In this YouTube monologue, Evan Carmichael answers a viewer’s question about financial discipline for entrepreneurs. He emphasizes the single most important rule: never spend money before you’re earning it. He illustrates how easy it is to waste cash on inventory, equipment, or loans when the underlying product or vision is unproven, citing examples like buying 1,000 t‑shirts or expensive camera gear that ends up unused. Carmichael shares his own incremental approach—starting with a cheap DSLR from Costco, testing it, and only upgrading as advertising revenue and speaking gigs materialized, eventually spending about $3,000 on a full video‑production setup and hiring a small team. He explains the difference between expansion capital (for proven businesses seeking scale) and early‑stage R&D funding (high risk, often hard to raise), urging entrepreneurs to bootstrap, validate their market, and then justify further investment. The video concludes with typical YouTube calls to action.
Chapters
The most important financial rule for entrepreneurs. So I got a great question from one of my YouTube viewers, love you guys, Albert, who wrote in to say, "What tips of financial discipline should I adopt as an upcoming entrepreneur?" This is a great question, and Albert, the number one most important financial rule that you need to adopt as an entrepreneur is don't spend money until you're making money. It's easy to spend money, okay? Anybody can spend money. You are really good at spending money, right? If I gave you $1 million today, you could find a million different ways to spend money. Not everybody can make money, and that's the key difference. As entrepreneurs, we don't start out with a lot of money, okay? At least I didn't. If you've got some rich Uncle Joe who's willing to back everything that you're doing and dump all his money into your company, then fine, do whatever you want. But if money is important and and you don't have a lot of it, you gotta— it's gotta be used properly and wisely like it was for me, then you have to make sure that you're spending it properly, okay? So a lot of entrepreneurs do this, like, "Hey, I'm gonna launch a t-shirt company, so I'm gonna go out and I'm gonna buy 1,000 t-shirts and spend all my money on that," and you end up with 1,000 t-shirts sitting in your garage because you picked the wrong product. Or, "I'm gonna go out and I'm gonna start making videos and I'm gonna get my own camera and I'm gonna buy all the, all the tools. And then you get bored of it after 2 weeks and you stop and you got this equipment just sitting there in the corner. That's what a lot of people do. They spend whatever money they have trying to get something to go, but it was the wrong vision, it was the wrong product, it wasn't the right thing for them. And now you're out of money, or worse, you go and you take out a loan to try to make this thing happen. Maybe you put an extra mortgage on your house. And now you're forcing this monthly payment back that you can barely afford. Let me give an example. So with my, uh, with my videos, okay, I make these videos, right? You watch them every day, hopefully. When I started, my first videos were just with my DSLR camera. That's how I started. I didn't want to spend any money on it until I knew that I had a way to make money and that I was committed to keep on doing it. And then as I got a little bit of money from advertising and as I saw some results and I got a little bit of speaking gigs here and there, I could justify spending more money on it and spending more time. And I knew I wasn't getting bored of it, because sometimes you start something and then you get bored of it and you invest all this money into it. So I started spending a little bit more and I started upgrading my camera. And I kept it cheap. I went to Costco and my first camera was maybe $250, $300, and I slowly started upgrading my cameras through Costco. And I always went to Costco because you had 90 days to test it out before you had to return it. Whereas with the camera stores, they only gave you 7. So if I didn't like it, if I didn't use it, if I stopped having an interest in it, I could always just take it back and get my money refunded. So I slowly started increasing my budget as I started seeing results and I knew it was working and I knew I wanted to continue it. So now, how much have I spent? I spent $3,000 on my current gear setup. I have my camera, I got my tripod, I have my microphone. Maybe a little over 3,000. I have Christina who edits my videos. Hey Christina! I've got Monzur who does some research for some of my videos. So I have a team around me, so I have salary to pay that goes into making these videos happen. But this has happened because I've invested along the way into making my product better as I got results. Any company that you start, you can start small. You can bootstrap it up to prove that one, you're still interested in doing this, and two, you find a way to make money at it. If you can get those two things happening, then it's easy to justify putting more money into it, okay? Putting any money into it. I think back to my venture capital days and easiest deals to fund were the companies who just needed expansion capital, right? So in other words, They had already built up a business, they had already proven their market. Maybe they were only selling in their local area and now they wanted to take it nationally. Okay, and they needed marketing dollars to do it. That's the easiest kind of money to raise and they take the least amount of equity from you because it's not as risky, right? Because you've shown that it works. You've shown that it works on a small scale and now you wanna build it out. That's worth spending some money on. The hardest money to raise is the R&D, the early stage, the pure startup, because it's just an idea. And who knows, maybe you'll get tired of it. Maybe you'll try it for 3 months and then decide, "Nah, this isn't for you." Or maybe you'll make a ton of mistakes because you've never done this before. You haven't figured out the right business model and you have to pivot and pivot and pivot and pivot until you find it. And I don't want you wasting your money all along that path. So the number one most important financial rule for entrepreneurs is don't spend money until you're making money. Believe. For those of you watching, like the video. You can support me by clicking in the link in the description below. Leave a comment, let me know what you think, and click on my face, subscribe to the channel. Thank you so much. I'll see you soon.
