2 Questions that you must Answer before starting your Business | Full Video | By Sawan Kumar #shorts

If you are about to launch anything, the two questions before starting a business that will save you years of wasted effort are simple: why should the customer buy at all, and why should the customer buy from you. Answer both honestly and you stop selling a commodity by accident.

Direct Answer: Before starting any business, you must answer two questions in order. First, why should the customer buy whatever you are selling. Second, why should the customer buy it from you and not the store across the street selling the same thing cheaper. If either answer is missing, you are pushing a commodity without a reason, and you will end up waiting for customers while blaming luck, the government, or digitisation.

Why the two questions before starting a business decide everything

I have trained more than 79,000 students across 74+ courses from my base in Dubai, and the single pattern that separates the ones who scale from the ones who stall is whether they can answer these two questions on demand. Most founders skip them because they feel obvious. They are not obvious. They are the entire foundation. Without them you spend your evenings scrolling YouTube or Netflix and cursing the technology that “took your business away.” With them, the noise disappears and the path gets sharp.

Question 1: Why should the customer buy at all?

This question forces you to leave your own head and sit inside the customer’s. Take something as boring as a pair of denim. Why would anyone walk into a store today and buy one? Strip the assumption away and you will find several distinct reasons, each one a different customer with a different urgency.

• The torn-jeans buyer: his old pair is finished and he needs a replacement this week.
• The wardrobe-refresh buyer: he simply wants a new one because the existing ones feel stale.
• The holiday buyer: he is travelling and needs an extra pair packed before the flight.
• The emotional buyer: he is not feeling great and wants to spend a little money to lift his mood.

Four buyers, one product, four entirely different reasons. If you sell denim and you have not mapped these buying triggers, your marketing is a guess. Your ad copy is a guess. Your shop layout is a guess. The moment you name the trigger, your message writes itself.

Question 2: Why should the customer buy from you?

This is where most businesses collapse. You may have nailed the “why buy” question, but if the customer can get the identical product across the street at a cheaper price, you have given them no reason to walk into your door. So what is unique about you? Is it the service, the curation, the bundling, the after-sales follow-up, the trust you have built, the way you guarantee the outcome? Pick one and own it. If you cannot finish the sentence “buy from me because…” in under ten seconds, neither can your customer.

The cost of skipping these two questions

When founders skip this work, the symptoms are predictable. They lower prices to compete. They run ads that get clicks but no sales. They blame the algorithm, the platform, the economy. I have watched smart, hard-working entrepreneurs spiral exactly like this. The product was fine. The effort was real. The two questions were never answered, so every action downstream was disconnected from the actual buyer.

How to actually answer the two questions today

You do not need a strategy retreat. You need an afternoon and a notebook. Here is the order I walk my students through:

• Step 1: Write your product or service at the top of a page.
• Step 2: List at least four distinct reasons a real human would buy it. Use the denim example as your template — torn, refresh, holiday, mood. Make yours that specific.
• Step 3: For each reason, name the buyer in one line. Age, situation, urgency.
• Step 4: On a second page, finish this sentence five different ways: “A customer should buy this from me and not the cheaper option because…”
• Step 5: Circle the one answer that is true, defensible, and hard for the competitor across the street to copy. That is your positioning.

This is not theory. This is the exercise I run inside my own businesses every time I launch something new, whether it is a course, an automation service, or a coaching offer. The structure does not change with the industry.

What changes once you have the answers

Once both questions are answered, your decisions get faster. You know which ad to run because you know which buyer you are talking to. You know which channel to be on because you know where that buyer hangs out. You know what to put on the homepage because you know the one sentence that closes the sale. Pricing stops being a panic decision. Discounting stops being the default lever. You stop comparing yourself to the shop across the street because you are no longer selling the same thing in the customer’s mind.

This is the leverage that separates a business from a hustle. Two questions. Not twenty. Not a 40-page plan. Two.

The two questions before starting a business are deceptively simple, which is why so few founders sit with them long enough to finish the work. Open a blank page today, write the four denim-style buyer reasons for your product, then finish the sentence “buy from me because…” until you find one answer you would defend in front of a sceptic. That single afternoon will outperform months of tactics.