Act now
Dreams and intentions are great starting points.
It’s now a matter of just doing it.
Making a start can be the hardest thing. But once you have started, it’s a matter of sustaining that momentum.
As you continuously iterate your knowledge and ideas, you will fine-tune and improve yourself and approach.
Find a business idea and making it work
When you have decided to embark on a journey of entrepreneurship or freelancing, you need to find a business idea that sells.
Here’s a seven-step process to explore some suitable business ideas, selecting that one idea that potentially sells, and making that idea work for you.
- Step 1 – You brainstorm and select your proposed business idea from a comprehensive list that I have compiled on this website. Get your creative juices flowing.
- Step 2 – Develop an overall strategy for making money. This step requires you to determine your money-making criteria and meeting those criteria. You will need to update your strategy as you gather more information. Remember that people don’t plan to fail, they fail to plan.
- Step 3 – Acquire or develop a product (e.g., e-Books, tools, coaching services, training, etc) that will help solve your target customers’ problem. The aim is to sell a relevant product to your customers and make money. Test out your proposed product by converting it into a minimum viable product.
- Step 4 – Identify the best platforms and established marketplaces (e.g., eBay, Facebook, blogs, etc.) where the majority of your target customers hang out so that you can sell them your proposed product.
- Step 5 – Validate your minimum viable product with your customers using these established marketplaces.
- Step 6 – Work hard to market and drive Internet traffic to your chosen platforms so that you can convert your visitors into leads and thereafter transforming them into paying customers.
- Step 7 – Depending on your testing results, you could scale-up selling this product with your own website, find another new product to sell, or ditch the product altogether.
Don’t follow the advice of many gurus. That is to have a website first prior to vigorously validating your money-making idea and minimum viable product. This will save you a lot of money.
Always get your money-making idea validated first by your customers before spending any more time, effort, and money. This will guarantee your long-term financial success using this risk-free strategy. It will reduce or minimise your financial exposure while preserving your investments to low-risk activities.
Personality counts
Based on personality research, some people have the natural personality to start a business. A large portion of the population will happily stay employed in a job. They will never start their own business.
That’s okay.
If you fall into this category, there are other strategies to increase your salary or wages and secure your job. Read about them on my blog.
Always have a strategy
Whatever pathway you select to start your business, you should always think about drawing up your own strategy to make money including plans to execute the strategy.
I am always reminded of a passage in Alice in Wonderland (chapter 6). It nicely captures the reasons why having a sound strategy is so important for everyone.
“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
“I don’t much care where –” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.
“– so long as I get SOMEWHERE,” Alice added as an explanation.
“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”
I have learned that developing my strategy as early as possible will focus my efforts to do the things that matter most and to earn an income in the future.
I am always reminded of this quote by a successful online entrepreneur.
“I initially failed in my quest to create a sustainable second income, simply because I didn’t have a clear strategy in mind. I didn’t follow a clear system. I did everything that everyone else seemed to be doing but I didn’t really know what my main goal was. Thankfully, now I do. Even better, I now know how to focus on my chief objective and more practically secure my present and future financial prosperity.”
Your strategy selection will depend on many factors like:
- Your desire to succeed including time and commitment that you are willing to put in.
- Your personality and interest.
- The audience that you are writing for and selling to.
- Amount of money or savings you have to finance your strategy.
Having a sound strategy to start a business and make money will be the key to your success.
Determine your business type
When you are thinking about starting a business, you need to determine the type of business you want to start.
Here are some options:
- An online business
- An e-commerce business – For more information, click here.
- Bricks and mortar business – For more information, click here and here.
- Franchise business – For more information, click here.
Six criteria of success – find that sweet spot
Your aim is to find that sweet spot where the following six criteria intersect:
- You are so passionate about and committed to your money-making idea that you will spend all your free time working on it (even on weekends!).
- You want to create value for people and desire to make a difference in people’s lives trying to solve their problems.
- You have desperate niche customers who are willing and able to pay you for your unique product or service because you can solve their pain points or problems. That’s the ultimate outcome of your online business activities.
- You can create a sustainable stream of income out of the money- making idea when you do decide to quit your 9-to-5 job. Remember always that you have to pay your bills!
- You have or are capable of acquiring the necessary skills and experience to build that business without much re-skilling or learning.
- You want to align your business and work with your personal and religious reasons and beliefs. Your WHYs of embarking on a business must be crystal clear.
Convert your product into a minimum viable product
Using Google, Google Keyword Planner, and Google Trends to perform online desktop research on your proposed business idea, or on the product you want to sell.
Head over to existing online marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, Udemy, or Fiverr to confirm whether your product is something people are looking for, are willing and able to pay for and can be delivered by you.
Read all customer reviews and feedback on similar products. These will help you validate or improve your own product, and verify assumptions about your product and customers.
These marketplaces are technically digital marketing platforms for you to advertise your product. Compared to paper-based medium, these platforms are the quickest, safest, and cheapest way for you to validate and sell your product.
Quickly develop a ‘minimum viable product’ (MVP) based on assumptions formulated from your desktop research. Test, learn and validate your minimum viable product and assumptions by selling your product on existing marketplaces.
This may require some money or investment, depending on the type of product you choose.
Launching first with a minimum viable product keeps your risk, exposure, and expense low (or nil). It gives you the license to test the waters and validate your ‘good enough’ product with your potential customers. It confirms whether your product can fully meet the requirements of your target market and for you to make money quickly.
A ‘good enough’ product does not mean that it’s of poor quality. All elements of a quality product must still exist to fully gain peoples’ trust and confidence.
In testing your product and yourself, you may end up saying, “running a business (or selling a product) is not for me”.
It’s okay to walk away from starting a business or making additional money knowing that you have given this a try.
This will reduce your initial investment to the minimum.
Validate your minimum viable product with your customers in established marketplaces
Traffic is vital for all businesses to make money. If people don’t know about you and your product, you will not make any money.
There’re countless techniques, tactics, and strategies that you can use to drive traffic. There’s no shortage of people trying to sell you solutions and tactics to drive traffic to your website.
But if you are starting out, these tactics can be very technical, overwhelming and costly, especially in terms of time and money. You need a web hosting, a domain name, a content management system like WordPress, and you need lots of time and technical expertise to put them all together. Or you can pay someone else to do it for you.
That’s where established marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, Udemy, or Fiverr come in handy. These websites are already well known. There’s a good amount of Internet traffic going to these established websites.
The main headache of driving Internet traffic to your own website has now been taken away from you should you adopt this strategy of using existing marketplaces to sell your first product.
People who visit these websites are your potential customers. People intentionally go to these websites as visitors wanting or motivated to buy something, which is good news for you.
All you need to do now is to convert a fraction of these marketplace visitors into paying customers by putting mouth-watering irresistible products in front of them to buy.
Established marketplaces are just great online classrooms for you to build your knowledge, experience, and confidence.
You need to spend some money here to test out the products and processes.
What’s so great about this risk-free strategy is that there’s no shortage of how-to videos on YouTube to get you started immediately using one of these established marketplaces.
Scale-up with your own website, find new ideas or ditch your idea altogether
After validating your product using established marketplaces (rather than having your own branded website at the initial stages), you have a couple of choices:
- Scale up on what you already have by developing and launching your own branded website to sell your winning product to your paying customers. Launching your own website should be the last thing to do after focusing on your product creation, design, testing, validating, and launch. You have better control over the profitability of your product because you are not at the mercy of marketplace owners. What’s more, you want to build up your own customer list because ‘money is in the list’. With control over your own customer list, you can continuously nurture your leads, and transform them into paying customers when it’s time for you to sell more of your products to them. This will require some investments on your end.
- Continue using these established marketplaces and sell your products without having your own branded website. You should plan to continuously improve your product offering as competitors will set in. Be a step or two ahead of your competitors. This option will reduce your initial investment.
- Continuously refine and improve your product in collaboration with your customers using existing marketplaces until you are truly satisfied with the product’s quality, benefits, and features. Roll out newer versions of your product with improvements suggested by your customers. This option will keep your investment low until you find a winning product or service.
- Scrap your original product idea altogether if it’s a flop. Go back to listening to your customers for new ideas and solutions. Continuously refine your business idea for a specific target customer group. Use established marketplaces to continuously test and validate your idea, product, and assumptions. This option will cut your financial loss and you move on to do other things.
- Abort your desire to start a side gig or business altogether without further loss of time, effort and money. You should not have any regrets whatsoever. Some personality types are just natural at being business owners and entrepreneurs. Don’t be stressed over this option. It’s just who you are.
Other basics
Based on your business idea and the type of business you have selected:
- Write up a solid business and marketing plan. Without customers, your business is dead.
- You need to find some money to invest in your business startup. An online business requires very little capital. Whereas an off-line business will cost you more.
- Your legal and tax structures must be based on your personal and tax circumstances. Hire a lawyer, tax consultant or financial planner to advise you on the best structure and approach for your business.
- Your accounting needs must be considered at a later date.
- You need a lawyer to help you with reviewing contracts and legal negotiations.
- Sort out your personal asset holding as you could be personally liable for your business debts. Seek legal advice on how to ring-fence and protect your personal assets from potential creditors.
- If you are an inventor, then consider hiring a patent lawyer to protect your creation. It does cost money to protect your intellectual property.
- Take out personal insurance to protect you and your family. Income protection, disability, life, and death are some options. Talk to an insurance broker for the best insurance cover for you given your personal circumstances.