Evan Carmichael says most new entrepreneurs either never start because they think they need money, or blow their cash on inventory and fail. Start with a service instead: reach out to your network, solve one specific problem for a client, overdeliver, and get paid immediately. Once you have revenue and customers, you can build a product.
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How can you start a business without money? I got a great question from one of my YouTube viewers, love you guys, Paul, who wrote in to say, "How can you start a business without money?" This is a great question because a lot of entrepreneurs do one of two things. A lot of entrepreneurs don't start because they feel like, "I don't have enough money to start a business, so I'm not going to start." And they let that limiting, negative personal belief hold them back. And then other entrepreneurs go out and they spend whatever money they have to start their business and they end up not succeeding. You end up, you know, if you're making t-shirts, you buy 1,000 t-shirts and they just sit in your closet, they sit in your garage, and you have this inventory just sitting around not making you any money. Here's the key, okay? Here's how you start a business without making money. You start around a service. The reason why a service is so important to get started is because it gets you close to your customers, it brings money coming into your door so you can put food on the table, so you don't have to worry about going back and getting another job, and it means you don't have to start with a lot of startup expenses. Okay, you don't need to have an office. I don't want you to go out and spend money on an office, spend money on business cards, spend money on a website, spend money on brochures. Just start talking to people. Let them know what you do. Let them know that you can help. See if there's a way that you can help out companies that are already in your network. You're starting around a service. If your longer-term vision is, "I want to have this product, you know, I don't want to just trade my time for money," that's okay, but start with the service because it gets you really close to the customers. It helps you understand their needs. It helps bring money in the door, and then you can build a product to leverage your time. And when you do that, you have an expertise base, you have a customer base that you can sell them your product to. But the way to get started at the very beginning is not to spend money. You don't have to spend money to make money. You just have to get out there and start talking to your ideal customers. Let them know what you're all about. Show them you can help them and work on a small project. Okay, when you're working with your first customer, if you don't have a lot of experience, a lot of background, if you're coming in with a big pitch, a big expensive pitch, it's risky. They're probably going to say no. There's a lot of people that they may need to talk to. Just find one simple, small thing that you can do to help them. Whatever their biggest pain point is, just one little thing that you can work on and then overdeliver like crazy. So you don't have to write a proposal, you don't have to make a sales pitch. You're helping them with one small thing, and if you overdeliver like crazy, you want them saying, "Wow, that guy was so good. I wonder if there's anything else you could do to help us out with." and you're in, and you're gonna get more deals and more deals and more deals, and you can increase your prices, and then you can launch new products. But the way to get started is to start a service, and don't spend money until you're making money. Believe. For those of you watching, like the video, give it a thumbs up below, let me know what you think, leave a comment, ask a question below in the comment section, and click on my face to subscribe to the channel. Thank you guys so much, I'll see you soon.
