Ryan Daniel Moran explains how to start a business with just $500 a month. Spend it all on audience-building through Facebook ads, email lists, and YouTube videos. Once you have eyeballs, you can pre-sell products, run Kickstarter campaigns, or promote affiliates without ever buying inventory.
Rhodian Pakota asks, if you only had an extra $500 a month, how would you start a business?
So look, real simple. This is an easy one. If you've got a limited budget and you have no idea how you're gonna launch a business, every dollar of that budget needs to go into some sort of audience building. If you have the eyeballs, you have everything. The reason why some businesses just launch out of the gate is because they can pull a lever and put their message, put their business in front of hundreds or thousands of people and the right people. I don't care if you're blogging, if you have an information product, if you're selling physical products, if you sell a service, if you've got a SaaS business, I don't care what it is. The biggest thing that determines if you're going to succeed or fail is can you get whatever it is that you want to monetize in front of the right people. So if you're on a limited budget, the best thing you can do right now is, is to be able to.
Put all of the right people into one place. When my buddy Sean and I launched our yoga business, which we sold a couple of years ago, we had this question of, okay, what do we do to make sure that we can take sales from day one? So all we did was run Facebook ads to a Facebook page. We spent like $10 a day and built up a few thousand likes. And this is back in the day when likes actually meant something and people saw your posts, but we had a few thousand people in there. And that's why day one, when that product hit Amazon shelves, we were able to take sales right away. Now, if you don't have a product yet, if you've only got 500 bucks, you're probably not gonna do a big inventory buy. So still, the best thing you can do is put the people that you want to serve into one place. Run Facebook ads to an email list and start promoting affiliate products to them. Start advertising one video on YouTube to build up the audience. So when it comes time for you to do the information product, you can put up a video and you've got 50,000 subscribers that you built up from that 500 bucks a month that you spent for six months building up the audience. You pull that lever now you've got the eyeballs and you can send them wherever you want. I mean, if you could have the ugliest sales page in the world, you could not even have the product made yet, but you could pre sell it on an ugly sales page if, of course, you have the eyeballs in the first place. So that's the chicken egg issue. And my recommendation, build up the eyeballs, and then you can pull the lever and make the sales however you want. I just recorded a podcast today with Kirsten Ross. We were talking about Kickstarter. She said the number one thing that drives Kickstarter success is, is if somebody has an audience, if they have the eyeballs. So, heck, build up the audience, figure out what the product is later. You could run a Kickstarter, send the audience to the Kickstarter. You get all the funding that you need for the business rollout, you buy the inventory, and now you're in business because you spent 500 bucks, you lost 500 bucks a month building up the audience. That's the work that most people aren't willing to do, and that's the work that will put you ahead of everybody else.
