START A BOOKSTORE WITH NO MONEY – Here’s HOW!

Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael, and welcome to another edition of Ask Evan. In today's video, I'm going to answer a question from one of my readers, Santosh, who was asking about how to start a bookstore without any money and wanted my advice. So he wrote in asking, "Dear Evan, I want to start my own bookshop, but I don't have any capital." How should I approach and generate the amount? Please guide me. Santosh. So Santosh, you can potentially go out and get investors for this. I think it's going to be really challenging for a bookshop. You know, if you have really good personal line of credit, you can talk to the banks. Otherwise, it's probably not going to be an opportunity they would look at. And for angel investors, you might find the right person to invest, but usually angels are looking for opportunities where they can earn a much higher return on their capital than a bookshop. They want to see higher growth type of companies. And it's a lot harder because you don't have anything set up, right? It's just an idea at this point. So where a lot of entrepreneurs make a mistake, especially when they're getting into retail operations, if they're setting up stores or cafes or restaurants, you burn through a lot of money in setting up that operation, and a lot of times it doesn't work out, and you've maybe eliminated your life savings, you've upset your investors. And so what I always encourage entrepreneurs to do is you can think big but start small, and try not to start spending too much money until you're earning money coming in. So there's a couple ways to do it for your idea, and hopefully these can help you, you know, guide that business forward. So the first thing I would do is instead of launching your own bookstore to start, partner up with other retailers and see if you could have a little book rack within their business. And what that does is helps them drive new people into the store, you give them a little bit of the profit, And you can also see what type of books sell and what type of books don't sell. Alright, so instead of setting up your own bookstore, buying the wrong books and spending all this money, you can quickly test with pretty low cost way and it's a plus for the retailer because they can get new people coming into their store. It works better when it's a smaller retailer, smaller outfit that you're working with and hopefully you can set up these types of profitable relationships to test your concept. The second thing I would do is try to partner up with other organizations that may not be retail operations but also serve your same target market. So if you're selling religious books, partner up with different churches. If you're selling books about coffee, partner up with different cafes. And again, offer to sell books within their establishment, give them a little bit of the profit, and you're going to help drive people to learn more about their organization. Again, it lets you test to see if the model works or not, and you're not out a lot of money to set up that type of business. The last thing I would do is with retail operations, it's really important to get the location right. You can spend a lot of money setting up your bookstore, but if it's in the wrong location, even if you have the right books, you're not going to be able to turn a profit. So it's really good to be able to test different locations to see which one works before you commit a lot of money to setting up your bookstore. So what I would try to do is set up partnerships with different retailers in different locations to see what works and what doesn't work. You can also have book sale days and set up, you know, outside different stores just for one time and see if it works, see if you're able to draw people, see if it's the right type of demographic that you want to target or not. And it's a quick way again to test to see if you're attracting the right people or not before you go out and invest all that money into creating a bookstore. But by doing all these little things, like partnering with different organizations, you're able to test, see what works, what books people like, what location works, start building up a list of customers, people who like you, know you, want to buy more from you, and you have money that starts to come in, which then you can use to go out and actually create your bookstore. And if you do decide to go out and try to get investment, at this point you have some traction, you have some momentum, you have something behind you more than just an idea, and it'll be a lot easier to go out and raise that capital that you're looking for. So I hope that helps, Santosh. If you guys like the video, please give it a thumbs up below, and I'd also love to hear your thoughts and feedback if you want to leave a comment under the video. And stay tuned for the next episode.