The Worst Business Advice I Ever Received…

Someone asked me about the worst business advice I’ve ever received, and I think this is a lesson every independent creator and entrepreneur needs to hear. When I was first starting the Rippaverse, I reached out to anyone and everyone I knew who had experience in publishing or comic books. I wanted to learn from people who had been in the space. And I got a lot of advice — some useful, some not.
One thing you have to understand is that not everybody in publishing knows the publishing side. Just because someone is a great writer or a great artist does not mean they know anything about the business. Those are completely different skill sets.
The worst piece of advice I got was from someone who told me not to create my own website. The suggestion was to rely on more general platforms — crowdfunding sites and the like — rather than building out my own infrastructure. And this wasn’t said with malice. The person was trying to help. But in hindsight, it was terrible advice, and thankfully I ignored it.
Here’s why. When we first launched Isom #1, we ended up doing $3.7 million in pre-orders. But during that launch, PayPal decided to withhold over a million dollars from us. I had to get lawyers involved just to get them to release the funds. Now imagine if I had followed that advice and didn’t have my own website. Imagine if we were entirely dependent on one platform and that platform decided to withhold funds, restrict our account, or kick us off entirely. That could have killed the Rippaverse before it ever really got started. Maybe we’re not even around today if something like that had happened.
Because we had our own site, we had the ability to pivot. We could switch payment processors. We could route around the problem. We had control over our own infrastructure. That flexibility is what saved us. If we had been completely reliant on a third-party platform with no backup, one bad decision by that platform could have ended everything.
The lesson is simple — never give a single platform total control over your business. Build your own infrastructure. Own your relationship with your customers. Have the ability to pivot when things go wrong, because they will go wrong. That was the worst advice I ever received, and ignoring it might be the best decision I ever made.