When you launch a new service, enter a new market or start a new partnership, it begins at zero, because nobody knows about it yet. The source calls this condition Non-Existence. If you do not recognize it, you can build something excellent and wait months for a phone that never rings.
What Non-Existence is
Non-Existence is the lowest of the seven conditions on the scale, and its number is zero, not minus. It is the starting point of anything new, and it carries no punishment and no failure.
The source describes the scale as a route. Whoever applies the formula of Non-Existence intelligently comes through it into the next condition, and goes on from there. The first stage cannot be skipped. What you need is to recognize that you are in it.
The confusing part is that the business itself can be in a very different condition. Suppose a freelancer launches a new service and treats it like his established business, which is in Normal. The new service is in Non-Existence, and nobody knows it exists. Each condition has a formula of its own, and the formulas are nothing like each other.
The Non-Existence formula is short, and easy to remember. It applies to anything new: a service, a market, a post, a partnership. The idea behind it is simple. Before anyone buys from you, they need to know you are there, and you need to know what they need.
Why people build first
The common mistake is starting from the end. Suppose an installer adds a new service. He builds it, gets everything ready, and waits for the phone to ring. He skipped everything that comes before the building, and the phone stays quiet.
Someone moving into a new field does the opposite. For a whole month she only talks to people in that field and asks what they are short of. What she builds afterwards sells.
Both can be talented, with a good product. What separates them is the order. One started with the product and the other started with the people.
The same mistake catches people who know their craft well. Suppose a consultant opens a new practice area and starts streamlining the process from day one. Nobody yet knows she offers it. She is running a Normal formula inside Non-Existence. With the next area she opens, she spends three months announcing herself, asking what is needed, and delivering it. This time it works.
The point where people fall
The source spends most of its paragraphs on one stage of the formula, finding out what is needed or wanted, because that is where people fall. It says that a person sometimes assumes he knows what is needed when it is only a fixed idea of his own, untrue, and he fails at his job because of it. Sometimes he does not bother to find out. And the source says what is safer: “it is always safest for him to make his own survey of it”.
Suppose a consultant is certain the market wants a cheaper package. It turns out the market wants faster availability, and will pay more for it. Or suppose an owner spends a year building a product nobody asked for. The assumption was his, and the market never took part in it.
The sentence that so often stands in for asking is “I know my field”. Knowing your field is worth a lot, and it still does not replace putting the question to the people who would buy.
What happens to the one who gets stuck
The source describes the outcome without softening it. A person who fails to do this never comes out of Non-Existence. He does not even reach Danger, the condition above it, because nobody knows he is there to be bypassed. In the organization's eyes he is a zero.
In a small business this translates directly. A service nobody knows about cannot be judged good or bad, because for the market it does not exist.
Suppose an owner has three services on her website, and her long-standing customers know about only one of them. The other two have been in Non-Existence for three years. She sends her customers one message about the second service, and two bookings arrive that same week.
Three years at zero ended with a simple message, because what the service lacked was people who knew about it.
What the booklet has on this
In It Was a Slow Month, this chapter gives the full Non-Existence formula, with its steps in order, and two exercises: test, and act.
Before you build another new thing, find out how many of your customers know about what you have already built.