The Smartest Way to Start a Business With $1,000

You don't need a trust fund, you don't need a venture capitalist, you don't need a shark tank pitch to start a real business. What you do need though, is a clear plan, a real problem to solve, and the courage to get moving. Today's question comes from Fran. And Fran asks, what if I only have $1,000 to start a business? What do I do? This is perfect because I've built the hundred dollar MBA to answer this exact question in a practical, no fluff way. And in this episode, I'm gonna walk you through, step by step, exactly what to do. In fact, what I did, if you only had a thousand dollars, if you have a thousand dollars or less, what I would do to start a business. And I'm talking about from scratch. And just a quick reminder, if you wanna ask a question, you can submit it at 100mba.netq and I'll answer it right here on Q and A Wednesday. Let's first just make sure we're on the same page. What are you buying for a thousand dollars to start your business with a thousand dollars? You're not buying a logo, you're not buying an LLC or, you know, a corporation. You're not buying Facebook ads, You're not buying any of this stuff. What you're buying is momentum. You need to get traction to see if you have something on your hands. The best thing about business is that you can try a whole bunch of stuff. And all you need to do is be right once. Okay? If you are right once, then you'll have a successful business. You'll have a way to earn an income, you have a way to earn wealth. It's incredible. But the point here I'm making here is the point we're trying to do. What we're trying to accomplish with this thousand dollars is making sure the business we have has legs and can earn us an income. It can earn us profit. The reason why I'm stressing this is because this is where most people absolutely blow it. They spend money on looking like a business instead of trying to be a business or becoming a business. So let's start with a three part framework that I teach inside our program, the A hundred dollar mba. The first thing we want to do is sell our skills first. Now we all have some level of skills that we've cultivated through our upbringing, through growing up, through the career we have right now, through the things we've studied. We have skills that we can utilize. We want to leverage whatever we have. Listen, business is challenging. I'm the first one to say that so. So the best thing to do is to leverage everything to our advantage. What can we take from our life, from our skills, from our experiences that can help us leverage ourselves and our values so that we can have a successful business, so we can have some momentum. This is why I always say it's kind of smart to start with a service based business. Why? Because it requires no inventory, no overhead and you already have the product which is you, your skills. I want you to ask yourself, what do I already know how to do that others would gladly pay for? Now this could be something that you're teaching, like a language or software or design. This could be something that you do like editing videos, writing content, designing logos. This could be coaching, helping somebody get to where they want to go, whether it's fitness or mindset or career prep. Start simple. Offer one service that package it cleanly and sell it to one person. You can use your first $50 to buy some really inexpensive but powerful software like Canva Pro. You can upgrade your Zoom account or start using a professional domain based email so you have a domain name and your emails on that domain name like omar@100mba net. With these types of tools, you're going to be able to sell your service through email, through outreach, doing calls, sales calls, through Zoom, creating beautiful graphics. You can even create a website with Canva as a part of their pro package. So for $50 you can get off your feet and sell whatever you can offer. Back in 2012 when I left my teaching career and I was going to full time entrepreneurship, guess what I did? I sold the service. I had a service based business. I built websites for bloggers, for writers, for models, for for people that are building blogging websites or blogging businesses, chefs. And my offer was pretty simple. I will build you a simple website for X amount of dollars. I packaged it and then if you want extra pages, it will cost you this much more. The second thing I want you to do with your money to get that momentum is to build trust with content. This costs you Nothing, a whopping $0 right now that you have something to sell, you need to start earning trust with your post potential audience. This is where a lot of people just overthink this. You don't need, you know, a 30 page website, right? All you really need is a simple one page website that has a way for people to contact you. And then you want to pick one platform that you feel comfortable with. Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube, shorts, whatever it might be. And just stick to one platform to start with, just to get momentum and, and post content daily. You want to post content that solves a problem, problems that are painful for your potential customer. You want to show your expertise with this content and you want to speak directly to the type of client that you want. You don't need to dance on TikTok. You don't need to be funny. When you don't feel like you need to be funny, it's okay. You can just be valuable. As long as you're valuable with your content, that's fine. Now you need to post as often as possible. I say daily. If you could do 10 times a week, even better. Just start getting some momentum. You've heard me say the word momentum a lot because it's so important. Because it's very hard for you to get traction and to get customers and to get a steady flow of positivity in your business. When you do things sporadically, when you maybe post once and then you forget a couple days and you post maybe two times in one day, then you forget for a week, that's not gonna serve you. Again, this is costing you $0. You already have a smartphone. Most of us, right? Your job now is to make helpful content that's valuable for your audience. Why? Because when people see your content, they're going to be like, wow, that's exactly what I'm going through. That's the problem that I have. I love how this person's approaching it. I want to learn more. They go to your bio, they click your link, they go to your website, they learn about your services. This is how business gets done. Now, just to be super clear, so you don't get caught up in this, you're not chasing followers here. You're not trying to become an influencer. You're trying to build credibility. You're trying to build trust with potential customers. Okay? Third thing I want you to do, once you have gotten some clients with your service based business and you've made some money, got some traction, you're now learning a lot about your customers and the problems they have. You're going to spend a hundred to $200 right now on creating a digital offer or product. Now again, this is after you've made a few hundred dollars, maybe a few thousand dollars with your service, it's time to start multiplying yourself. Create something once and sell it multiple times. This is called leverage. And it's very hard to build a successful business without using leverage. Some examples of a digital product that you can create is like a Short online course, a digital template, a five day challenge, a group coaching program. But here's a trick. Don't build it yet. All the things I just mentioned, you can build in a week, 10 days. That's, that's not the problem. The problem is you want to make sure you're building something that people want so you don't waste your time and energy. So what you're doing here is you're pre selling your product. You're validating the idea, you're making sure that people want what you're offering. So you're going to pre sell it, make some money, take that revenue and build something significant for your customers. This is a good way for you to validate, to know if you have enough people interested in what you have to make it worth your while. So say for example, you launch a online course and only three people buy and your course is 500. You're like $1500. That's not enough for me to actually build it. Right. That's not enough momentum, that's not enough validation. I need at least 10 people in order for me to say, okay, this is worth it. So guess what? If you're not going to do it, refund the people. No problem. Listen, I've done this multiple times with my products and services. I did it with my biggest business, which is Webinar Ninja, my software company that had over 30,000 users. You know, multimillion dollar company that got acquired. We started that company in 2014 by pre selling the product. There are so many ways for you to sell products easily. If you're techie, you could just do this with stripe buttons. If you're not techy, you can use something like Gumroad. They're going to take a cut, but that's fine. You're just validating. You're making sure that you have traction. Later on when you have more customers, you can look at more cost effective ways. All you got to do right now is, is on this landing page, on this page of your website, describe the outcome, the transformation and the benefit of what you're offering. You want to start selling it even if you only have a few people buy. You might find out, okay, this is worth my time. Say for example, you're selling on an online coaching program and the coaching program is $5,000 a year and you get seven people to buy for you. That's going to be worth it, $35,000 to do this once a week, call, whatever it might be. And again, it's just the start. You're going to get more people into your coaching program later on, you need to be the judge of what's worth your time and your effort. Now that you've validated the idea, you've got the cash to build it because you pre sold it. So this is why it's such a win win. Okay, let's make sure that everybody's on the same page. How would I use a thousand dollars? Exactly. Let's break it down. Zero is all you need, right? Not much money to be able to start with a service that you could sell. You can invest 50 to $100 on some very cool and innovative and useful technology like Zoom or Canva or your email address with your domain. You could use, you know, Gmail for business. It's called G Suite I believe. And you can buy domain name so that you have a credible email. It's not like you know mark742mail.com it's Mark, you know, better business help dot com, something like that. You can spend 200 to 300 on creating your home, which is your website. Design a clean landing page, maybe get somebody on upwork to design it for you. Buy a domain, like a domain name that's maybe going to cost you about $20 a year. You can then take that design and just put it into your Canva website because Canva has websites now. So super simple for you to get started. Then you got $0 again to post content daily on the platform that you choose. Now you got 500 to $700 remaining. Well, my advice is to keep that cash. Keep that cash for what you might be wondering? Well, once you have a proven offer, you know you're pre selling this offer, you have proven that people want it. You want that cash to be able to promote that offer. You know it's working now you want to put some fuel to the fire. You want to really get things going. So you might want to use this to run ads on Facebook or Instagram. You may want to use this to sponsor somebody's newsletter so you can get some new customers in. I'm a big believer in spending money in marketing and advertising and awareness because that's how you get customers. So once you've validated the idea and you know that this is something that people want and cures a problem that people have. Awesome. Now we're going to really up the ante, supercharge it with some advertising, with some promotion and make sure that we get a return on investment for that cash. Again, your first thousand dollars isn't for you to build Some sort of empire. It's for you to get a few wins, to get confidence and prove your idea in the real world. Fran, who asked today's question? Your thousand dollars is plenty. It's enough. But what matters more is your resourcefulness, not your resources. Is how willing are you to figure it out, to work hard, to be consistent, to use these really cool tools like I mentioned, like Canva and Zoom, to make sure your life is easier and you look professional. If you see that thousand dollars, like a test, like an experiment, you're going to win. If you spend it like it's a vanity project, it's going to be gone. It's going to be a waste of money. My advice, and the advice I would give my younger self when I started out in business, don't be afraid to start scrappy. Every great business you admire, they started where you are, with nothing. Okay? You don't need permission. I highly encourage you to Google what the first version of Facebook looks like or the first version of Airbnb. It's hideous. Okay? Do you know that the first version of Airbnb, when they were in business, they would just connect the apartment or homeowner with the person that's looking to stay there, and there was no way to pay each other, Right? You just paid the landlord in person, in cash. It sounds ridiculous now. How could they, you know, not have that? But they just wanted to validate that people are willing to give up a corner of their home or their whole home to somebody to stay at a short period of time, like a hotel. Is this thing even a thing? Is this something that people actually are willing to do? If so, we'll work out the money stuff and how to, you know, get all the details in order later. So again, you don't need permission. You don't need a bank loan. You need courage. You need some consistency, and you need a calendar that you stick to. I'm going to do these things every day, show up every day. Do the work. Don't let your pessimism or your negativity or maybe your lack of confidence drag you down. Do the work, despite how you feel, and let the market guide you. Let your audience, your potential customers guide you. Listen to what they need, what they want, and more importantly, what they're complaining about so you can solve those problems. If you want to continue to learn and grow your business, I highly recommend you check out my three Things newsletter. Just sign up for any freebie that we have any of our guides@100mba.net and you get added to our newsletter automatically. It's my way to be able to coach you from afar. It's a free way for me to continue to give you value. And it's one of the ways that you can make sure you're getting better every week. Why? Because every week, I send you three things. One, something to think about so that you're growing your mindset. Number two, something to do so you're building upon action upon action. And number three, something to learn so you're skilling up, becoming a better entrepreneur every single week. Getting better in business. This is the real game. This is all it is. The better you get, the better your business gets. So let's build it together. I'll catch you in the next one. Take care.