Evan Carmichael walks through starting a business with no money: find your why, identify customers with a painful problem they'll pay to solve, talk to them before building anything, and let their feedback shape your product. Revenue follows when you solve a real problem.
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Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another edition of Ask Evan. Today I'm going to answer a question from one of my readers, Katu, who wrote in saying that he wanted to start a business but wasn't sure how to do it or where to start. So, some quick advice for you. I always start with the why. So why are you starting your business? What are you really passionate about? You want to build around something that you have a really strong interest in. You're not just trying to make a lot of money, which is great and will happen if you're really, you know, doing something valuable, but you want to start around something that you're super passionate about. So tap into your skills, tap into what you're really excited about, where if you can help a lot of people, and that's where you want to kind of get started with your business. The next thing I would do is think about potential customers you can help. And the best way to build a business is around the customer who has a problem, who who you can help solve that problem, they're willing to pay you for. So before you start spending a lot of money creating your business and promoting it, start talking to potential customers. So whatever passion you've identified that you feel you can help people out with, go start talking to people who can potentially pay you to solve a problem for them and build your product or service around those issues. So you get close to your customer and you have money coming in quickly. Right, a lot of companies do the wrong thing. They start off with a great idea that they think is a great idea, and they launch it, spend a lot of money, and nobody wants to buy it, or they would buy it if it had these tweaks. So you spend a lot of time and effort and money going down the wrong road before you start listening to your customers. So better to start talking to customers before you start your business and build it around the paying customer as much as you can. As you grow, the amount of money that you're going to make is going to be in proportion to how much value you provide. So the more you can help people, the more value you can bring them, the more you're going to get paid, the more money you're going to make. So hopefully that helps as a quick starter. Start around what you're really excited about, where you feel you can add a lot of value. Start talking to customers and get their feedback and build it around someone who has a pain and is willing to solve it and is willing to hire you and pay you money to solve it for them. And then remember that how much money you're going to make is going to be directly related to how much value you bring and how much you help people. So hopefully that helps. If you guys liked the video, please give it a thumbs up below, and I'd love to hear what you have to think. If you want to leave a comment under the video or you have some advice for Katu as well. So thank you, and we'll see you in the next episode.
