How to Build a Digital Business Without an Office | Siddharth Rajsekar | Episode 13

You don't need an office, you don't need employees, you don't need all of that infrastructure cost for you to actually build a digital business. And in this video I want to share with you my digital business blueprint and how we were actually able to build a business with just six virtual staff working for us and multiple virtual vendors who work for us for different projects that we have on a pay per project basis without any office. We only have a registered company in a co working space. But I work 100% from home. My entire team work 100% from home. We have done multiple crores in revenues and we've helped our students generate over a thousand crore revenues in the last seven years. And all of our students have replicated the similar model. What I'm going to share with you in this video, Let me first tell you that there are different kinds of businesses. I come from a business family myself. My grandfather was an entrepreneur, my dad was an entrepreneur, but they were the traditional entrepreneur. They would do this, the traditional stuff. They had the office, they had the employees, they had the staff. And then luckily for in my case, I went into the corporate world and I learned different stuff. And when I came back to set up a business, I also ran a traditional business with 35 employees and 35 clients that we used to handle. But through that I learned that in the digital age that we are in, you can build things in a slightly different way. You do not have to follow the old rules to do things. I'm not saying that teams are not important. Teams are important. But the way to structure them and the way to scale a digital business is way, way different compared to traditional business. So first let's break down what are the kinds of businesses that there are. First you have the manufacturing companies. Manufacturing companies require place, it requires people, it requires a lot of investment to actually build something to manufacture and then to actually distribute, you need to have another team to do that. Otherwise you will not be able to generate revenues and profits. So a traditional business like that, it requires infrastructure, place and people cost. The second kind of business like I mentioned is a distribution business. Distribution business. You may not need to have an office, but in case you need to have a go down, if it's a physical product, you need to have some place to keep the product so that you can distribute that kind of a product. And of course you need people and manpower and teams to go and sell that product. Then you have the third kind of a business which is a services based businesses. Like when I was running my Digital marketing agency. We used to provide a service to other people where they would pay us money. We would build websites for them, we would do social media campaigns for them. We were not delivering a physical product, but we were actually delivering a service that again required an office space to have all of my teams to come together. And the teams would be able to, they would deliver the project for our clients and we would, you know, give them what they really wanted. So our services business requires place, it requires people, it has infrastructure, costs. And the fourth category of business are the franchise based businesses. If you have a, like a food franchise or a spa and salon franchise, even that requires place, it requires people, it requires physical presence to run a business like that. And the fifth category of business are the aggregator kind of business like the Ubers and the Swiggies. And the best part about aggregator business is you don't need an office. This is a very unique business model where you just need an app or a platform that connects your customers and connects the service providers. But again, to build a business which is an aggregator base, it takes a lot of investment of money. It takes a lot of investment in marketing to actually make that work. It does not just grow like that virally, does not happen like that. And also the app needs to be so good and a lot of investment needs to be built. Investments need to be put into actually building the app and building that product, which most people don't have that kind of money. They have to like go and get angel investors to do it. Now the business model that I'm talking about is the category number six is what I call as the freedom business model. So to build a completely digital business where you're selling digital products and you're selling your knowledge and information and selling memberships and so on, it's a completely different mindset. You don't need to have an office space, you don't need to have a lot of staff. In the beginning, like till my first thousand five hundred customers, I did not have a single employee. I was doing it all myself and it did not, it was taking some time, but it, it was very much doable. Okay. And the third thing is you don't need to have real estate space because we don't need to store anything in a go down because all our digital products, I'm selling courses, I'm selling memberships. There's no manufacturing, there's no shipping, there's no handling, there's no logistics. People from anywhere in the world can buy my products at any point of time. And I Have to just create the product once. I only recorded my courses once, and now people are buying it again and again and again and again. So the blueprint to build a digital business is what I'm going to share with you right now. Because now that you've understood that there are different kinds of business models, and this business model is one of the ultimate business models in the world today, because you don't need to even be bound by geographical boundaries. You can be in any part of the world, traveling anywhere, and you can deliver an impact. So how do you really structure this? How do you really put this into action? How do you build that digital business? What is the blueprint behind it? That's what I want to share with you right now. So take a lot of notes and I will tell you that step by step. So the first thing is, when I was starting my business, I made it very clear right from day one that I want to keep it lean. I want to keep it very simple. I only have three products to sell. If you look at Apple, when Steve Jobs got kicked out of Apple and when he came back, took over, there were so many products in Apple. And the first thing that he did is he is he cleared the clutter and he brought it down to just a few products that he wanted to sell, and he brought it down to only a few products that he wanted to innovate in. There is a book called Think Simple. I got really inspired by that book. In that book, the author has spent a lot of time with Steve Jobs to think on his mindset, on how he kept things simple. Now, it's not that Apple is a completely digital company. It's a physical product company and they have digital as well. But the principle that I got from Apple is to have lesser number of products to sell instead of many products to sell. So in my case, I just have a silver membership, I have a gold membership, I have a diamond certification. And these are the three products that I sell. And the fourth product that I have is what I call as a quantum club mastermind. Where I don't sell that, I select people to be a part of that. Nobody can just be a part of that particular mastermind. Now, even though I have courses, even though I have coaching, I have challenges, I have a community, a social network, everything, it's all packaged within this ecosystem or what I call as a learning social network. So the first principle is have only one entry point into your ecosystem. Now, once they come inside my ecosystem, I have many other products that they get access to inside but there's only one transaction that people need to do to come into the system. And how do they do that? How do they come into the system? They watch a video like this, they click the link in the description, they attend my webinar, they watch my webinar for 90 minutes where I educate them, I engage with them, I set the expectations and then I offer my membership into the community and people buy and they come into the community and I do these webinars on automation every single day. People are coming into the community, they're just putting money into ads. People watch the ads, click on the ad, what attend my webinar, buy the product. And we're very profitable with that. So that's the first step, which is having one entry point for your product. Second is the customer experience. What are people paying you for in additional business? They're paying you for some kind of value that they're expecting from you. In my case it is value in terms of the information that I'm giving them once they come into the community and the community experience that I create for them. Now what are the elements of community experience? Number one is the quality of the information that I'm giving. So when anyone comes into my community, the way that I've recorded my courses, the precision with which I give them clarity on moving to the next step, it really blows their minds away. And that's why we have more than 9,000 reviews right now on Trustpilot at five star, which is very, very hard to get. So I really focus on product. In fact, in the first 18 months of my journey, I was not on Instagram, I was not on YouTube, I was not doing anything on social media. I was just focusing on getting the product right. I was doing a lot of one to ones. So the second principle of the digital business blueprint is to provide a world class customer experience by focusing on product first and student results and also the community engagement. We have hackathons, we have a support forum, we have a point system, gamification. I've shared this in the previous videos, but all of these things add up for the customers experience inside the community. And then the third principle I want to talk about is the team. How have I structured my team? In the beginning I hired only one person to handle all of my emails because I used to be answering 200 to 300 emails every single day at one point of time. Then I realized that I needed some help and support once I crossed more than 1500 customers and I brought on my first hire into this business and his only job was to make sure that by 9pm all the emails are answered and then anything to do with payment, gateway refunds, or anything to do with people not being able to get access. He was able to handle all of that single handedly while I was focusing on building product. Then over time I realized that I needed another help on my content because every time I would finish a call, I had to upload that into the system and I had to really be there for the, for the students. So I hired my second person who was a content manager. And then I realized as the community grew to 5,000, then it became 10,000, then we reached 20,000. Around the 5,000 mark, I realized that I needed to have a community manager. And all my hires came from my own community because I wanted somebody who could understand what I was doing. I wanted somebody who could understand the depth of the mission that we are on and how did I hire them. It is a very, very interesting story. So what I did was I sent an email to my community and I said, I'm looking to hire this position. If you want to be a part of my core team, you got to send me a video telling me why you want to be a part of my community. And guess what? I got more than 53 videos. Out of the 53 videos, three were promising. And out of that I selected one. And whoever I've selected to be a part of my team who came from my community, they're working with me now for over five years and that's the kind of team that I've built. And now we have a six to seven member team. And I have a lot of virtual teams also and a lot of Paper Project team. Like my video team is Paper Project. I have a design team, Paper Project. I have a ads team where I, you know, pay them every single month on a retainer basis for them to run my advertising. But in the beginning I was running all of this myself. So before you hire anybody in your teams for a digital business, blueprint is get hands on first before you get hands off. The only thing that I would recommend that you outsource is design. Because many of us are not good at design. Give it to the best designer to design your logo, give it to the best designer to design your digital product boxes and all of that stuff. But everything else, you can actually do it yourself. Communication, support, creation of your content, running your own ads, and also communicating via emails to all of your students. So the third principle of building a digital business is the way that you hire your teams now if I have to give you another bonus tip. What is a blueprint to build a multi crore business? It is keep innovating from within. So from the day I started my business till today, I have one simple Google form where every week, every Thursday my customers come and they ask questions on that Google form. And as of today I have more than 10,000 questions on that one Google form. I'm not kidding, 10,000 questions. And out of this 10,000 I've possibly answered more than 5,000 questions. So every week when I show up for the community, I ask them to ask the question. For the week they would ask probably hundred questions. And I answer 50 to 60 of the questions in two, three hours. And that bank of questions becomes my food for delivering a better customer experience for them. And now with AI and ChatGPT, all I have to do is take those questions, throw into ChatGPT and ask ChatGPT what else can I do to give them a better customer experience so that they don't have these questions in their mind and I get a lot of answers. So what I'm doing now is I don't look at my competitors, my so called competitors. I don't believe in the concept of competition. I believe that there's room for everybody to win. But having said that, I don't look at what anybody is doing outside. I get ideas from here and there but I am so focused on what my customers need and by, by serving them and asking them questions every single week, every single month I have enough food for thought, food for strategy to give them a better customer experience. And because of that we have built our community of more than 35,000 people at this point. And we had so many of our students who have gained amazing results. We have given hundreds of Karurpati awards as of today. And at this point more than 35 of them have received the 10 crore champion award which is really hard to get and a 1,000 crore impact in the industry. And we are just a six to seven member team. How is that even possible? No office. And another, the way that I communicate with my teams is we don't have any meetings. Some, some of you may be thinking like how is it even possible to run a business without doing meetings? Because when I was running my agency before this, we were spending so many, so much more time in the meetings than doing the work. Okay. And coming from the corporate world, I understand many of you would have experienced the same. You're going from one meeting to the next meeting to the next meeting, but you're not actually able to do the work. But when I started this business, I decided from day one that we'll only have a meeting when it's really required. And all of my communication happens via WhatsApp. WhatsApp voice notes, WhatsApp messages. Even with my core teams, I don't need to get into a zoom call to explain anything. If I can explain to them that same thing in 30 seconds. And all of my voice notes are less than one minute, very fast, crisp, to the point, and they get back really fast. And of course, we do have our core team huddles once in a while. We also have our core team retreats once in a year. I take my core team of seven, eight of us, we go to some exotic place and we last time we went to Goa and we just brainstormed for two days, we had a lot of fun for two days and we just bonded together and then we came back. So the key here is the way to build a digital business is way different compared to running a traditional business. And if you're coming from a traditional mindset, it is time for a rewiring. Because today we're living in a time and age where you can automate, you can systemize, you can delegate. All of my emails are automated. All my, my communication with my students are automated. All of my webinar reminders are automated. I'm not sending this message every single day to thousands of people. It's all happening through backend systems. Because systems work, people fail. If you follow the right systems, technology, systems and implementation systems, you'll be able to scale your business much faster than you can ever imagine. And people fail because what I've understood is that the more human components you have in a system, it is harder to manage it unless you have strong project managers who can do it. And there are many big corporations that do it well. But still, the corporate culture is a corporate culture. If you want to maintain the soul of your business, you can do it with a lean and efficient team and a mission driven team. And I've always said this, a mission focused business will any day outshine a profit focused business. And when you hire a team that is aligned with your mission, vision and values and you have that singular product that you're getting people into, and then when you are able to structure it in a way where you can duplicate yourself using videos that I shared in the previous video on how you can, you know, build your presence using videos and leverage this media, and you combine that with automation, systemization, delegation and virtual teams, the game becomes magical. Now that you've got all of this in the next video, I'm going to be sharing a lot about storytelling, how to use the power of storytelling to attract more customers and to build a deeper connection with your audience, especially if you're a coach or a digital entrepreneur. Because facts tell, but stories sell. And those who are good storytellers are the ones who will be dominating the space because there are enough and more people who are just talking about their features and of their product, but there are very few who are talking about the reason why they do what they do. Many of you people are storyfind their business, and that's going to be a differentiator. And if I have to say, one of the key reasons why we built a community of more than 35,000 people is because of my stories. And many of you have heard my stories in the first few videos. If you're just watching this video right now, subscribe to this channel and go and watch all the episodes before this because you'll be able to know what my real story is. And because people connect with my personal story, they end up becoming my customers. And not just customers for gaining knowledge from me, but they become customers for life. Because I'm committed to my mission. I'm committed to my customers. I'm committed to my students because I believe that we are on the journey together. I'm just maybe a few steps ahead on this topic that I'm teaching, but I'm also a learner. I'm a student just like you, and I'll continue to be that student. And I'm going to continue to learn and push myself and innovate. And I want to share the stories as I go through that so that it inspires other people. And when you become a good storyteller yourself, your digital business is going to boom. I can't wait to see you in the next video. And I can't wait to see you launch your business. Now. If you're not yet a part of my community, there's a link in the description. Join my webinar, attend that for 90 minutes and be a part of my community, our premium community. I can't wait to help you, and I'll catch you in the next video. Sa.