The best way to build a business — a sustainable business, the kind that makes money every month, that pays your bills, that empowers you to live the life you want — a business that grows reasonably over time, and has a stable base… is to not fail.

That’s it. That’s the secret. To succeed, don’t fail.

I could waste a lot of words here talking about what failure is and isn’t, why the startupsphere is obsessed with it — but I cut those out of my draft because it doesn’t matter.

The simple fact is:

Success comes from avoiding the many potential failure traps along your path.

Success is, in a very real way, a game of survival… attrition, even. If you can route your way around the traps where ambition-ending failure happens, you’ll make it.

And, counter-counterintuitively, the best way to avoid those failure traps isn’t to study failure, but to study success. To figure out how people make their projects survive, long term. To learn the outlines of what just about always works.

Because, when you look at them architecturally, all successful businesses have a lot in common.

Call it the Amy Karenina Principle: Successful businesses are all alike; every unsuccessful business fails in its own way.

So let’s take a good hard look at the architecture of successful businesses. I’m not talking the glittery superficial stuff, like the type of product, design, branding or naming, domain name length, target market/niche, the hours or ways they work, kind of founder, or even “company culture,” whatever that means.

I’m talking the irreducible core.

The template. The framework. The foundation.

What do all profitable product businesses have in common?

I’ve spent a lifetime thinking about this, studying this, teaching this, and experimenting with this.

Here are 7 major success principles I’ve found, plus 1:

  1. Every business that exists to sell a product started and finished a product.
  2. Every product business that makes sales is able to charge for and deliver a product. They created it, finished it, shipped it, with a price tag, and the infrastructure to exchange money for goods and services.
  3. Every business that consistently makes sales has created a product people, who spend money, are willing to pay for. They don’t waste time trying to sell to people who aren’t interested.
  4. Every product business that makes a profit earns more money than it spends. That means the pricing is right. The product delivers more value to customers than it costs to build, sell, service, and grow.
  5. Every product business that is consistently profitable grows profitably, often, ultimately, through word of mouth from happy customers; they don’t over-leverage themselves by spending ten times the Lifetime Customer Value to acquire new business.
  6. Every product business with happy customers, that spreads via word of mouth, designed a product customers need and want.
  7. Every successful large and complex product started as a smaller, simpler product and evolved, in the market, over time.
  8. Bonus: Nearly every business that is successful and profitable with a large suite of products started with one product.

This is the simplest possible framework for success: Eight pillars that every sustainably profitable product business has in common, or at least had in common when they became a sustainably profitable product business.

To succeed, you must build these core pillars for your business, with your process.

But — and this is key — you don’t have to copy, and you shouldn’t. Nobody is dictating to you what form those pillars must take, or how to build them. These eight pillars offer an almost infinite range of possibilities, style, execution, format, flavor. So much room for activities!

Naturally, there’s also lots of room for you to make mistakes on the way.

But so long as you end up with a finished product you can launch and operate, that people want and need, that people are willing to pay for, which is affordable to run, and which can spread by word of mouth…

You can’t fail.

You will eventually succeed.