The real cost of starting

Two sisters in Kuwait decide to sell children's books online, in Arabic and English, picked by people who actually read them to their own children.

They make the sensible list first. A small storeroom. Shelving. A laptop. Packaging, a website, a few months of stock. They add it up, it is a frightening number, and they decide to go ahead anyway.

The list is honest. It is also missing the largest line.

In the first months they order too many copies of a beautiful book that nobody wants and too few of a plain one that sells out twice. They price the gift boxes so low that every sale loses a little. Their first photographs make the books look like textbooks. They spend a fortnight on a loyalty scheme that no parent ever uses, and a weekend learning that one district is much harder to deliver to than they assumed.

None of this was in the plan. All of it cost money, time and some pride. And all of it is the reason that, by the end of the year, they know which books families keep coming back for, what a fair price is, and how to describe a story so a tired parent stops scrolling.

It is tempting to call those months a run of mistakes and to feel embarrassed by them. That gets it the wrong way round. Nobody starts something new already knowing what only the attempt can teach.

The shelving and the laptop are the visible part of the bill. The wrong turns are the rest of it, and every new venture pays them on the way to working.

They are not evidence that you started badly. They are what starting costs.