THE PATH
Twelve chapters. One honest path.
Each chapter is a season — written from the trenches, not the highlights reel. New chapters and founder stories added quarterly.
Origin Stories
What Freelance Taught Me About Freedom
My journey from freelance web development to the spark of something bigger. Late nights, low rates, and learning to value your own work.
Community Is the First Platform
Why Real Relationships Beat Algorithms
How organizing WordPress events created opportunities. Building trust, reputation, and real-life connection — before followers mattered.
Build Without a Blueprint
Launching Startempire 1.0 With Pure Drive
What we got right, what we missed. Content, momentum, and the danger of building without revenue.
Collapse & Clarity
What Health, Silence & Grief Rewired in Me
My hiatus, losing my father, personal burnout. The unexpected reset — and what God revealed in the silence.
Pivot to Product
Why Services Can’t Scale Your Freedom
Starting to build tools, not just provide services. Launching ASAP Digest and the software vision that changed everything.
The Wonder & Wealth of SaaS
Build It Once, Scale It Infinitely
The indie hacker movement, productization of expertise, and why SaaS is the ultimate leverage for solopreneurs.
Who Are You on the Entrepreneur’s Path?
Finding Your Model, Not Someone Else’s Map
Entrepreneur archetypes, a self-guided quiz, and co-paths for freelancers, SaaS builders, creators, and investors.
Build in Public, Scale with Trust
Audience as Your Second Business Partner
The value of radical transparency, content loops and authority building. Teaching through your journey — even the messy parts.
Resurrection & Redesign
Startempire Wire 2.0 as Your Scalable Playground
What we’re building now — media, community, and software. What dies in one season becomes seed in the next.
The Book Is the Ecosystem
Read. Write. Contribute. Build.
This book as the center of a living curriculum. Podcast → Book → Workbook → Workshop. A call to step into authorship and story sharing.
Seasons of Growth
A Rhythm That Moves You Forward
The quarterly content release cycle. Planning themes, aligned events, guided workbook groups. Transformation happens in cycles.
Build to Keep or Sell
Scalable Impact, Exit Optional
Personal SaaS vision, why some tools are for life and others for sale. The vision of wealth with values — exit clarity from day one.
WHO THIS BOOK IS FOR
You’re building alone
in a world that doesn’t teach this.
This book was written for the people nobody writes for.
🎨
The Creative Freelancer
You’ve got the talent and the clients — but no system, no leverage, and no path to ownership. You’re trading hours for dollars and calling it a business.
In this book: You’ll see exactly how the freelance trap becomes the foundation for something real.
⚡
The Side-Project Builder
You’re shipping on nights and weekends. Every Monday you restart from zero because nothing compounds. The ideas are there — the system isn’t.
In this book: You’ll learn why initiative without follow-through is just motion — and how to fix it.
🌱
The Faith-Driven Founder
You believe God planted something in you — but the business world doesn’t speak your language. You need a map written by someone who walks the same path.
In this book: You’ll find a story that doesn’t separate faith from hustle — because they were never separate.
Not a book you finish.
A book that grows with you.
The Entrepreneur’s Path grows with each season. New chapters emerge from podcast interviews, community masterminds, and real founder stories. Readers aren’t consumers — they’re co-creators.
→ New chapters added quarterly
→ Podcast companion episodes
→ Community-contributed founder stories
→ Co-author invites & group challenges
→ Evolving appendices and workbooks
The rough times were the actual things that caused me to begin what I do now.
— Verious Smith III
THE AUTHOR
Verious Smith III
What God plants in obedience, He waters into abundance.
That conviction drives everything. From a BFA in Visual Communications to 15 years of freelance, WordCamps, and startup pivots — through burnout, his father’s passing, and the silence that followed — Verious built not from a blueprint but from a calling.
Founder of Startempire Wire. Host of the Founders Podcast. Creator of ASAP Digest. Now building a suite of SaaS tools through Philoveracity — and writing the book he wished existed when he started.
Start the path.
Chapter 1 is free. No email required. Just read.