In this live webinar, host SPEAKER A introduces Evan Carmichael’s second installment of his “12 Steps for Startup Success” series, focusing on moving a startup from launch to the survival stage where cash flow covers expenses. After a brief recap of the first six rules, Evan presents rules 7‑9: (7) Be different and be you – differentiate through unique features or personal storytelling; (8) Start with a service – a low‑cost, cash‑flow‑positive model that brings founders close to customers and can later seed a product; (9) Sell the business – prioritize B2B sales to secure recurring, higher‑value contracts. He reinforces each rule with quotes from famous entrepreneurs and real‑world examples (e.g., Zappos, Martha Stewart). The session also announces interactive elements (live Q&A, prize giveaways, free consulting calls) and promises two end‑of‑session bonuses: a step‑by‑step pitch‑creation guide and a 100‑word bio template to help founders market themselves. The overall tone is motivational, instructional, and slightly promotional, aiming to equip entrepreneurs with practical mindsets and tactics to achieve sustainable revenue.
Chapters
Let's hit it off. Evan, thank you so much, and I'm going to hand it over to you. All right. Well, thanks, everybody. It's always a pleasure to be able to connect with fans. You guys are coming from the newsletter or Facebook or Twitter or wherever you're coming from. It's great to be able to do these and hear your questions. So last time we had an awesome presentation. It was great to get all your feedback so that we keep doing it. So this one is the 12 Steps for Startup Success Part 2. So we're covering and going on to the next step from the last presentation. A little bit quickly about me. I know a lot of you guys probably know most of this stuff. So I had a background in '19, built and sold a biotech software, hooked up with a venture capital company, raised expansion capital, and my goal is to help a billion entrepreneurs through doing things like this. And a whole bunch of miscellaneous facts you guys can check out whenever you want. But I want to get to the content. So this is about survival, and the biggest thing for entrepreneurs is you got to get to the survival stage. If you're just starting up a new business, number one goal is to get to a place where you're earning enough money to pay the bills, right? It's awesome to have great big vision. It's important to have that, and it keeps you motivated to keep going. But if you're not paying enough, if you're not making enough to pay your bills, it's going to be hard to stay in business. A huge reason why a lot of entrepreneurs have to close down is because they are not making enough. So these two workshops are about how do we get to the point where we're making enough money to survive. Carl quickly mentioned about the questions. You know, as they come up, you can always type them in. Carl is going to be monitoring those questions as they come in. There will be some time hopefully at the end too to be able to answer questions. So, you know, as they come in, make make sure you're writing them in. And we are going to be giving away some prizes randomly based on the questions that come in. One person is going to get a free half an hour call with me. We're going to talk about your business. I had an awesome one last month, so it was great to do that. And we're also going to be giving away 3 packs of our Famous Entrepreneur trading cards. So hopefully you could be a lucky winner. Just a quick recap of what we did last month, the first 6 rules. Follow your passion, work to learn, start part-time, build around the customer. The amount of money your income will make depends on how much value you provide. And model success. And I gave you guys a sample mentoring script that you can use. There's a lot of interest in that. Hopefully you guys have actually gone out and taken action on that. I don't want to spend too much time recapping from last workshop. The video is going up on YouTube. If you're on our Facebook page, it's already started going up. I think on Tuesday, so you can check those out. We're going to get to the next, the next rules, and I have a bonus one at the end. So quickly, it's going to be: be different, be you, start with the service, sell the business, don't spend until you earn, don't let the naysayers get you down, give it your very best, and the bonus one is going to be don't quit. And at the end, since the mentoring script works so well, I'm going to give you guys two free bonuses at the end. One is how to create your pitch And this is going to be, whenever you're talking to somebody, introducing yourself, you have to have a good pitch. And I get bombarded with entrepreneurs telling me, you know, what they do, and their pitch is just terrible. And if you have a good pitch, you're going to be able to get customers, investors, partners, media, and explode your business. So I'm going to work with you guys on how to create your perfect pitch, and then also how to create a quick 100-word bio, which can also help sell yourself and you can include in all your marketing material. So that's going to be at the very end, hopefully we got time to work through that properly. So let's go. So startup rule number 7, so continuing from the first 6 from last time, be different and be you. This is really important. So if you're starting any business as an entrepreneur, you've got to do something different to stand out, right? You're going up against competitors who have been in the business for X number of years, and if you're just doing the same thing that that everybody else is doing, you can't expect great results, right? If you want great results, you have to be doing something different. So you have to find a different way to stand. You have to find something that's unique about your business that can help you stand out from everybody else. And maybe it's a specific feature you have in your product or service. Maybe it's the degree of service you provide. Maybe it's going after a specific niche where you can really understand your customers. But you have to do something different. You don't want to do the same thing everybody else is doing. Or you're going to get the same or worse results. And the next thing is be you, and this is really important. People like to buy from people, people like to connect with people. So a great way to put some personality into your business is to show your story, right? And nobody else can be you, so it's a way that you can be different and leverage that. When I first started EvanCarmichael.com, it actually wasn't about me, even though it's off my name. It was about the famous entrepreneurs, some of the success stories. People started writing in saying, "We want to learn about you and your story and why you started this site." So it's been shifting. I've told a lot more about my story. If you think about it, people don't usually like to buy from big companies, but they like to buy from entrepreneurs where they get to know the owner and see that they're personal. They have a really strong passion for their business. Our number one rule from last month was do something around your passion. Passion. So if you are super excited and passionate about your business, you want to share that story and let people know about it, right? So it could be just a written text of what, you know, why you started your business. It could be a video of you on there telling people, you know, welcome to my website. Whatever it is, you want to inject personality and tell your story. And if you can get that passion across, people are going to want to work with you. Passion is contagious. They're going to want to be a part of what you're doing. And if it's between buying from you who's really excited and passionate and has this great story, and buying from your competitor who's, you know, no-name XYZ company, who are they going to buy from? Right? It's going to be you. So you want to be able to leverage that story. So be different, be you. Just a couple quotes from some famous entrepreneurs. This is from Anita Roddick who has recently passed away, but she's from The Body Shop, founder. "Whatever you do, be different. That was the advice my mother gave me, and I can't think of better advice for an entrepreneur." If you're different, you'll stand out. Another quick one from Lillian Vernon: "I want customers to know and relate to me as an individual and understand that my company is a reflection of myself." So think about your own business. Think about, again, how you can stand out and do something slightly different, and also how you can tell your story and let people know the personal side of you. Next, start with a service. This one is a little controversial, but I always prefer, if you can, when you're starting up, to start around a service instead of a product. There are a couple of reasons for it. First, the service is a lot cheaper to set up. A lot of times entrepreneurs fail and have to go out of business because they run out of money. It's hard to run out of money on a service-based business because the only cost really is your time. So you can last a lot longer. If you look at the success rates of different companies, you'll see the ones that have the highest success rates are the ones who provide services, and the ones who fail the most are the ones that provide products or have a lot of capital expenses. So you want to start with a service because it will give you a better chance of success. Now it's great to have a vision of having a product, and the reason why I like a service is it also brings you closer to your customers. So if you're targeting a certain niche, you start working with customers in that market, you get to know them a little bit through the service you're providing, and then when you're really close to them, you can launch a product. And the chances of that product being successful goes up dramatically because you've been in contact with these people, you really understand what their pain points are, and you're likely to get some orders. Even if the product doesn't make a lot of money right away, you can still stay on that survival plane and still be able to run your business because you have cash flow coming in from the service side. A lot of people don't like a service business because you're essentially trading your time for money. Uh, and that's true where product is easier to leverage compared to service, but our focus here is I want to be able to make sure I can stay in business and not have to go get a job again. So if you can start a service, get close to your customers, overwhelm them with value, get some money coming in so you can ensure that you're able to keep your business going, and then as you get feedback from your customers, you're able to launch a product from that That could be your big vision, big goal, but you're making sure that you're still in business because you have that successful service going on. So start with the service if you can. This is Tony Hsieh from Zappos, sold to Amazon. We're a service company that just happens to sell shoes. So they, you know, sell shoes online, but they really value the service side of things. And then Martha Stewart, "To be a really successful entrepreneur, you must constantly strive to understand your customers. You must also appreciate them and care about their happiness." and I think you get that a lot more, especially at the beginning, by doing a service because you are in such close contact with them and you can really build around their specific problems and pain points compared to doing a product. I don't want to discourage you from doing a product business. I think it's awesome. It is a great way to get more leverage from what you're doing, but it's a lot harder to get to that survival point selling a product compared to selling the service. So I want to make sure that you guys are still around, you know, like a year later, you're still in business, you're doing well, you got some cash flow coming in, and you're ready to really explode. Number 9, sell the business. If possible, I always recommend trying to do B2B sales to start instead of B2C. So B2B is selling the business and B2C is selling to consumers. The main reason is if you're selling to business owners and you're finding that you can be a really valuable part of their business, they're going to spend more money with you, they're going to hire you on an ongoing repeat basis, and you're going to get a lot more cash flow coming into your business. It's really hard to establish cash flow. This is a challenge for new startup entrepreneurs. How do I get the cash that I need on a regular, you know, consistent basis so I can pay my bills and stay in, in business. And if you're selling to a business compared to selling to an individual consumer, they might spend 100, 1,000 times more with you than any one individual consumer. So that's a good opportunity to make a lot more money coming in consistently and regularly. And if you overdeliver like crazy and they see you as a valuable part of their company and what they do, then they're going to want to keep you on board, right? There's no reason for them to shut you out. Where consumers can be a lot more fickle. You know, they may buy from you only once, and then your constant challenge and struggle is to go out and find more and more and more of these consumers. So that's harder to establish, a lot more expensive, and can take a lot more time to get to startup— sorry, survival mode compared to if you are selling to business. Again, your longer-term goal may be to sell to consumers, but I try to rejig my business model a little bit at the beginning to try to sell to businesses, try to get that recurring cash flow coming in, and then you can expand out your model from there. It's not the usual model, I guess, but if possible, you'll find that you'll get more money coming in on an ongoing basis and you're going to get referrals from them, you might be able to do more business internally through other departments at that company. So it's a great way to be able to establish yourself if you can and get to that survival point that we're all looking for.
