Evan's Top 10 Rules for Success for Side Hustlers ft. @madlyjuicy - Part 2

Alright everybody, welcome to another YouTube Hangout. Super excited to be here. This is part 2, so I recently did an interview with Erica from Madly Juicy and she wanted to ask me about my top 10 rules for success for millennial entrepreneurs who are starting off part-time, how to build a full-time business, and we got cut off. My internet shut down. After 7 rules. So Erica, welcome back. Let's do this again. Yes. So what we just talked quickly before we went live that I would recap quickly the first 7 that we got through and then introduce 3 more so that she had it, she can do her full 10 for her audience. Luckily I wrote down the first 7 because otherwise normally for me is a pfft. It's fine. And so we did this in collaboration with my live audience, and what we came up with for the first 7 was number 1, follow your passion. And this is mine. This is one that I always believed that entrepreneurs should follow. Follow your passion. A lot of people do business just trying to make a lot of money, and you see people on TV make a lot of money. It's like, wow, that's what I want to do. But the way to get there is that you have to do something that you love. And the people who chase ideas just to make money never make it, but the people who truly love the work, like you love what you're doing, that's, that's, that's the secret to getting through. Number 2 is have an environment for greatness. And so, you know, you look behind me and you see, you know, these great people that inspire me on a daily basis when I walk into my office. And, you know, you may not have— you look at the millennial entrepreneurs, they may not have a lot of greatness around them. They may have friends who are putting them down, or family don't believe in entrepreneurial ventures. You need to start filling your head with resources, with knowledge, with information that help you become that great person. Because if you don't, then you're going to, you're going to look like your parents, you're going to look like your friends, right? You're the product of the 5 closest people around you. And so, you know, it may mean switching your friends a little bit, but it could also mean just You know, instead of playing Pokémon GO, start watching video interviews from successful entrepreneurs. Start reading more books, you know, start in your downtime doing things that help you be that best version of yourself. And so having that on a consistent basis can help you get to where you need to go. Number 3 was it's not about the resources, it's about the resourcefulness. A lot of entrepreneurs, when they're starting up, especially complain, well, I don't have the money to do that. You know, I didn't, you know, I don't have the right education. My parents aren't rich, you know, I didn't go to the right school, whatever the excuse is. And if you look at some of the most successful entrepreneurs, people who you look up to, whoever's on your list of your favorite entrepreneur in the world, chances are they started with less than what you have already right now. And the most successful entrepreneurs aren't the ones who start off with a ton of money. It's the ones who find a way to make the $1 that they do have stretch a thousand different ways and invest their hustle and energy and ideas and creativity into building something up. And so stop, stop blaming lack of resources because resources is not the thing that's holding you back. You need to be resourceful. Number 4 is making money is about providing value. And so if you want to make money, you have to provide value. You want to make money quickly, you have to provide value quickly. It's one of the fundamental rules of, of business, probably, you know, the, the most fundamental one, I guess. Whatever business you're looking at starting, look at how you can contribute to somebody else's life, how you can alleviate a problem for them, how you can provide value to them. The more you can do that, the more that they recognize and appreciate that value, the more they're going to be willing to pay you for whatever you're doing. And so instead of just looking at how can I make a lot of money, look at how can I help somebody in a really significant way. And if they really appreciate that, then that's your step to starting to make money. Number 5 was small decisions with the head, big ones with the heart. When your head and your heart are aligned, it's easy. That's, that's the path that you want to go down. The struggle becomes when the logical, safe, practical thing to do is on one side and then the risky, you know, not so certain path but that you really feel like you want to follow is the other way. And the challenge is your head can only think of a world that currently exists, where your heart, you can create a world that doesn't yet exist. And so just making a list of pros and cons is not the way to make the big decisions in life. You have to trust your heart and what you feel most passionate and excited about. Just like if you're thinking about you know, marrying somebody, you don't just make a list and then decide based on that list, okay, they have more pros than cons, I'm going to marry that person. They may have a ton of cons, but there's something there that just attracts you to them and makes you a better person. And so you have to go and test it a little bit more. And so quite often your head and your heart are not aligned. And the big decisions you want to make with the heart and the smaller ones, like, okay, I've made that decision. Now how do I do it? What are the practical steps to go and accomplish it? Those are the ones that you make with your head. Number 6 was build around your values. And so the thing that helps separate you from everybody else is that you, you know, you're a unique person. You have a set of values that are different. People will buy from you because they like what you stand for as a human being. And you have to draw the line somewhere as to what your business will or will not do. And usually, you know, the devil comes with a bag of gold. You know, there's an opportunity to do something that will pay a lot of money, but you don't quite feel comfortable with. What do you do? And that's where you want to stay true to your values. The values then also become good marketing for you. You know, if you look at Whole Foods, you assume that it's healthy. So people want to go in the Whole Foods and they're not checking the labels anymore when they go in because it's healthy foods. When you're buying from The Honest Company, it's honestly produced, so you're not as worried about it. And people will pay more when they know that the business is based on a real set of values. So understanding what your business is all about, what your core values are as a human being, and then bringing that to your business will help you make important decisions and also bring on the right customers for you, the right employees for you as you continue to build. I know this is like a part-time thing to start, but you want to have an eye towards the future for something bigger. And then number 7, where we ended, was that the suggestion was take more showers, and I converted that to allow for creativity, where really a lot of times we're so caught up in the day-to-day, in the grind, in the especially someone who's doing it part-time, they're in school, they have a part-time job, they're also trying to start their business on the side, they're doing a million things at once. When you're so busy and structured, it can also mean that you don't come up with anything new, exciting, creative, and different. And so you need to make sure that you allow time for creativity. I get, you know, a lot of my best ideas in the showers or on vacation or while camping or taking long drives. Right, and so making sure that you have that time, 'cause often your best ideas, that's when they're gonna come, when you're doing something relatively relaxing, but also kind of active. So like you're in a shower, you know, you're relaxing at the warm water, but you're also, you know, moving a little bit. So don't planning your life so it's so structured that you don't have allow, you don't allow yourself the time for creativity. So those were the 7 that we started with, a quick recap for those who, who may not have seen the first one. Now I'll add 3 more so we can round up to 10. Number 8 would be for me, don't spend money until you're making it. A lot of people feel like you have to make money to— you have to spend money to make money. And that couldn't be further from the truth, where I hate spending money until I'm making money. You know, like, especially as a student, as somebody part-time doesn't have a lot of money to then go and say, well, I want to start a t-shirt company and in order to get the price discounts I need, I need to buy 5,000 t-shirts and it's going to cost me $10 a shirt and that's $50,000. And maybe you borrow that from your parents or, you know, take out a huge loan or, you know, whatever it is. Like, that is not the best way to build a business because a lot of people then buy those 5,000 shirts and then it sits in their mom's basement because they've sold 3 of them and the rest are just sitting there losing money, where it's much better to invest your heart, your time, your hustle, energy into finding a way to add value to start making money before you start spending. So even as an example, like I still do this today, when I started my YouTube channel, I already had a successful business and I wanted to get into YouTube and I didn't go out and buy the gear and the lights and the microphone and the camera and the tripod and the green screen and all that stuff. Because I didn't know if I would stick with it, because I didn't know if it would work. And a lot of people do that. It's like, okay, I'm going to be a YouTuber. It's like, okay, to do this, I need to get the newest camera and tripod and all this stuff. And suddenly they're $8,000 in the hole and you do 2 videos and it's like, ah, you know, I don't really like this. And you're stuck with all this gear that you can maybe sell, but you know, at a reduced price. And so I'd much rather bootstrap my way, find a way to make it work, find a way to add value, and then invest money back into the business. As I'm growing. So whatever your big idea is, find a small way to get started. Find a way to put something out there that doesn't have to cost you money, that you can use. Like, if you're doing t-shirts, you don't have to go and print t-shirts yourself. You can use a print-on-demand service where they print them one by one for you. And yes, you lose— like, you'll lose profit compared to doing it yourself and buying 5,000 t-shirts, but it helps you build momentum, it helps bring some money in, and there's no risk for you of money going out at the start and you making the wrong bet. And when you start getting some results, then you can ramp it up. You can, you know, if you're making that t-shirt as an example and you're making only $2 a shirt because you're using some third-party service, when you see that it's working and you're building an audience up and you know what kind of designs are working, you're making some money, then you can invest that into making your own line and bringing it in-house. But find the smallest way to get started. And a lot of people use that as a reason for not getting started at all because they feel they don't have the money to get started. The money won't save you. You've got to, you've got to get started. Invest your hustle, time, and energy. Because what I hate seeing is people go out and take in a huge loan, uh, and you know, they're in debt for the rest of their lives because they made the wrong decision at the start, or they borrow money from their parents and they can never pay it back, and it's this constant fight because, you know, they took this huge bet. So make smaller bets and make them more consistent.

Okay, makes sense.

Number 9, evolve your business with you. So especially kind of in your younger years, there's a lot of, there's a lot of changes that happen. There's a lot of, you know, as you grow and you learn and you take on new experiences and you travel, you you change as a human being. And where a lot of entrepreneurs get stuck is they start a business and they may get some results, they may get a little bit of success, but then they find that they grow tired of the business, they're not interested anymore. And it's back to the first one of following your passion. Like, did you start it for the right reasons in the first place? Rule number 1. But also, sometimes people will, will just lose interest in their business. They're tired of doing the same thing day in and day out and day in and day out. And they started their business to not have to go get a job to not have to work for the man, to not have to be in a huge corporate job. And what they've done is now built themselves a job that they don't like going to and they hate. And so what can make you successful in the early days can be the anchor that prevents you from moving forward because you're doing the same thing over and over and over again and you grow bored of it. So the key to success there is as you change and evolve and grow as a human being, you need to bring that to your business. Your business should always be a reflection of what you are interested in. And so you want to always be bringing new creative ideas. You want to always be testing out new things. If you look at my YouTube channel, the videos that I started with are not the same videos that I have up now on my channel. You know, my interests have changed. What I want to do has changed. And so I brought that to my business, constantly experimenting. And that brings me satisfaction and joy where a lot of people lose interest after 6 months or a year or 2 years. Because they've stopped injecting new things. They haven't evolved their business as they've evolved as a human being. And then number 10, the last one for me is modeling success, where this is what really saved my company in the early years. I was 19 years old, had my first business. I was struggling. I was making $300 a month, you know, not able to survive. And I thought I had to come up with every idea myself. And what I realized was I'm not the first guy to try to do this before. And I looked at Bill Gates and how he started his business, Microsoft, and how he went from zero to one. I don't care how Bill Gates makes an extra million or billion dollars now, like zero to one, that's what I wanted to do. How can I learn from that? And through him was with partnerships. He found partnerships to ally himself with and helped him build Microsoft up. And that helped save my business. Formed my first partnership, I brought in $13,500, which doesn't sound like a lot of money, but to me that was like jackpot. And I've used that strategy ever since where I almost quit that business, where I told my business partner that I quit, that like, I'm tired of not getting any results. I'm tired of feeling like I'm not contributing value here. I'm out. I went from that moment to finding finally a way through. It was just a whole bunch of pent-up frustration without without getting any results. And so understanding that whatever your goal is, whatever you want to accomplish, somebody has already done it. Somebody has already done what you want to do. They may not have done it exactly the same way you want to do it, but there's lessons that you can learn from people who've gone before you. And so I would look at two things. One, people who you look up to in your industry. So if you want to be, you you know, a clothing entrepreneur, go look at people who've started clothing lines and see what they've done. How did they get started? Look at Calvin Klein, look at Russell Simmons, look at the people who've done it, look at Vera Wang, right? All these people have done it already. They may not be exactly what you want to do. If you want to do, you know, urban streetwear, you can still learn from Vera Wang and how she started her business. The second part is I would also look at— these are aspirational mentors— I look at people who are not in your industry people who you just look up to, just people who you're a fan of. You know, maybe you want to be a clothing entrepreneur, but you love Oprah Winfrey. Like, Oprah Winfrey, her message, her story, just you love her, right? Well, how did she get started? Learn from her success. Like, just because you're in a different business, it doesn't mean that you can't learn from somebody else. So, you know, I can learn from all these people. Nobody's in the business here that I'm in, but but I've learned from them and applied it to my company. And so modeling success, and probably the biggest mistake I made as a young entrepreneur was trying to figure out everything myself, where when I flipped the switch and realized I'm not the first guy to try to sell software before, this stuff has already been done. I just need to study their stories, study the clues, and apply it to my business with a little kind of tweak. That's when I started to see success. So That's it, those are my 10.

That's wonderful. I do have one question though. What is the most common mistakes that you see young entrepreneurs do when they're starting a business part-time?

I think it's a combination of a lot of these rules, just like the opposite, right? Like, they're not following their passion. Maybe one that I would add that's not in the top 10 here would be just patience. It just takes longer than you think it's going to take. Like, it's a grind, it's a hustle, it takes, it takes a long time. So like, if you're making a business plan, you know, you have your best case and worst case scenario. It's always worse than your worst case scenario. It just takes longer. And this was a real struggle for me because Anything I applied myself to when I was in school, I would do well at, right? If I applied myself to my studies, I would get good grades. If I applied myself to athletics, I would, I would run faster, I would score more buckets. You know, when I put in the work, I would do, I would get pretty quick results. With entrepreneurship, I was hustling, I was working every day. I was showing up at my business partner's condo. I was working from his dining room table because his you know, home office was too small. Every day I would show up and I would just like eat, live, breathe this business and it wasn't getting results. And I don't think people talk enough about how hard it is to get going and people don't share about the pain and suffering that they go through because then you look online about the next YouTube entrepreneur millionaire or young super success star and And you think, man, why? Why? Like, everybody's having all success. Why am I the only one sucking? Where most people suck at the start. That's part of the game. And so giving yourself, you know, permission to suck, I guess, and understanding that it's going to take time to build up, having a little more patience. And that's why the passion is so important, like tying back in the rule number one, because if you're only attached to the outcome, you won't achieve success. You have to enjoy the process. Like, the grind, the hustle, the work has to be something that you enjoy doing, because if you don't, you just— you're gonna quit. It's just too hard. So that hard work that other people look at and say, that's insane, I'm never gonna do that— you do it because you don't see it as crazy work. You enjoy that process. You know, I've made 3,000 videos plus on my YouTube channel. Uh, not all of them are public, but 3,000 videos. Like, that's a lot of work, but I love making YouTube videos, right? Like this right here, we're making another video. This doesn't feel like work for me. I enjoy it. I enjoy this process. And so that's where you need to find the thing that you would do even if you weren't getting paid for it, because you're not going to get paid for it for a long time. You got to have the patience to keep going through And I think a lot of entrepreneurs just quit too early. Like they started up and 6 months later it hasn't gotten them any money. So like, okay, I'm out. You know, that didn't work. It's not that it didn't work. You just didn't give it enough time or invest enough heart and hustle into it to make it work.

It's a great point because like you say, nowadays, the society sells us a dream that it's from one day to the next one, you become a success. So it's great that you're saying that because none of people knows about that, how long it takes to become successful.

Yeah, and there's no like— and I get that, I get asked that a lot too, like how long does it take? There's no rule, there's no like, hey, after 2 years you'll be successful. But even like if that's— if you're asking that question, then you might be in the wrong business, right? Like if you're asking that question like, okay, 1 year I'll be successful, and if you don't hit that mark, then you're going to quit. Then you're probably in the wrong business to start anyway. Like, if you want to be a singer and you haven't made it after a year, do you love singing? Like, if it's inside you and something that you have to do, then you have to keep going. You just find a way to keep going if it takes you 10 years or 20 years to get going. And so don't have an end line. It's just constant work. It's work that you love doing. And that's a consistent message. Like, look across successful entrepreneurs, successful musicians, successful innovators, successful politicians, you know, in any industry, the people at the top of their field, they love what they did and they just kept going through it even if they weren't having initial success.

Awesome. Love this.

Rishi Cup TV in the live viewers bringing up, first of all, she has a good point, mad juicy, so madly juicy. So she's like, what do you have to say? But also just talking about service-based businesses being easier to bring cash flow than products, which I always recommend at the start too. And it's good for millennial entrepreneurs just getting started off. It's way easier to bring in money and make money doing a service than selling a product. A lot of times your product doesn't hit. A lot of times your product costs a lot of money to get going. Where if you can start a service, you're just, you're trading your time for money. It's harder to scale, it's harder to build something much bigger based off a service, but it gets you close to a customer and brings in cash flow faster. So ideally you can start a service-based business and then transition to a product once you have cash flow coming in and you're close to your customers.

Okay, makes sense. I feel like one of the things that can be hard for millennials is pricing, but I know we already talked about it. But it's just, you know, at the beginning when you're launching your business, some are afraid to put the right price, you know, pricing that would help them live, basically, you know. So, like, for services like that, when you're launching a business, what would be your recommendation?

Sure, and pricing is not just an issue for millennial entrepreneurs, it's for all entrepreneurs. I think in general entrepreneurs underprice themselves. They don't get the price that they want because they don't believe that they deserve that price. Yeah. So they end up underpricing themselves too much. There's a number of ways to do it. You know, for just research point of view, you can look at what your competitors are charging just to get a sense of what's going on in the market. I hate basing my pricing based off what my competitor is doing though, but just so you have kind of a baseline for what's going on, there's standard like cost plus. So it costs me this much, I'm going to charge, you know, 50% margin. I'm going to get to this price. But really the best, the best way to price your product or service is based off of the value that you can provide to them. And sometimes it's hard to judge and sometimes you need to get out there and just start playing with your pricing and seeing what kind of feedback you get. You know, when I started doing videos with sponsors, for example, like brands started wanting to do deals with me, the first brand would pay me $500 to do one thing with them. And I thought, $500, that's great. You know, I probably would have done it for free just to put that brand on my website, you know. So, but they paid me $500. Right. And then what started happening was, you know, they came back, they wanted more. And I tried to provide way more value to write. Like they just wanted me at that time. They wanted me to write a blog post for the article. Wasn't even video yet. Write a blog post for the article, 300 words. And they hired 10 people to do that assignment. And I didn't just write 300 words. I wrote 1,500 words and I made a video and I promoted it to my newsletter list and I sent people and I was engaging in the comments. And so my post did better than the other 9 combined. And so when they were making a decision as to who do they want to bring on, they picked me over everybody else because I provided the most value to them. And then I started increasing the pricing, right? It went from $500 to $1,000 to $1,500. And then with that client, it stopped at $1,500. They, you know, they couldn't afford it anymore. And I moved to other clients who were like $2,000, $2,500. And so a lot of pricing is experimentation and seeing who can afford your services. At the start, though, you got to make sure you can provide that value, right? At the start, you got to, you got to test out the waters and see, like, pitch somebody. I don't know what they're selling. You're selling t-shirts. Okay, sell your t-shirt for $30 and see if you can get some bites to see if people like it and say appreciate it for what it is. Is there enough quality in it? Are you buying some high-end fabric that you're sewing into it, or is it some super cheap fabric that breaks down if somebody puts it in the wash? And being able to communicate that value to others. But I think in general entrepreneurs underprice themselves for the value that they do provide, mostly because they don't believe that they're providing real value when they are. We just don't have the confidence yet, and especially young entrepreneurs who are first getting started. So if you're putting your product and service out there, you're getting some results, try it. Like the next call you get, this is how it is, right? Like when a brand comes to me and they say, hey, how much does it cost to do this? $2,500. And like, okay, great. Okay, next time it's $3,000, right? Or $4,000, right? Other people are like, ah, $2,500. You know, like, you got to figure out where your ceiling is, where the cap is for the product that you're selling. Okay. I think it's a much better way to go than just trying to do a fixed, like, okay, here's our expenses, so we're going to add 50% margin and that's what the price is.

All right.

I love it. Well, we're out of time. We got through it all in half an hour. It's awesome.

Wonderful.

Erica, for everybody watching on my channel, what's the best way to reach out and follow you and learn more about what you're doing?

All right, so you can go on www.madidjussi.com, and for Twitter, it's @madidjussi also. You'll find us there. Pretty awesome.

I love it. Well, thank you, Erica, for the time. Thank you guys for watching. Continue to believe. Have a great rest of the week. I will see you soon. Bye-bye!