Startup Advice - What business should you do without capital? Ask Evan

Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another edition of Ask Evan. Today I'm going to answer a question from Fatima, who's one of my Facebook readers, who wrote in about how to start a new business that doesn't require money. So specifically the question was, "I'm a third-year student in accounting." "and wanna be an entrepreneur after I finish my course. My question is, what business should I do, especially since I don't have capital right now?" Thank you, Fatima. So, thanks for the question. I think it's a great question, one that a lot of people are thinking about. How do I start a business without a lot of money? The key here is you don't need a lot of money to start almost any business. There are very few businesses where you absolutely need to have a ton of money to get started. And so what I would encourage you to do is instead of trying to find an opportunity where you don't need a lot of money, Look at something where you feel that you can add a lot of value to and that you're really passionate about. That's gonna be the key. If you look at any famous entrepreneur, how they got started, and you ask them what the key to success was, almost always one of the key reasons that come back is that they had a strong passion for that business. It wasn't just to make money. They wanted to change the way things were done in a certain industry. They wanted to add a lot of value to people's lives. So don't just go out looking for the opportunity to make money. You'll often find that the, the people who just try to make money rarely do. And it's because they quit at the first sign of trouble. They don't put in the hard work to get past the hurdles that come in front of them. And it's only because you love your business so much and you love what you're doing and you love how much you're helping people, that's what gives you the fuel to keep going even when times get tough. A lot of entrepreneurs say that they would do what they were doing for their business even if they weren't making any money because of how good it makes them feel, the value that they're adding. And they would go and get a job to support this passion of theirs. So That's what you want to try to find. You want to find what you love so much that you're really helping other people and you would do even if you're not getting paid to do it because you really love what you're doing. For me, I love helping entrepreneurs. I love making these videos. I love talking to entrepreneurs. I do a lot of this stuff without getting paid. I'm making this video for you because I'm not getting paid to do it unless there's some secret person paying me that I'm not quite sure about. Really, I don't make a lot— I don't make money from these videos, but I do it because I love doing it. I love helping entrepreneurs. Hopefully you can take this advice, go away, put it into your business, and become successful. So that's what you want to find with your own entrepreneurship venture, something that you're really passionate about where you wake up excited to do it and you know you're adding a lot of value to people's lives. And that's going to be the key, is helping other people. From there, if you're looking at ways to not spend a lot of money, and that's key. You find a lot of the successful companies started just from bootstrapping. Start a service. So service companies are easier to start up. They don't fail as often as product companies or retail companies. The idea here is you're not spending a lot of money to get started, but you're spending a lot of sweat equity. You're putting your time in to see if it'll work. The challenge a lot of people face on the product side is You spend a lot of time creating this product, you spend a lot of money buying this product, making purchases and you have huge inventory and then it doesn't sell. And you've invested all this money into this product that then is sitting in your basement or your, you know, extra room or whatever it is and you can't sell it and so you're out of cash, you have to go back and get another job. Where if you're doing a service, it brings you closer to your customer, you really understand what their pain points are and how you can help them and then you're not spending a lot of money You don't really need to spend any money to start a service-based business. You know, you can potentially have a business card, maybe a website if you want, but you don't need to spend money. It's more your time. As you're able to build it up and you work with a couple of clients and you know, you might be tired of trading your time for money, then you can expand into a product type of business. But you have some cash flow built in from your service. So definitely look at whatever field you're really passionate about, you feel you can add a lot of value to your clients, start a service around that. The third key point that I want to leave you with is try not to spend money until you're making money. Anybody can spend money. It's easy to spend money. If I gave you a million dollars, you can go and spend it a million different ways. I'm sure you could. And this is a challenge I had when I was in the venture capital business. We saw so many entrepreneurs come to us looking to spend money. What you want to be is that entrepreneur who can earn the money. And so try not to go out and make a lot of purchases and spend any money on your business until you're making something back. And this is something I've tried to apply to all of my new ideas with my company. Every new thing that we try out, I'll spend some time and energy putting it into it, see if it'll work, but I won't spend any money on it until I'm making some money from it. Example, just a couple times with these videos, it's a good example because you're watching this video, so it's a good medium. When I first started doing video, I really wanted to get into video because I found I was really a visual learner and I learned a lot more from video than just hearing something or reading something. So I wanted to get into video, but I didn't have a a revenue model behind it. So I didn't want to go and spend money on, you know, camera, lighting, tripod, all the things that you need to make a video work. I didn't want to spend money on it because I didn't know if A) I would commit to this and continue doing this, if I would like it or not. You don't know if you're going to like a project until you actually get into it. And I didn't know if I'd ever be able to make money from it. So the quickest way to do it is just start trying it out. I took my regular camera and just started recording myself, answering some questions that people had written in to me. And I really did like it. And if you go back on my YouTube channel and look at the earlier videos, they were really bad. The quality of the content was pretty good, but the lighting was bad, the camera was bad, the audio was bad because I didn't spend money on a microphone. So that's how it kind of started off, but I continued with it. I realized I really enjoyed doing it, and eventually I was able to find a way to monetize the videos, not all the videos, but some of them through corporate sponsorships. And the money from those ones helped me create all the other ones. So I can spend the time I want doing these types of videos, even though I'm not getting paid to do it, because it's fun. But it gave me the ability to go out and buy a camera, buy a tripod, and buy a microphone, and get some lighting, hire an editor, create an intro, have some music on it. Just to improve the experience and make the videos that much better. So it all started from nothing. Like, it could have gone nowhere. I could have spent all this money on this gear, and I did 2 videos and shut the whole project down. And now I'm stuck with all this extra gear that I'm never gonna use again. So try not to spend money until you're making money. This is kind of a long story to kind of get back to that point. Whatever business you're going into, if you're passionate about it, and you're creating it around the service, you don't need to spend money. You can find ways to be able to get some contracts without spending money. And then even though they may not be big contracts, if you can prove to yourself that, hey, I'm able to make a little bit of money here, and you really enjoy doing this, this is definitely what you want to keep doing, then you can invest some of the money that you make back into the things that will help you grow the business bigger and bigger, bigger, and continue to expand from there. So I hope that helped. Maybe not the specific answer you were looking for. People sometimes want a kind of bullet shot, here's the exact way to go about and do it and the type of business you want to run without any money. But the good news is you can do it around anything. And the more you can build a business around your passion, the more money you're going to make and the more fun you're going to have too. And that's part of it. If you're going to put in a lot of hours running a business, you might as well be doing something that you really enjoy and that you know you're helping a lot of people out. Instead of just trying to make some money off of it. So hopefully that helped. Uh, if you guys liked the video, please give it a thumbs up below. It really makes me wanna do more of these videos for you guys. And if you have a comment about this video or if you have a question for your own company, feel free to leave it in the comment section below. I always read those. I try to respond to everybody as much as I can. Uh, so thank you and I'll see you in the next episode.