platform they didn't control. Delivery is the example I use since it's what I've done for six years, but the lessons don't stop at food.

What they missed is that I'm not sending this to sell anyone a marketplace. I'm sending it because I'd rather give away what I've learned in one email a week than watch the next founder make the same expensive mistakes.

I'm not sending it to grow the list either. I already get hundreds of queries from people who want the platform, more than I can handle. I've started saying no to projects, and I'd rather have a small list that reads than a big one that doesn't.

And this surprises people, but with all those queries waiting, I still don't sell Enatega to everyone who wants to buy it, budget or not. I take the first call myself, and I'm not on it to check whether you can pay. I'm on it to check whether you can run a marketplace.

I've sold to people with the money who then handed the whole thing to a project manager and never learned the business themselves. The money got spent in the wrong places, and the project died. The budget was never the problem.

If you think this is a cheap clone you can buy and hand off to someone else, and you don't see why the details matter, you're not my customer. I'd rather tell you that here than waste an hour of your time on a call.

Enatega is a brand I plan to be running for a long time, and its reputation rests on how well the operators who buy it run their business. A failed marketplace with our code in it costs me more than any single deal is worth. So however many queries are waiting, I qualify every lead properly before I take their money. Who I sell to matters more to me than how much I sell, and revenue was never the goal of this email or of that first call.

Which is why, after being annoyed for about ten minutes, I decided the reader was right about one thing. Nobody should be on this list who doesn't want to be.

So, one request, and I mean it. If this email isn't useful to you, scroll to the bottom and tap unsubscribe. No hard feelings. You get a quieter inbox and I stop showing up in it.

Same goes if this landed in your spam folder and you only found it by accident. Gmail and Outlook watch how many people on a list open the emails. When a big chunk never opens, the whole list starts drifting into spam, including for the people who read every issue. An unsubscribe from someone who never reads this helps someone who does. And if you do want it, move this email to your primary inbox once. That usually fixes it.

For everyone else, the people who filled in that form because they want to launch something or fix something in a business they already run, nothing changes. One email a week, and as little of your time as I can manage.

Some of this is easier to show than to write, so I've started posting the video side of it on the Enatega Instagram page. It's me on camera, walking through the things I usually end up explaining on calls, a couple of minutes at a time. If that's useful, follow along there.