Ryan Daniel Moran (Capitalism.com) explains how to start a business with $1,000 or less, drawing on two personal case studies: (1) at age 18 he used roughly $1,000 of graduation money to build a website and do affiliate marketing; (2) in 2013 he bought 1,000 units at ~$6 each (≈$600), used additional funds for Amazon/website setup, grew the business to about $1M/month revenue, and sold it at a $16M valuation. He presents two practical approaches for entrepreneurs on a tight budget: (A) spend the $1,000 solely on lead generation and sales (website, content, email capture), or (B) spend it to create a strong prototype to attract outside capital (crowdfunding, investors, pre-sales). The video emphasizes leveraging other people’s capital, focusing capital on what proves product-market fit, and prioritizing cash flow.
Questions this video answers
December 27, 2020.
Twice.
18 years old.
About $1,000.
$6 per unit; 1,000 units (total $600).
Chapters
Hey, what's up guys? I'm Ryan Daniel Moran from capitalism.com and in this video we're going to talk about getting started as an entrepreneur with $1,000. Now that seems like a low amount of money to start a business, especially one that could really be big or pay for your life and give you financial freedom. But I want you to know I've done it twice. So I have two times that I've started a business that has made at least a full time income with $1,000 or less. So this is not like theory how to stuff. I've actually done it with a thousand dollars or less twice. The first time was in College. I was 18 years old and I took my graduation money which was about $1,000. And I had a friend who was, who bought a guitar amp with his graduation money. I had another friend who just spent it all on books for college. And I said, I wonder if I could use this money to bring back friends, meaning invest it, bring back other money. How could I get this to grow? How can I make some money with the money that I just got? Because $1,000 is like the most amount of cash I ever had up to that point. So I was going to school thinking I was going to be a pastor and pastors make $30,000 a year at the time. And so I wanted to have something on the side that could grow and be a meaningful amount of money because I wanted to live a different kind of life. I always wanted to be rich ever since I was a kid. I wanted to be a multimillionaire. So the way that I spent that thousand dollars was on one website. I built one website and the purpose of the website was to sell stuff. Now this is before Facebook, this is before there was any social media at all. This is even before WordPress or any way that you could build a website. So I was sitting there hand coding websites. I mean I was figuring all this stuff out at late nights on my dial up computer. So just so you know, if I can do it with $1,000 with no web coding software and with dial up Internet, you can still start a business today with $1,000 or less. The second way that I started a business with thousand dollars was back in 2013. This was the business that is still responsible for more than half of my wealth. It was the company that I wrote my book 12 months to dollars about. And it was when I did my first order of inventory, six dollars a unit. I ordered a thousand units, that was 600 bucks. And I then I took A few hundred extra bucks to set up an Amazon store, build a super basic website. I sent that inventory over to Amazon. We sold through that inventory. That business ended up growing to about a million dollars per month and in revenue over four years. And I sold that business at a $16 million valuation four years later. So those two businesses both started with under $1,000. And so for the rest of this video, I just want to give you a few things that will be helpful along your journey, as you are bootstrapping with a very limited budget of what you need to focus on in order to be an entrepreneur with such a limited budget. But first, before we continue with the video, and if you've already found something in this video to be helpful, then turn the thumbs up blue because it helps me rank in the algorithm and help more people become entrepreneurs, even if they've only got $1,000. All right, let's keep going. So what does all this mean for you? You with $1,000 or less, how do you start a business on a limited budget? There's two ways. The first is going to be the way that most of you are thinking about starting a business right now. And the other is the way that I would consider to be the smarter way to be an entrepreneur. And I'll explain both of them. The first kind of the bootstrap way is for you to spend that thousand dollars to only get leads and sales for whatever your business is. Here's what I mean. When you're starting a business, cash flow is the lifeblood. It's what keeps you going. You have to get cash flow in order to stay in business. So with that thousand bucks, you've got to do the minimum necessary to allow you to do one thing, one thing, and it's take a sale. You cannot spend that money on anything other than getting in front of people who want to buy whatever you got. Which means that you either need to have a product of your own or somebody else's product to sell. And for me, I did affiliate marketing when I was 18. I built that one website with those few hundred bucks, and I was just ranking for keywords that I knew people were searching for when they wanted to buy other people's products. So today that still works, by the way, building little websites where you rank for keywords that are around products that people want to buy. And you can do that on a very limited budget by working really hard, which is exactly what I did. You can also do that with things like YouTube videos, like I'm doing right now. So with your Thousand bucks. You can start a YouTube channel, talk about the things you sell, talk about the products, talk about the journey that that customer is on and where the product might fit into that. And as you do that, the exposure is free. It's small, but it's free. It's small at the beginning, it builds up over time. And your thousand dollars can just go to building whatever website you need to collect the leads and follow up with the those leads. I would also put $100 into getting an active campaign account on aweber account or some account to be able to collect email addresses. I wish I had an affiliate link for you to sign up for one. I don't pick whichever one is cheapest. I think what is. I think mailchimp might be the cheapest one. And I think you can get started for free on mailchimp. So any way that you can just collect the lead and follow up with the lead to make the sale is the way that you would get started. You just got to have something to sell, whether it's an affiliate product through affiliate marketing or it's something that you have of yourself to sell. Even if you are just like an insurance salesman, I think the biggest opportunity for people who have insurance agencies or realtors or you're in some sort of profession where you're selling the product that is coming from the corporation is for you to have your own website, for you to put content on the Internet and to drive that back to leads and sales.
The second option to build a business and become an entrepreneur with $1,000 or less is to remember that you don't need to use your own capital or your own resources to build a business. In fact, it's kind of dumb to use your own resources and your own capital. The job of the entrepreneur, the job of a capitalist, is not to fund the whole business. It's to build the vision for the business. It is to get so clear about the type of business and the type of change that you want to bring about in the world. And you're so clear on that when you communicate that to customers, to vendors, and to investors, that they can't help but want to work with you. So if you can remember that your job is to simply bring together resources and it's other people's resources, that's your job. Then you'll realize that you don't need to use your own capital. You can use bank loans, you can use investors, you can crowdfund. You can do all kinds of things in order to kick off a business. Even if you don't have any money of your own. Here's what you need to spend that thousand dollars on. You need to spend the thousand dollars on getting a great prototype. That's where your thousand dollars needs to go. So if you're building a piece of software, if you're selling physical products, if you're building some sort of agency, you need to have some sort of prototype, some sort of model to show potential customers and potential investors that you've got something great. So I mostly do physical products and I like the food space, so I invest in food brands, I like supplement brands, I like beauty brands. And so my investment of that thousand bucks goes to how do we make a great prototype, a great product with good packaging? And I can get that out the door for 600 to $1,000. And then if you need to raise some capital from there, you can crowdfund or pre sell or raise money for that first round of inventory, which might cost a few thousand dollars in order to get off the ground. So if you're doing this on a shoestring, remember that you don't need to use your own capital to grow the business. Besides, when somebody is running a business, they don't try to do every job themselves, right? They hire employees and they hire agencies, and they have partnerships and they have a board of advisors. Business is a team sport. It doesn't require you to know or do everything. And one of those things that you don't need to do is put in your own money, but you do need to have a great product. And that's where all of your focus and all of your capital should go at the very beginning to have something to sell that you can show to investors, show to stakeholders, and show to potential customers.
There's no lack of capital in this world. There's no lack of money in this world. There's no lack of ideas in this world. There's no lack of people in this world. You don't need to have the right amount of money or the right idea or the right relationships in order to start a business. What this world is lacking is people who are bringing together all of those resources to create a great business. It requires that you are willing to be of service to the customer and to all the other stakeholders. That doesn't take money. And if you do your job well, then other people will want to invest in your company again. The other option, of course, is for you to only focus on sales and to make the process as short as possible to get leads for what you got and then close them and that can be a nice cash flow business. If you found value in this video, let me know in the comments because you know, I've done this. I've built companies with a thousand dollars or less that have been very, very successful. And so I would love to help you on your journey. Make sure you're subscribed to the channel if you aren't already, because helping entrepreneurs build businesses and invest the profits is our mission here. And if you're starting your journey, you can download our free resources over@capitalism.com start hey, I'm Ryan Daniel Moran from capitalism.com thanks so much for watching this video and I'll see you next time. Take care.
