4 Stages Of Growth For Digital Entrepreneurs

The path of digital entrepreneurship is difficult. There are four stages that you need to actually go through to come out successful, to make consistent income and profits. And in this podcast, I want to share those four stages with you.

Hey there. Sidhad Varacha here. Thank you so much for tuning to yet another episode of the Freedom Business podcast. And if you have not yet subscribed to this on Apple or Spotify, please make sure you do that so that you get my future episodes. I heard a beautiful quote by my colleague and friend Pooja Puneet. She said that when people become successful really fast, it actually grows their ego.

And the people who build their success gradually over a period of time, it builds their character. There are four stages that a digital entrepreneur needs to go through to become super successful. People who become successful overnight, maybe some of their content go viral and they just get overnight success somehow the stability will not be there in the business because they'll come back to ground zero. And that's why slow success is any day better than fast, rapid success. So that your foundational elements are in place. The first stage of your journey is going to be the grinding phase. The phase where you are going to be learning a lot of things. You're going to be picking up a lot of new skills. Especially in digital entrepreneurship, there are many skills. There's marketing skills, there's traffic generation skills, there's lead generation skills, tribe building skills, conversion skills, copywriting skills skills. And you also need to build different kinds of skills as an entrepreneur, to manage teams, to manage your accounts, to understand finances, to understand banking systems, compliances, taxes. So there are a lot of new things that you would pick up in the grinding phase. And it be. It would be the phase where sometimes you feel overwhelmed. And I started off on this journey like 10 years ago where I was overwhelmed with so much but. But I decided to enjoy the process and just pick up new things and build this range of skill sets that is required for additional entrepreneur. The second phase of the journey is the phase where you're going to start to see sales happen. You know, in the first phase of my journey, I was not getting sales, but I had to learn many things and it was not reflecting my bank account. So the sales process or getting consistent, predictable sales and customers. The second phase is where you actually crack the model on your product to market fit. Okay, what the market needs and what product that you have, product or a service. So in my case, in the first phase of the journey, I was into affiliate marketing. I was selling other people's products because I Don't have a product of my own. I didn't have a digital product of my own. I had a service where I was selling my time along with my agency. You were doing stuff. But then when I decided to move to a digital product based model, I wanted to sell digital products. I didn't have a product of my own. So I sold my mentors product and I was making commissions and I made a a lot of money doing that. But then later on realized that my market needed something else because I'm from India. There was a boom in the coaching industry and though I started with affiliate marketing, I started to, you know, put together some ideas and concepts to build coaches and build more teachers and mentors. That is more aligned with what I really wanted to do and also aligned with my mentor's vision, which is to create a new breed of teachers and leaders.

So I started to get more sales and I started to see the product market fit. And every month I was adding like 100, 150 customers. This is in 2018. And that was the second phase. Now the second phase is where if you know something is working, if, let's say, if you found that product to market fit, don't change anything. Write it, ride it, ride it, write it, and put more money into ads and start to scale. And that brings me to the third phase, which is a scaling phase. Going from grinding phase to selling phase is actually the hardest. As you move from selling phase to scaling phase, that's actually a much smoother transition because now you got to scale multiple things. Number one is you got to scale your traffic and ads. So from going at 100 customers per month, I started to push it to 200, 300, 400, 500 customers. In some months I've done like a thousand customers buying my entry level premium membership into my community in a single month.

And as of today, we have built our community of. As I'm speaking and recording this podcast, we have crossed over 25,000 paid members, premium members, over a span of less than five years. And that momentum, it's just by doing the same thing, you know, I didn't do anything different. I was just scaling on the same idea and scaling on traffic. So one is scaling traffic, second is scaling teams. So rather than building a big office and having big infrastructure and, you know, hundreds of people on payroll, I decided to just hire three people in house. So I hired a general manager, operation who handles all the operations. I hired a community manager who handles all the communication, all the community lead activities. And I have a content Manager that handles all my content marketing part and you know, cleaning up of my ads and multiple other things that happens outside and managing the content pieces that need to be uploaded within my own paid community and in the digital products. So the three member team and two people supporting this three member team, we've scaled our business to like multiple thousands of.

Thousand rupees in revenue, multiple crores in revenue. And the scaling phase was where I kept the team lean. So scale traffic, scale teams, but with a, with a lean and focused approach. Then I started to outsource different aspects which I felt I could not bring in house, for example advertising, design, video editing. I've got like project based freelancers who do work for me. So that's the scaling phase where you can expand your reach. And then phase number four is the impact phase. Phase number one is grinding phase. Phase number two is the selling phase. Phase number three is a scaling phase as you're moving up. And phase number four is impact phase where you're actually making a difference at scale when you're making a difference at scale. So now I have a team of facilitators and you know, they handle our meetups. And as of today we have documented hundreds of members who have crossed six figures in revenues, close to 100 of them who have crossed one crore in revenues in Indian rupees, and a couple of them have crossed 10 crores in revenues. And many of them are building up their momentum towards that particular milestone. Now this is the impact phase. And of course impact phase does not mean it's the end. It is to go back to the grinding phase now. So I'm going back to grinding mode on how I can grind more to scale this up to the next level. Grind more, get more sales at mass and then, you know, create, you know, the next level of scale and impact. So this journey is a continuous iterative journey of reinvention. Once you have hit one peak, when you go from one peak to the next peak, there are valleys in between. And as long as the overall trajectory of your business is growing upwards, that's what matters. So I hope you found this podcast useful. Now you've got a perspective. If you're listening to this podcast on my blog, Sidharth Rajagar.com in the comments, please share below on what else is your perspective on this? Which stage are you in and what are you planning to do to move to the next phase? Okay, so before I close this podcast, I want to give you a few tips. If you are in the grinding phase, what you got to do is you got to invest in your learning, in your growth education and surround yourself with people who are smarter than you. If you're in the scaling phase, you got to learn techniques of scaling and you need to start outsourcing, delegating, automating, and you know, giving it to other teams to do stuff for you within the scaling phase when you're in the selling phase. Before that you got to really.

Give a great customer experience when people are going to buy when they're buying your product. That's in the phase two. When you give get a good customer experience for your students, they will start to directly and indirectly refer you to others and that'll impact in your scaling phase. Okay, so the first phase grinding phase, work on yourself, keep learning, selling phase, provide a great customer experience. Scaling phase, outsource, delegate, automate and the impact phase you got to reinvent yourself and look at what's that next level game that you can play so that you can continue the momentum and take it to a whole different level. Hope you found this podcast useful. I'll catch you in the next episode. If you can share your learnings below, that'll be great. If you're not yet a part of a community, you can go to sidzsids Co.

And attend my next webinar. And at the end of the webinar I'll be talking about how you can join my premium community and you can be a part of it. And if you're already a part of our community and not yet a Diamond member, I would highly recommend that you upgrade to diamond membership by going to sidzsids Co Diamond. And that's like the ultimate membership for any trainer, coach, teacher, expert who wants to scale their game to a totally different level and to be a cut above the rest. Wish you all the best. Catch you in the next episode.