How to Start Your Online Business in 5 Minutes | The Entrepreneur’s Guide

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 YouTube viewers, Christian. Hey Christian, thanks for the question. He's 16 years old. He has a t-shirt company that he wants to launch and he's not quite sure how to do it and wanted my advice on kind of how to get started. Should he have a website, etc.? So Christian, to answer your question, what I would do, I'd try to make sure I start without spending a lot of money. And it's easy to spend money, right? Anybody can go out and spend money on any business idea. If I gave you a million bucks, I'm sure you can find a million different ways to go out and spend it. But as an entrepreneur, it's not about how much resources you have, it's more about how resourceful you can be. So I would try not to spend money until I'm making money. And that's kind of one of the golden rules of entrepreneurship, at least for me, is not to spend money until I'm making money. So don't go out and spend a lot of money on a really expensive website or create tons of inventory, which a lot of entrepreneurs will do, especially in your kind of business. They'll create tons of inventory and then it's sitting in your garage and you can't sell it and you've wasted all your money. So I'd launch a simple website with some designs, put them up, and try to start selling just the designs that you have. So don't go out and create huge inventory and actually have physical product. You can print on demand or print really limited quantities So you're not spending a lot of money and you start pumping up interest in your product. So you have your simple website, go out and start marketing it. Start talking to people who are in your industry, start talking to people who are in your age group who you think might be interested in buying your t-shirt. I try to create guest posts with bloggers who are, you know, in the design field or might have potential customers for you and just start spreading the word. Get some feedback to see if people like your designs, if they have other ideas for how the designs could be better. And you know, your initial few designs may not be the ones that make you rich, right? It may be the ones that come later down the road. So you don't want to blow all your money on those first few designs, say, oh, this isn't going to work, and then shut down your company, right? So try to get the feedback, try to start building up some momentum online and offline with your peer groups, people who can potentially influence some buyers for you. Get their feedback, pour it into the new design, and as sales start coming in, you You may not be making a lot per sale because you're printing on demand, you're printing really limited quantities, so the profit margins aren't great, but you're also not carrying huge inventory. And when you see that these products are starting to sell, then you're able to maybe make slightly bigger orders, invest a little bit more in your business because you have money coming in. So really, really, really try not to spend money until you have money coming into your business. Take the feedback from your customers and use that to continue to grow. Hopefully that helps Christian. Thank you for watching all the YouTube videos. For those of you who are watching, I'd love to see the thumbs up if you like the video. Please give it a thumbs up below. And if you have a question or if you have any other thoughts for Christian, some advice for him, feel free to leave a comment under the video. I usually try to respond to as many of those as I can. So thank you and stay tuned for the next episode. Mm-hmm.