Vixen is launching a business while supporting her family and managing a visual handicap. Evan recommends starting part-time with a service business to keep cash flowing, then moving to products once you're stable. Services need less money upfront and teach you what customers actually want.
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Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another edition of Ask Evan. In today's episode, I'm going to answer a question from one of my newsletter readers, Vixen, who wrote in frustrated about trying to start a new business. Vixen has a lot of pressures to bring in money for the family and also has a visual handicap and is finding it challenging to get this new business off the ground and wanted my advice on what type of business to start and how to get it going. So, Vixen, thanks for the question. Hopefully I can give you some advice to help you out. The first thing and most important thing, at least in my mind, to be a successful entrepreneur is you have to follow your passion. You gotta do something you love, something you feel you can really add a lot of value to other people's lives. So, you know, something— think about what you do every day that helps people and see if there's a way you can turn that into a business. Or you might take it another way. Think about something that you've solved for yourself, a big frustration of your own that you solved, and maybe you could have other people pay you to do that same thing for them, solve frustrations for them. So I try to start around there. You don't necessarily need to start full-time. You could start this on a part-time basis, get to know the businesses that you're interested in. You still make money while you're learning about the world of entrepreneurship. So you don't necessarily have to just jump right in. You can still make money, make your mistakes, you know, working for somebody else, and then see if it's also for you before you go launch your own business. And then the last bit would be to try launching a service. And product businesses are really expensive, usually require a lot of inventory, a lot of capital to get going, and if you make a mistake, you've got all this stuff hanging around. Where service allows you to get paid more quickly, you know, faster, right up front you get money. And it ties you to your customers. You can really build around them and what their pains are. You get to know your customers a little better, and you can bring in a significant and ongoing steady stream of cash, which then you can use to launch your product business, uh, afterwards on an ongoing basis. Service businesses are harder to scale, but they're easier to start. So you can start with the service business, bring in the money, and then turn your attention towards creating a product that might be a bigger business in the end. Hopefully that helps. Uh, if you guys like the video, please give it a thumbs up, and I'd love to hear what you have to think. Uh, if you want to leave a comment under the video, and we'll see you on the next episode.
