A business-simulation novel series
Fail first,
fail cheap
on the page.
Live the first year of a business before you ever risk your own.
Do you want to know the number from your own first year business simulation?Well, Click the Napkin Accounts.
Our vision
We exist to lower the cost of your failure.
A good café, a good bakery, a good restaurant - a shop with your name on the door - is a dream a lot of people quietly carry. Most never try, because the price of getting it wrong is simply too high.
We have walked that road ourselves, and we have watched too many people break beyond recovery at the very start. Helping them not to is why we exist.
WHY WE WRITE
The best way to learn
business is experience.
It is also the most expensive.
In the autumn of 2025, three would-be founders came to us with the same worry: ‘I want to start something - I just can’t picture how.’ What they lacked wasn’t drive. It was an image in their heads of how the year would actually unfold.Business books are dense. The memoirs of successful founders skip the day-to-day of how a shop is actually run. But scattered through those memoirs are the real lessons - the ones paid for over decades, at great cost. We spent years reading them, gathering the operating wisdom that lay in fragments across a hundred books, and weaving it into a single story, in the order it would happen. So what this novel teaches isn’t an invented lesson. It’s the working principle of a business, already proven in the real world.And we stripped the jargon out. No dense theory, no unfamiliar terms. Just one person opening the shop each morning and meeting whatever the day brings. Follow it long enough, and the feel of running a place quietly settles into your hands.Watching, getting drawn in, living it second-hand - we believe that is the best way to learn a business before you begin one.People have learned through stories for thousands of years.
THE SERIES
The First Year - live
the opening year, first.
Set in cities around the world, 'The First Year' follows founders across different trades. Each protagonist meets a season of real, ordinary crises - and fails a little ahead of you.
The stories are fiction, but the lessons inside them are not invented. The operating principles that countless founders paid dearly to learn are woven right into the story. So while you read, you can fail as much as you like. The price has already been paid. And we don’t hand every story a happy ending. Real life doesn’t always.
We suggest reading the series in full. You’ll notice the logic you picked up in Coffee Shop carries over to Pizza Shop - and it’s that cross-learning that builds a real feel for how a business runs.
WHERE TO FIND US
Read it. Before begin.
You’ll find The First Year on Amazon.
Finish the series and find your nerve still intact?
Then start the real thing with clearer eyes.
STAY IN TOUCH
We'll tell you the moment
the next door opens.
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EBEN PRESS
The First Year is a work of fiction, offered for reference only. We accept no legal responsibility for your business.