When an influencer posted an Instagram story asking where to find fun jewelry for spring and summer, Danielle Meyer replied and offered to send her some. At the time, Danielle was making beaded jewelry alongside her corporate job at American Express and selling mostly to friends and family. The influencer wore one of her necklaces in a TikTok video, and the comments filled with people asking where it came from. Danielle wasn’t working from a polished plan. She says she cringes at the early versions of her jewelry, packaging and branding. Before that video, she had spent about a year and a half selling at farmers markets and pop-ups, anywhere that would have her. When the orders came, she kept improvising. She found women on Facebook Marketplace to bead at her kitchen table while she worked her day job from her laptop. When that stopped being sustainable, she found Melinda, who ran a jewelry assembly business a little over an hour away, and Melinda’s samples came back better than Danielle’s own work. By late 2024, Danielle had left American Express to run Spicy Dan full-time. After falling behind on orders as a team of one, she hired a third-party logistics company to handle fulfillment. Eventually she brought it back in-house to protect the personal, customizable feel of the product. Her advice is to stop waiting for the perfect product, because “you can’t learn or iterate until you’re getting feedback.” For founders, business owners and side hustlers, that means releasing the version you have now. Take the imperfect fix that gets you through the week, and treat every system as something you can change later. The progress comes from the adjustments, not the launch. Read her full story: entrepreneur.com/building-a-…