Evan Carmichael walks through finding a business idea: start with what you're passionate about and good at, then talk to customers about their problems and whether they'd pay. Target businesses for steady cash flow, keep costs low, and validate demand with a service before building a product.
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Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another edition of Ask Evan. In today's video, I'm going to answer a question from one of my Teles Talks business readers, Farzan, who wrote in asking, "How can I find a good business opportunity to start?" So, Farzan, that's a very kind of general question, but a great one to kind of get the wheels working and thinking about ideas to start working on. I think what you should start with is look at what you're really passionate about, what you really love doing. Think of your hobbies, think of what you're really skilled at, and where you might be able to add a lot of value for people. So if you can cross over, you know, what you're really good at and what you are, you know, passionate about, and then where you can add a lot of value to people, that's a big opportunity to be able to make money. Once you've kind of figured out a couple ideas, go start talking to customers. See what their problems are, see what potential solutions you can offer them, and think about ways that you can actually start making money from them. Ask if they would be willing to buy XYZ from you to be able to help them solve that problem. I always try to find business customers if I can at the start, because if you can show that you're an indispensable part of their business, they're going to hire you back for bigger projects and repeat projects. So you have steady cash flow coming in and pretty significant cash flow hopefully to help you grow that business, where consumer products or services are a lot more difficult difficult to make money. You have to sell a lot of them to be able to start turning a profit. So depending on the product or service, hopefully you can do that. And then I always encourage startups to keep your costs low. Don't go out spending a ton of money. You don't need a lot of money to get your business off the ground. It's not about resources, it's about resourcefulness. And if you can, start a service-based business. So go start talking to customers, learn about their problems, invest your time and energy into making them super happy and solving their needs. And then if you decide later on that a product-based business is for you, you have some cash flow coming in, you know you can support yourself, and you know the specific problems of your customers, and you can sell the product to them. But starting a product business from the start can be really time-intensive, capital-intensive, and a lot harder to make a success. So I hope that helps. Uh, if you liked the video, please leave a comment below. I'd love to hear what your thoughts are. And if you did like it, please leave a thumbs up too. I always get, uh, happy when I see thumbs up on my videos. So I hope I'll hear from you soon. And stay tuned for the next episode.
