Hey, Reader —
Do you have favorite products you can’t live without?
For me, it’s my Dyson hair dryer, vacuum cleaner, and room fan. Silly, I know. People think they’re incredibly overpriced.
But I bought them all for one reason: every Dyson product delivers a remarkable experience. And they’re more alike than you might think.
You see, many folks think Dyson built a vacuum company. He didn't. He built a company obsessed with one underlying mechanism: how to move air with precision.
Everything else, from the fans and air purifiers to the hand dryers and hair dryers, looks like diversification. But inside the company, it’s all the same problem viewed differently.
Airflow is the unifying physics behind everything they make.
That’s the part most people miss. Dyson’s success wasn’t a series of disconnected inventions. It was the long, disciplined mastery of a single capability. When you understand airflow like he does, new categories aren’t leaps. They’re reapplications.
That mastery wasn’t theoretical. It was earned through years of engineering, modeling, and thousands of prototype iterations.
But airflow alone didn’t make Dyson dominant. He also made the invisible visible.
When the early team did market research, customers said: “I don’t want to see dirt inside a vacuum.”
An ordinary company would have taken that as truth and hidden the dust away.
Dyson did the opposite. They realized that if you can see the dirt, you can see the performance.
The vacuum’s transparent bin wasn’t a quirky design decision, it was a strategic one. It turned a private engineering achievement into public proof. It showed customers, in real time, that the underlying mechanism was working.
Dyson said there were long stretches where progress felt invisible, where he’d come home exhausted, feel like he’d failed his family, and then get up the next day and build the next version. Because he knew the airflow mechanism mattered, and that it was the foundation for everything that would come next.
After 5,127 (!) prototypes, the airflow platform was finally perfected, unlocking entire product lines: vacuums, silent bladeless fans, air purifiers, the Supersonic hair dryer, high-speed hand dryers, heaters, and more. Different products, same physics. The same core mechanism, expressed repeatedly.
Here’s the solopreneur lesson in all of this:
You don’t need to do everything. Master one core skill, then let that mastery scale across forms.
Your core skill is what you return to without trying. It’s how you naturally solve problems, make sense of ideas, or create value. It’s the through-line in your best work, even when the projects differ.
And one more Dyson lesson: show your proof.
Most solopreneurs hide the parts of their work that demonstrate their value. This might be your sketches, drafts, outlines, process, or your developmental thinking. But that’s the equivalent of hiding the dust.
The vacuum’s transparent bin didn’t make Dyson look messy. It made him credible.
The same is true for your work. Let people see the inside.
When you do this, your work stops looking like a collection of projects and starts looking like a signature.
Some other ideas I've been thinking about this week:
What you see depends on where you come from.
What if your cultural background literally rewires how you interpret shapes, patterns, even basic visual scenes?
In a surprising new study, researchers found that something as simple as a rectangle grid can appear fundamentally different depending on where you’re from.
For solopreneurs, there’s a clear takeaway: our visual frameworks, business models, and creative instincts are interpreted by much deeper forces than we realize. It nudges us to ask: if culture shapes perception, how might we shape our visuals for broader impact?
Building visuals on autopilot? Not quite, but getting closer.
This recent guide rounds up the 11 best AI infographic generators you can try today. It explains how these tools transform text and data into polished visuals in minutes, and which ones are worth exploring.
What you’ll notice is that speed isn’t what makes them powerful. Rather, it's how they can embed your brand, structure your message, and let you control one core visual narrative across multiple formats. Sweet.
How do you keep your best ideas from evaporating?
Author Steven Johnson swears by a “Spark File,” a single, continuous document where he captures every insight, question, and half-formed thought before they disappear.
There are no categories. No folders. No pressure to make sense of it in the moment. As he explains in this article, every few months he re-reads the entire document, and is continually surprised at “little sparks that I'd forgotten that suddenly seem more promising,” or “the hunches that turned into fully-realized projects.”
For writers and solopreneurs, it’s a simple system with an outsized payoff: when you collect ideas continuously, you stockpile the sparks that become tomorrow’s best work.
Think it may work for you? Why not try it? It's a pretty simple experiment.
Until next week: Stay small. Play big.
Terri
P.S. When you’re ready for more, here are a few resources from the Solo Business School:
Want to send a question or comment? Please do — I read (and respond to) my email.
Got this from a friend? Subscribe to get future issues.
Unsubscribe | Update your profile | Make International LLC, West Irving Park, Chicago, IL 60613
Authority By Design is a registered trademark, and Content Velocity and Working Solo are trademarks, of Make International LLC. Issue #089.