Outsourcing your business tasks to established marketplaces
You really don’t need to have your own website, at least when you first start out. You don’t need to divert or dilute your limited energy and time on developing and launching your own website.
You also don’t need to worry about driving Internet traffic to your own website because established marketplaces already have brand equity and Internet presence to draw a lot of potential customers to you. You only need to focus your energy and time on getting your product or service right for your customers.
Instead of spending weeks or months building your own website and getting stuck in tactical hell, you can immediately sell your product or service using established marketplaces. There’s enough information or how-to videos on YouTube and elsewhere that will help you get started to use these marketplaces and list your products or services for sale.
You will learn how business and online transactions are conducted on these established marketplaces. You will learn about various management processes that will be invaluable to you when you do start your own online business using your own website. You will learn about what website features can be replicated on your own website. Established marketplaces are just great online classrooms for you to build your knowledge, experience, and confidence.
In return, these marketplaces will charge you a fee for marketing and hosting your information and maintaining the platform for you. In doing so, they are ‘renting’ to you the use of proven systems, processes and brand equity that will save you loads of time and effort.
You are effectively outsourcing a lot of business and marketing activities to the ‘mall management’ of established marketplaces. This strategy will free up a lot of your time so that you can concentrate on incorporating your passion in the products and services you design, develop, and sell.
You are also effectively limiting your risk, time and effort in running a business as some business tasks and process have been outsourced to established marketplaces. You are also reducing the risk, cost, and effort of fully maintaining a stand alone storefront (using a retail analogy) or a dedicated website.
As stated previously, there are so much more business activities that you must take care of when running your own business. If you can minimise these activities at the beginning of your money making journey and postpone them to a later date, then it will help you tremendously in terms of focusing on what’s important (i.e., product creation, design, and roll-out) and reducing your learning curve and stress in management and business.
This strategy of using established marketplaces will short cut or jumpstart your journey to business ownership without the technical or tactical headaches. You can effectively leverage on established marketplaces and their reputation to drive traffic and sales to you.
These established marketplaces will build up your confidence in business and management. You will believe in yourself more as you gain more confidence and knowledge.
You will also learn more about yourself as a person. You can decide whether you want to be a business owner in the long run or not, taking into account your personality and personal commitments.
Focus primarily on product creation and income generation
This test and validate strategy will free up valuable time for you to focus primarily on profiting from your passion, which will find its way into your product or service offering.
When testing and validating your minimum viable product using established marketplaces, you will learn about yourself, the ins and outs of product creation, copy writing, marketing, launch, and management, and what it takes to actually start and run a business. All these activities are conducted on a small scale.
Realistically, you need to give yourself at least five years of working on (or in) your business for you to enjoy the fruits of your labor. If you are thinking short-term, then starting and running a business may not be for you. You will quickly find out if running a business and dealing with customers, and products or services are something you will enjoy doing in the long-run.
Decision time; what’s your future?
After doing your product or service testing and validating using established marketplaces (rather than having your own website), you have a couple of choices or paths to take:
- Scale up on what you already have by developing and launching your own branded website to sell your winning product or service to your paying customers. Launching your own website should be the last thing to do after focusing on product or service creation, design, testing, validating, and launch. In the long run, you have better control over the profitability of your product or service because you are not at the mercy of marketplace owners who are known for changing their terms and conditions of use without notice, including charging more commissions. What’s more, you want to build up your own customer list because ‘money is in the list’. With control over your very 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 or services to them.
- Continue using these established marketplaces and sell your products or services. You should plan to continuously improve your product or service offering as competitors will set in. You need to be a step or two ahead of your competitors. Unfortunately, these marketplaces do attract copycats because of their transparency.
- Roll out newer versions of your product or service with improvements suggested by your customers. You refine it further until you can scale it up and launch your own website (Option 1). You continuously improve your product or service offering in collaboration with your customers until you are truly satisfied with the quality, benefits, and features of your product or service so that you can fully meet your customer’s wants or needs.
- Scrap your original product or service idea altogether if it’s a flop and go back to listening to your customers for new ideas and pain points. Continuously refine your idea for a specific target customer group and pain points. Use established marketplaces to continuously test and validate your product or service.
- Abort your desire to start a side gig or business altogether without further loss of time, effort and money. Limit your losses. You have given this a go and you should not have any regrets whatsoever for lack of trying. Some personality types are just suited for working for employers or people, whilst others are just natural at being business owners. And there are those who are in-betweens. Don’t stress over this option; it’s just who you are. You will find out more about yourself during product or service testing and validating.
When you take the first option, there are truck loads of information and resources out there to help you develop and launch your own website. There’s no shortage of information and resources. It’s a matter of choosing who you trust and believe.