The myth of overnight success &what the journey actually looks like behind the scenes

By John Stapleton

The idea of overnight success is everywhere in business right now—and it’s one of the most dangerous myths you can buy into.

It’s seductive because it’s simple. It tells you that with the right idea, the right tool, or the right moment, everything can change instantly. But that’s not how real businesses are built. It’s not how value is created. And it’s certainly not how enduring success happens.

I’ve set up three businesses, and I took two of them—New Covent Garden Soup Co and Little Dish—to successful exit. From the outside, those journeys can look like success. And they were. But from the inside, they were defined by years of pressure, uncertainty, setbacks, and relentless execution. Each took around ten years to reach exit. There was nothing overnight about either of them.

What people call “overnight success” is almost always the visible tip of a much deeper story. Years spent refining a product. Years building relationships. Years getting things wrong before getting enough things right.

At New Covent Garden Soup Co, we started with a strong idea—one that tapped into people’s frustration with what was available. We had momentum early on, but it didn’t scale overnight. It took hard graft. We were doing things for the first time, creating a new category with fresh soup and that came with resistance and plenty of mistakes. Initially, we thought we were offering a culinary solution to a first-course meal problem. But once we were in the market, we realised we were providing a complete meal solution—and building an aspirational brand in a category we had effectively created. That kind of shift doesn’t happen instantly.

At Little Dish, we weren’t just making high-quality meals for toddlers—we were offering reassurance to parents. Reassurance around product quality, ingredient provenance, and the promise that we wouldn’t cut corners. That level of trust takes time to build. It’s earned, not claimed.

Look at any successful brand. It might seem to appear suddenly, fully formed, gaining traction and winning customers. But behind that moment are years of unseen effort—early mornings, late nights, failed launches, near misses, and constant iteration. Success compresses time in hindsight. When you’re in it, it’s slow, messy, and uncertain.

That’s why I’m deeply sceptical of the current wave of AI-driven “overnight success” claims. You’ve seen them: “I built a business over a weekend. Now it runs itself. I spend 10–12 hours a week managing it.” It sounds appealing. It’s also, in most cases, nonsense. Because if you can build it in a weekend, so can someone else. And someone will. And all they need to do is execute slightly better than you—and your “business” disappears as quickly as it arrived.

Real businesses don’t work like that. You need something no one else has—whether that’s insight, brand, trust, distribution, or a deep understanding of your customer. It has to be defensible. It has to be hard to replicate. And that takes time.

You need to solve a real problem. Not something that looks good in a pitch deck, but something that genuinely makes your customer’s life easier. Something they come back for. Something they recommend.

Then you need time for enough people to hear about you. Markets don’t discover you by accident. You earn attention; you build awareness; you create relevance—through consistency.

Trust takes even longer. Customers trust you because you deliver, again and again, over time. That’s how loyalty is built. And customer loyalty builds long-term value. That’s also how you scale. Not through shortcuts or hacks, but through momentum—earned over time.

And here’s what many people overlook: if you sell too early, you leave money on the table. Given time, your brand deepens, your customer base strengthens, and your business becomes more valuable and more resilient.

The myth of overnight success isn’t just wrong—it’s a distraction. It pulls you away from the only thing that actually works: sustained effort, clarity of purpose, and the willingness to stay in the game long enough to build something meaningful.

There are no shortcuts worth taking. If you want to build something of real value, accept the reality: it takes time.

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