The Exit Pipeline
Leaving a job is a pipeline with four stages: idea, first dollar, repeatable dollar, and a dollar that covers rent. Most people quit at stage one and call it courage. The stage to quit at is four.
How to run it
- Idea — Decide what you would sell and to whom. Costs nothing and proves nothing.
- First dollar — Get one person outside your network to pay. This converts opinion into evidence.
- Repeatable dollar — Do it again through a route you can describe. Establishes that the first sale was a channel.
- Rent-covering dollar — Reach the point where repeatable income covers real monthly costs. Now you can leave.
Leaving a job is a pipeline with four stages. Most people quit at stage one and call it courage.
The four stages
1. Idea. You know what you would sell and to whom. Costs nothing, proves nothing, and feels like enormous progress. Almost everyone who intends to leave is permanently at this stage.
2. First dollar. One person outside your network paid you for it. This is the largest single jump in the pipeline, because it converts an opinion about demand into evidence. It also usually reveals that what people buy differs from what you planned to sell.
3. Repeatable dollar. You have done it more than once, through a route you can describe. The question here is whether the first sale was a friend, a fluke or a channel.
4. Rent-covering dollar. The income covers your actual costs, repeatedly. See the replacement number.
What each stage requires
Stage one needs a decision. Stage two needs an ask — the specific, uncomfortable conversation where you name a price to someone who might say no. Stage three needs a repeated process. Stage four needs volume through that process.
The transition that stalls people is one to two, and the reason is always the same: stage one can be worked on indefinitely without risking rejection, so preparation expands to fill the available years. See stop preparing and start and proxy work.
Running it while employed
All four stages can be reached before you resign, and should be. Evenings and weekends are enough to get to stage three in most service businesses, which is the point of doing it in that order.
The argument against — that it is slower — is true and it is the cost of finding out whether the thing works while you still have income. Leaving to accelerate stage one is paying a very high price to skip the cheapest part of the process.
Questions
What are the stages of leaving a job?
Idea, first dollar, repeatable dollar, and a dollar that covers your costs. Each stage requires something different, and most people quit while still at the first.
Why is the first paying customer so important?
Because it converts an assumption about demand into evidence, and usually reveals that what people will pay for differs from what you planned to sell.
Should you build the business before quitting?
Reaching stage three while employed is slower and lets you discover whether the business works while you still have income. Leaving to accelerate the idea stage skips the cheapest part of the process.