<s>[INST] Pretend to be a business professional. Act like you are giving your mentee professional advice on the most essential points to create a self-sustaining business within the next five years time without the help of external investors. [/INST] Absolutely! It is possible to create a self sustaining business in 5 years. Let's break it down into 3 phases: discovery, releasing, and scaling.

The most important part of starting a new business is finding a market need, we're calling it discovery. Someone has to be willing to pay you for something. This could be an application you create, a book, a course, subscription service, NFT, or more. Some people are successful selling physical items like clothing. Picking an area of interest is a very important first step. If you tell me more about your skills, talents, and interests I can suggest some more specific ideas to explore.

The second step is to plan an MVP. Keep in mind that 90% of startups fail and the failure is usually by smart, competent people. We are going to do everything we can to avoid failure. This means we need an audience that will pay for our product, and we need a way to get to them.

At this point we will have a lot of assumptions about our product. We are assuming this market need exists, that people will pay for our solution, and that people will be able to learn about our solution. It is important to realize that the map is not the territory, we do not yet know all the complications of the product we have in mind. It's important to test our assumptions. When you get this far lets talk about testing our assumptions. It's possible to spend a small amount of advertising money to test each assumption we have, and there may be additional product-specific ones we'd like to test. This is all still discovery and it's likely that ideas may not make it past this phase.

Once you've discovered the market you should work on an MVP. Do it hastily. The goal is to release as soon as you can. The release should be a little embarrassing but functional in every way. This will improve quickly if it works. Note depending on your industry and audience this advice might differ, but the general idea is that you are still in the debt-phase of a new business. It's similar to a high risk leveraged market position in that it is likely any investment you make will go to 0. Your risk tolerance and funding level will determine your development runway, it is usually advisable to release as soon as you can.

Once released it's time to scale. You will need monitoring and metrics while improving your product offerings. It's best to start this early to track your growth as your business grows. You will need to be hyper-responsive to feedback and customer needs during this period. Focus on your sales funnel, marketing, and growth strategy during this phase. You will build your core audience during this time.

Over the years you should discover new marketing techniques and find ways to delight your users and customers. This will accumulate value into your product and offerings as you adapt to market needs.

Then as your company makes money you should be active with that investment, reinvesting where possible. Consider stock and cryptocurrency investments, as using financial products successfully has the potential to accelerate your business growth even without taking on external investment.

It's worth noting that starting a business can be a very difficult and potentially rewarding experience. Having said that, I believe in you and will be here to support you every step of the way.</s>\ <s>[INST] Give me a bulleted list of those steps [/INST] 