How To Start: The First 5 Steps To A $1M E-Commerce Brand

How do you start? How do you begin to build a million dollar business? What are the first few steps that you need to do in order to have a seven figure business 12 months from now? I have helped hundreds of entrepreneurs build million dollar businesses. My book 12 months to 1 million has sold hundreds of thousands of copies. It's the playbook to building a million dollar business. Still, I am asked, how do you start? How do you get off the ground? And I know that if I can get somebody just moving in a direction, then we've got enough to work with to help them build a million dollar business over the course of 12 months. So today I just want to share with you the five steps to get off the ground. To get your idea, to get the first initial people who are interested in your product to verify that you're going in the right direction. And I think that if you do these five steps over the next seven to 14 days, you will make more progress than if you're thinking about it for the next seven to 10 months. So I'm going to break down the five steps that you can do this week in order to start the million dollar business. The first step that I want to share with you has nothing to do with business. I know I told you that I was only going to give you the stuff that you could do this week. I want to give you one that I think will change your life and actually give you permission to build the million dollar business. Because so often the million dollar thing is such a roadblock in our head and you think about it and you're like a million dollar business. That's impossible. I don't know anybody who builds a million dollar business. So I want to get that out of the way so that you have permission to be able to build the long term million dollar business. The first thing that I would suggest, and this is not financial advice, I'm an idiot on the Internet that you follow for some reason. But the first thing that I often tell my peers and the people that I know personally to do before they even start a business is to just invest $500 a month into long term stock market investments like the S&P 500. The reason why I tell them that even though it has nothing to do with business, is because if you invest about $500 a month for 30 years into the S&P 500, that compounds into a million dollars. Even if the business doesn't work out, even if you never start, even if the thing fails, even if everything else in life goes completely wrong, you still Have a plan to become a millionaire. And hopefully over time, as your business becomes successful, hopefully as you make more money, as you invest in skills, you'll make more and more and you'll be able to invest more and more. You'll be able to invest in your lifestyle and of all the things that you want. But if everything goes wrong and all you do is put a little bit of money away Every month for 30 years, you become a millionaire. And that's important because it removes this idea that we have to do certain things and have to make it happen quickly in order for you to be a millionaire next year. Because when you're operating from that energy, you tend to rush, you make mistakes, you try to force things, and you can't calmly and strategically execute the plan to building a million dollar business. So my advice to my friends, to my family members who are like, how do I become a millionaire? I say, hey, first thing, let's just put you on the slow path of becoming a millionaire. And I know you don't want to wait 30 years to become a millionaire. But even if we do everything wrong, you're still going to get there. Because 30 years is going to come and go regardless. And I would like for those 30 years to come and go and you be a millionaire rather than you spending the $500 a month and not being a millionaire. So set up the investment plan and now let's make the process faster by building a business. Because nobody wants to wait 30 years. You probably don't even want to wait 10 years. And it doesn't have to take 30 years or 10 years to get there. But if you know that you're eventually going to get there, now we can work on the fast lane. So set up the millionaire slow lane. And now we can calmly approach the fast way without having to force it. Because we know we're going to get there anyway. So that's the first step that I'd recommend. Now let's go into how to build the business and the foundation of the brand that has a reasonable chance of becoming a million dollar business over the next 12 months. Now we're gonna go into the fast lane. The first step to building a million dollar business is to pick the person that you will serve. A lot of members of our community get stuck here. They're over obsessing about the person. So let's make this really simple. The way you pick your person is to pick a big market and then to pick a small subgroup of that market. So in my case, I have a brand that is fitness supplements for dads. Dads are my market. Fathers are my market. Fitness supplements are one of the products that I sell. We have other ways that we can serve that dad, too, but supplements is one of them. Dads are my market. That's my person. Why? Because I'm a dad. I went from dad bod to father figure, and that's a transformation that I want to help people with. Dave Asprey's market is coffee for biohackers. That's how it started anyway. Biohackers is his market. Coffee was one of the products that he sold to that market, and then it became bars and collagen and retreats and all kinds of stuff. Mark Sisson sells condiments to the paleo diet community. The paleo diet community is his person. Condiments is one of the products that he sells to them. He also sells frozen foods and a whole bunch of other things. But the paleo community is this person. The condiments are one of the first products that he launched to that paleo crowd. Tara Bosch from Smart Sweets sells candy to the low sugar community. The low sugar community is her person. Candy was the product, and they sell a whole bunch of different kinds of candy, and they sell some other products too. But it started with candy as one of the first products. The low sugar community was her person. So your job is to pick the person, the person that you'll serve. One of the ways that you can crack that is by just choosing a big market and then a subgroup of that market. The second way to find that person is to choose someone you know, likely yourself and how you identify. I identify as a dad. I identify as an entrepreneur. I identify as handsome. I identify as goofy. I identify as a Cleveland Guardians fan. These are the things that are part of my life. I can serve any aspect of what I just listed out. I can serve dads. I serve entrepreneurs. I serve Cleveland Guardians fans. You can build a business around any one of those identities. If you don't pick yourself, let's say you pick your spouse. Your spouse does crossfit. Your spouse is a mom. Your spouse is a parent. Your spouse is a teacher. You pick that identifier, and that becomes your community. That becomes the person that you're serving. Now, I don't want you to obsess over who you pick for the purposes of starting. Just pick one. Because the process becomes really quick when you just pick the person, pick the community, and then we can do all of the other steps to be able to come up with product ideas and Launch those product ideas to that community. So even if you're not going to go with it, just pick a group, a subgroup of a big market, or an identifier of someone you know. Pick one, write it down. I'll wait.

Did you write it? Now let's move on to the next step. The second step to actually building the business is to make a list of four products that that person or that community currently buys. Where do they currently spend money? Do they spend money on food, on supplements, vacations, gear, accoutrements? What do they already buy? And make a list of at least four. This is a bit of a test. If you can't come up with four things, it means you don't know your market or you're not really interested in this market, you're not really interested in serving this person. So if you can list four, that's a good sign that there's enough to go with on this person. There's enough ideas, there's enough products for you to be able to build a brand around this person. If we take the case of Dave Asprey, he sold coffee to biohackers, right? But then it was MCT oil and then it was bars and the bulletproof vibe and then meditation retreats and it went on and on and on and on. If he just wanted to be a coffee company, then it would have been coffee. Then high calf coffee, decaf coffee, a French roast and a dark roast. It just would have been a coffee company. It wouldn't have been the company for biohackers. So the test here is, can you come up with four different products that that same person buys? I don't mean to insult your intelligence here, but I do see entrepreneurs come up with a product idea and they start selling it and then they come up with a brand new product idea that does not serve the same person. And now they're actually building two businesses. That is not what we want. We want one core customer who buys multiple things and comes back to us over and over again. And if our product line is specific to one type of person, then that person will come back and buy multiple products and see you as the preferred brand for them. That's what we're going for. We are not going after selling one product and then coming up with another product idea. Our job is to pick a person and that's our business. Then we will create multiple products that serve that person so that we become the go to source for that person. So I sell to dads in one of my businesses, my product line is the same product line as some of the other supplement companies that exist in the world. Now, I can sit here and tell you why ours are better. I can tell you about the scientific studies behind the ingredients in our products. I could tell you all of that. It would not matter if I didn't frame it in the way that it would help dads. So if I sit here and talk about how the product line is better and the ingredient profile is this study behind, doesn't matter unless you're in the market for that product or if you're my person. So if I go to just the general market and talk about our ingredient list and our supplement and why it's better, no one really cares. What they care about is will it create the result that I want for me? Well, guess what? If you're a dad, let me talk to you. Let me share with you how our product is going to help you on your journey of transformation. So we need that person to be identified and then the four products that they already buy so we get some ideas about what that person's already buying during their journey. So that's how we know that we might have something that's an indicator that we know enough about our person and our market to be able to consider launching a brand. We don't need to make any major decisions yet. We can now move on to step three, which is where we're going to figure out how we can serve that person and how our product line will stand out so that we're the go to source for our target market. Step three is to look at those four products that we wrote down and look at other people who are selling those products or other solutions that are similar to that product. And look at the reviews on Amazon, look at what people are saying on Reddit, look at what you like about the product, what you don't like about the product, and ask people who are also in your target market what they like or what brands they prefer when they're shopping for these products. What this will do is it will give us a clear list of benefits and challenges in the market. We're not reinventing products here. We are simply looking at what's working for other brands and what our customers like and don't like about the solutions that they have. When we do this, we'll get a very clear idea of what types of changes or product positioning or marketing will hit with our target audience. So some people, it may be as obvious as people saying that they buy this product, but they don't feel like there's a brand that is for them. That happens all the time. So people will buy products, but there's not a brand that targets them specifically. In that case, we've got a real winner because we don't even need to change much about the product line. We just need to create a brand that speaks directly to that person. But in most cases, there will be things that you notice or that other people share with you about what they like about a product or don't like about a product. And we start to get some ideas about what our four products can look like and how they will be different from all the competitors. Now remember, your product does not need to be better than everybody else's. It needs to be specific to your target person. That's the difference. The quote that I want you to remember here is that when you're building a brand for a person, different is better than better. When you're targeting a person, you want it to be different enough to speak to them, not better than everybody else's. People will choose your product based on the difference that they perceive that makes it for them. Sometimes that's just marketing. Sometimes that's just packaging. Sometimes it's just the copy you use to talk about and describe your product. It's not even the product itself. It's. It's the fact that it is for them that is what you are trying to identify. So if you find those differences that your person would prefer, that doesn't exist or isn't talked about by those other product lines that are making those products, that's how you know you have winners. If you start to see obvious improvements, obvious differences that you can make to create a product that's specific for your target person, that's a green light. That's how we know that we have something that we can build a brand around. So let's recap here. We have a person that we serve. We create a list of products that they already buy, and then we start to look for the benefits and the challenges of the products that already exist. And what we're looking for is if we were to make a similar product line, how could we make it different enough that it was directly targeted to our ideal person? Those are the first three steps. We can do all that in about three to four days. Ask a couple people for feedback, make a list of the differences that you notice, what you like about some brands and don't like about other brands. And all of a sudden we're within striking distance of a product line that is going to serve a target Audience, we're getting close already. Step four. I don't mean to insult your intelligence here, but step four is about the most basic 101 marketing that everyone in business needs to do that most people in business don't do. And it is simply to set up a very basic landing page that collects an email address. That's it. Audience building is the secret magic elixir that will make your business work. And almost no one does it. All of my clients do it, which is why we have hundreds of million dollar case studies. Almost no one does it, but everybody who does it is successful. You build a very basic landing page. I'm not going to teach you how to do that. You can look it up on YouTube or Google that Tish. And you can find a bunch of tutorials about how to set up a basic landing page that collects an email address. There are free tools out there for collecting email addresses. There's a bunch of services out there that will let you have up to like 500 email addresses for free and then you pay once you're over 500. I think Mailchimp does that. There's a bunch of them. Just put up a basic landing page that collects an email address. And all this needs to be is a waiting list page. You can talk about how you're thinking about building this brand. You're building a waiting list and you are putting people first in line for when your product is ready. You can use chatbots to write this copy. I don't care. Your job is to set up a basic landing page in about 30 minutes that collects an email address. Why do we do this? Because now we're starting to build a basic audience that will buy our products as soon as it is ready. Your job until your product is ready for sale is to stack the deck so that you can take sales on day one. We can do that by having 100 people on an email list. I don't care how you build that. I'll tell you how in a second. But I don't care if you just emailed everybody in your Gmail and texted everybody on your phone and said, I'm thinking about doing this. If this sounds like something you want to follow along with, go to this page. If you did that enough to have 100 people waiting and it was your target market, you're going to take a sale on day one. And that's all we're optimizing for here, is taking a few sales on day one so that we can get the snowball moving. Once the snowball is Moving, we can talk about how to make sales happen faster, how to accelerate your sales rate, get reviews, improve your conversion rate, all that stuff. All I want you to think about this week is stacking the deck so that we can take a sale when we're ready. You do that by building a simple landing page that collects an email address. Then you are going to make an announcement post on social media saying you are considering starting a food brand for vegans. You're thinking about starting a decor company for tiny homes. Whatever the product line is for the person, you're going to make an announcement, post about it, say why you're going in this direction, what you're thinking about doing, and invite them to join your waiting list. You're gonna post that on social media. You might send that to a few of your friends that match that target market. You might post that in some Facebook groups that you're already in because you're part of that market. You're just gonna get the word out with a couple of announcement posts. Start with one and see what happens. You, your first opt in might be your mom or your brother or your best friend. That's okay. Put it out there. So that there are people who know that you're thinking about going in this direction and they're following along for the journey. That first email subscriber is a big deal and you would be shocked at who comes out of the woodwork to support you. When you are sharing about the journey that you're wanting to go on. You would be shocked that at the number of people who say, hey, I know this influencer. Hey, I'm plugged in this Facebook group. Hey, have you checked out this brand? I know this person who works at this company. Hey, I know somebody who would want this product. You'd be shocked at the number of people who just come out of nowhere to support your business. When you are announcing where you are going in the vision that you want to create. You don't need to have a big three year multimillion dollar vision at this point. You just need to share where you want to go and that you are considering launching this business. You announce that you send them to the email capture page. Now we're building a list, we're building an audience and our job is going to be to stack that deck as big as possible. So let's recap up to this point. First we pick a person. Then we list the four products they already buy. Then we do some research about those four products, what we like, what we don't like. We get other people's take, we look at what other brands are doing and we start to see how we can create a product line that would be tailored to a specific person. If you get stuck at that point, then maybe that's not the business for you. If you've got lots of ideas and things are jumping off the page that might be the business that you want to get into, then we start to build the audience. Audience building, it's so scary. Just put up a basic landing page that collects an email address and make an announcement post that this is the business that you're thinking about building. You can always shut it down and say, I didn't go in that direction, I decided to go in a different direction. Here's my announcement post, where I'm going now with just that. You'll have a handful of people on an email list paying attention to what it is that you are doing now. On another day we can talk about email follow up strategy, how often to email them, what to say, all of this, all I want you to worry about right now is, is can you get people who will raise their hand and say, huh, this is interesting, I wanna follow along for this and do they email you and do you respond and do you have interesting conversations with these people? This is all that matters right now. So now let's move on to step five, which is how we're going to start to build that audience. Have you noticed that I have not talked about like working with manufacturers or getting reviews or launch strategy or anything. That's because when you do these basics right, all that other stuff comes very quickly and easily. And in fact there are some people in our community who are pre launching their products and their businesses before they even have product ready. And in one case I'm thinking about a guy in our community, his name is Miguel. He did $150,000 in a month from just announcing that his product was going to be ready in a few months. And if you want it, you can go take some pre orders on this website right here. A lot of our members pre launch their products before they're ready so that they have the capital to go negotiate with suppliers and get good terms and place big enough inventory orders more on that another day. The fifth step to getting off the ground and starting to build a million dollar business is to send attention to that lead capture page and just start to interact with the people who are paying attention. My recommendation would be that you do some post on social media every day that is documenting your journey as an entrepreneur or Commenting on what you're noticing in your research of this brand. Now I just want you to do this for seven to 30 days. So here are some ideas of how you could do that. You could take a screen capture of a brand that you found on Amazon and then ask people, what do you like about this product? What don't you like about this product? And then have a follow up post that says, I'm thinking about developing a product like this. If you want to be on the waiting list for this product, if I launch it, go to this website. Easy enough. You could do that five to ten times a month. The next would be a video of you saying, hey, so I've been thinking about starting this brand and the reason why I've been doing this is because I see that there are other products in the market but there's nobody who does it for CrossFitters or dads or moms or parents. And so I've been thinking about doing this and something that I've noticed is that the brands who are out there are sometimes good products but they're marketed to rich people or single parents or they're marketed to other people. So I wanted to create a brand or I'm thinking about creating a brand for people like me. And if that's you, I'd invite you to go join my waiting list. It's and you link to it. There's another idea. You commenting on what you notice in the marketplace, like hey, I'm here at Whole Foods or I'm here at Kroger and I notice this brand does it this way. I think that's really interesting. I like this because I don't like this because hey, I'm gonna be launching a brand of my own. Cause I wanna serve dads or moms or crossfitters or what travelers or whoever. Go over to this website and your email address and you'll be first in line for when I launch this thing. Here's another idea. Hey, check this out. I found this brand that sold for $12 million. It's in the same space that I wanna get into. Isn't that interesting? I haven't launched my business yet, but I'm thinking about it. And if you want to follow along for the journey, go to this website and enter your email address. It's just you commenting on what you are noticing in the space. Whether that is what's going on in other brands or it's hey, I've been doing some research and I realized it might take like $10,000 in startup capital. I'M kind of freaked out about that. I don't even know if, I don't know how I'm going to do that. So I think one of the things I might be doing is pre launching this so that I have the capital to be able to create this product. If you wanna be first in line for when I do that, go over to this website. You're also sharing your own thoughts and feelings about growing the business yourself. So those are a couple of strategies for creating content that sends people over to the waiting list. If you do that for seven to 30 days and respond to the people who reach out, you respond to the people who reply to your emails that you send out. Guess what? Your audience building friends. And when you've got about 100 people on a list which does not take very long, you've got enough to do damage, you've got enough to do a product launch. Now from here we can talk about launch strategy, we can talk about getting sales momentum, funding, we can talk about all that stuff. But if you're new on your journey, those five steps that I just outlined will give you more momentum than pretty much any book, any course, any strategy, any big idea. Because you'll be in motion and you'll have leads. You have, people have raised their hand and said, I might want to buy this product. And you'll be in the game building an audience and in the direction of serving a specific person with a product line that you feel confident and convicted about. Even if your product is not ready, that's the starting line. If you do just that, if you're like a lot of our members, that's enough to have a $5,000 launch, a $10,000 launch, a $25,000 launch, $150,000 launch. Yes, these are all numbers that are fairly recent within our community. If you do these five steps, I want you to comment on the YouTube channel or send me an email@ryanapitalism.com and I just want you to share with me what you did and what happened. And from there we can decide if you're going to actually launch this business. You can pre launch the first product, we can order samples from manufacturers, we can list the product on Amazon.com and send our list there. But what we've done in this process is de risked failure. Because if you've got a couple hundred people have raised their hand and said they want this now, we can test their responsiveness, there's a good chance that we can pre launch the product and fund our business growth, or if we make an inventory order and we place it for sale. We'll send it to our list and it will sell slowly, it won't sell quickly. And then we go, eh, maybe this isn't the business I want to be in, but we can de risk the entire process with a few hundred people who are following and if we're actively creating content that talks about where we want to go and then stage two will be the launch and getting to 25 sales a day. And when you've got a little bit of an audience, it does not take long to get to 25 sales a day. And if we've got four products at 25 sales a day at a $30 price point, you've got a million dollar business my friend. So those five steps are what I invite you to do. To just start to just get off the ground and in motion. And if you do them, you will be on the road to $1 million. If you enjoyed this, if you actually did the steps, let me know and I'll think about doing a part two about what to do next. In the meantime, subscribe to the channel. Because I mentor and invest in entrepreneurs, I put my own capital into businesses from our community that launch by following this process and need help getting to multimillion dollars and having a multimillion dollar exit. Because I help entrepreneurs build seven figure businesses and have a multimillion dollar exit. And if that's the journey you want to go on, this is the place to be and I can help you on that journey. I'm Ryan. Danny Moran, my company's capitalism.com I hope you enjoyed today. Let me know. Thanks for watching. I'll see you next time.

And now a quick word from Kyle Carnahan, one of our members from the capitalism.com community.

Yeah, so I'm realizing like man, I'm a fireman but like what am I leaving for my family? I was looking at my retirement because I'm going to get 60% retirement. I got to become an entrepreneur man. Like otherwise I'm leaving, I'm leaving a lot on the table man. As soon as that opportunities to join the incubator, it was like no question. And now I know that feeling like when it's time to invest in something, it's time to invest in something. That shift in mindset of being around these people that are playing this game elevated my expectations for myself to such a high level that like now I have zero roof of what I believe I'm capable of. You know, it's like in this community there's this give and give and give. And everyone's just giving back to each other, right? And everyone's giving back to each other and everyone's making more money and everyone's being more successful and they're just giving back to each other. And that's the game. Like, who can give the most? And I'm taking everything I'm learning from the incubator and I'm starting to use it in my business now. And all of a sudden I'm, you know, like a year later, I'm driving down the road and I look at my wife. I was like, holy shit. I was like, I'm a fucking entrepreneur.

When I joined the incubator, I had my belief and my trust. All this takes faith. You have to take a step forward in the dark, you're going to get nowhere. So stay stuck or just make a move. So don't sit on the fence. Stop being a fence sitter. Make a move. Either, either get out of here or make a move. You get the right coaches in place and the right people around you, I mean, it's just inevitable if you do the work. So, man, capitalism.com and Ryan Moran has been just in integral part of my growth and it's been amazing. So thank you.

If you found value in this podcast and you're ready to go Deeper, here are three resources where we can help you. One, you can grab my book 12 months to 1 million on Audible or Amazon. It has over a thousand reviews and it's the playbook to building a seven figure business. Second, you can join our community of entrepreneurs who are following a plan to build a 1% net worth by building businesses and investing the profits you can get. Plugged in@capitalism.com 1. And third, if you're looking to go deeper and build a seven figure business that you can sell, you can work closely with us inside the Capitalism incubator and you can get on the waiting list and find out what we do over at capitalism.com Inc. That's capitalism.com Inc.