Profitable Online Business
If you're starting a business you're gonna learn that experimenting and testing things and getting negative feedback is the best way to grow something. I wanted to start with is that we have this animal fear of making mistakes because hundreds of years ago thousands of years ago making a mistake meant losing your life.
If you made a mistake you're attacked by a wild tiger and you're gone these days our brain is still wired to prevent us from making mistakes But the worst thing that would happen. If you make a mistake in a business by starting it or by starting with the wrong idea is that your ego will get hurt that's the worst thing that's gonna happen. Your ego will get hurt.
You're not gonna be eaten by a tiger you're probably not gonna lose all of your life savings because well I don't think that you're gonna just invest all of your money. We are afraid to make a mistake because we are afraid that other people would tell us haha you're not a good entrepreneur. You know how many times I was told that and it made me a stronger person hopefully a better entrepreneur.
I started working on them everything about the company. We're starting is different and because I know a lot of you are starting a company or thinking about starting a company. I just wanted to write this article and share my notes it looks like I'm kind of teaching. I'm not teaching you guys I'm an entrepreneur.
Who is making a lot of mistakes all the time but this time I'm also being really honest with myself. I am good at,
- Creating Ideas
- Brainstorming with people
- Telling Stories
Who can bring them to life? I'm not the best to do,
- One-On-Ones
- Hiring
I might be good at telling stories but because I understand this from early on and we're starting the company with the same team that we worked before but I'm going to talk about finding co-founders because I tried to start on my own and failed a couple of months ago. I'm gonna tell you everything in this article.
But just knowing that I won't be able to run the company and whenever we exceed three employees I'm gonna be like oh my god it is getting crowded. We just talked about this early on and decided that my participation would be smaller just because I love doing this but the product we're working on is for creators.
So my expertise is going to be valuable but I'm also relying on other people in the company.
1. How to Choose the right market
Starting with the market linguatrip study abroad languages is my passion. If you ask me now would I start anything in that area? I would say yes, but it has to be something that's gonna grow like when we were hit by coveting. We clearly understood that the market is shrinking. The study market brought a string of languages.
I don't know but if we look 20 years ahead probably most people would just either know English already like they will be born with two languages their native and English and maybe there will be devices that will be translating. So looking into the future I would say the market is shrinking and ai and robotics whatever you see.
When I started a business my number one priority would be,
Am I passionate about this market or not?
This time yes. This is the first question I asked myself am I passionate about the market or not.
Is it the right wave?
Remember I told you about the guy named Gary tan, uh his phrase like this is something I would remember for the rest of my life. The writer is necessary but the wave is even more prominent. You can be a great entrepreneur but if you are creating something on a shrinking market. The same amount of effort on a market that is exploding can bring a lot more value.
You can impact a lot more people with your product just because more and more people need it. So this time when I'm starting a business I'm asking myself,
- Do I love the problem?
- Am I passionate about solving it?
- Will I be passionate when everything crashes?
Will I still be passionate about solving it and the answer is yes. I'm gonna talk about this a bit more but first the market that we've chosen. We're super passionate about it and it's also the future of its creator economy slash crypto web 3-0. I feel that this market is just going to be bigger and bigger. Yes, it's going to crash at some stage. This is what I asked myself.
So crypto is up and down up and down all the time people believe in it and then they don't believe in it then they sell and then there's winter crypto winter. So I asked myself when crypto winter hits in two or three months would you still be passionate about solving this problem.
And the answer is YES absolutely because I've been creating videos for six years and I believe that everyone should be creating videos. Almost everyone is comfortable with the camera. I believe that you have to find a way to put your passion online. No matter what you do. So yes I will still be solving the problem that we've chosen with well the team.
I will help them as much as I can. So again three questions that you should answer,
- Am I passionate about the problem
- Is the market growing
- will I still be solving this problem when everything crashes
If the answer is YES then we move to the next step.
2. How to test your idea for free
Testing to test the idea you don't have to hire a developer. You don't have to hire a developing team. You kind of have to start thinking about who will be on my team and maybe start networking and there are a lot of places to network. You can go to a meetup. You can take a course where people interact like an on-deck course as founders.
There are many places where you can start looking for a co-founder but to test your idea. You don't even need to worry about that because sometimes I talk to founders and they're like oh I need to find a co-founder first before I test the idea which is kind of cool. If you are not sure about the idea.
You want to have something on someone on the team and again I might be wrong. This is just my approach but my approach is that once you have a strong idea it will be a lot easier to find someone. Who will also fall in love with the idea strong co-founder? So I would do it this way I would think about the idea test it.
Test The Idea (GetResponse)
You can test it for free with GetResponse and I've been using them for years for all of my businesses to build email lists to build websites and they're providing a lot of free resources for entrepreneurs who are just starting. So you don't need a developer you don't need some technical knowledge to build a website and this is your easiest and fastest test.
This is how you bring your idea out to the world because the things you would need to worry about is,
- Where are my customers
- How to market to them
- Which ads do I create on Facebook
- Which email list or do I advertise on
- What kind of content do I create on social media
This is something you will worry about but something you don't have to worry about is how you build a website or where you keep an email list to test the idea. Initially, this is the reality of being an entrepreneur. So with GetResponse, you can create beautiful websites using their ai tool. This is where you keep your email list.
This is your hub to run your online business and it doesn't matter. Whether you decide to build a platform later on. So when we build the whole language thing we didn't build an email campaign sender. We just use GetResponse.
So for many things these days you don't have to build them everything is ready. You might build the actual platform later on but for marketing, this is one of the best resources.
Build Your Website using AI
So with their website builder, you can build a website using ai it asks you what type of business do you have as I create our economy something because it's a buzzword. Whenever you raise money people like a creator economy. Okay, let's choose to consult.
Next, you choose what kind of website you want to build it can be an affiliate, an event launch page, e-commerce, personal landing page, membership portfolio, let's choose business. Okay, and I'm already getting some recommendations. We've picked the following features based on industry and site type.
So in the top section ai chose some features for your website,
- Contact Form
- Signup Form
- Testimonial
- Video
Regarding testimonials ideally, you have them provide services for free to your friends and just ask them for a testimonial but this is a chicken nut problem like how do you start without testimonials. I think our first testimonials came from people I just helped for free.
If you don't want to have any of these elements on your website. You can just deselect them and add something else like faq or pricing table and don't worry everything is changeable. So you can change after. Next step you choose a theme for your website. Let's go with this one you can upload your logo.
Okay, when you start a business one the most important thing is to get it out there to your customers and figure it out. Where your customers are and whether they resonate with the problem. The logo is not your number one problem I am sorry if you just thought oh my god. I'm going to spend all the time designing nope.
We don't have a logo right now and we wouldn't even think about it these days. We would think about solving the problem but our first logo of language was just a word. Okay, you can upload your logo which hopefully you didn't spend any money on just you know create something by yourself or if you have a website that you like.
You can pull colors from there you know I remember when I first did my website we hired a developer back then there was no get response or any other tool. So we hired a developer we paid them maybe like 500 bucks which are was a lot for us and we asked them to pull all the colors from the Louis Vuitton website.
I don't know why I was just like I want to give it this fancy feeling. So he pulled all the colors from Louis Vuitton and they were brown and beige back then and we designed it all in a way to feel luxurious. etc. Which now totally makes sense for some businesses. We wanted to appeal to students not design a luxury boutique.
So these days I would think again about the customer who's your customer are they fancy luxury people or are they students are they creators think about that. Okay but if there is a website that you like you pull colors from there and so you insert this website inbox and ai pulls the color palette for you.
Next, you need to confirm some of your company details like buy google voice, phone numbers. If you don't want to get called on your phone or maybe by virtual office depends on you. So you don't want your highly profitable business to be in a city that charges an additional tax but this is something to talk to your CPA about anyways.
The ai is building our website and uh there are three options that we can choose from. So the website is ready all you need now is to add information about your business and you're ready to go online that's it.
- No developers
- No outsourcing company
- No i.t sweatshops
I just wish we had this 10 years ago what is it 10 years ago when we're starting using get a response and their free plan to get your business online.
3. How I Lost $15,000
Okay, testing I made a mistake this time at first I thought you know I'm gonna try everything on my own and I will hire a team to outsource everything to them. Build the whole product and the product was a bit different but anyways I hired a team. I paid them fifteen thousand dollars to develop a product without testing it.
I was like I'm just fashioned about the idea let's just do it. So they coded it took them four months I'm and while they coded I just kept talking to Dima and I realized I'm not a solo founder. I would love to help someone rather than just run the whole thing and then I started talking to other founders.
They told me the worst thing you can do when building a product is outsource everything. Okay, so and when we talked to the demon he shared some ideas that he had I was like okay I'm gonna join you and so I wasted fifteen thousand dollars. Which is good and bad I lost money but good I realized this is a mistake.
Outsourcing building the product there's another mistake that I made I started building the product without actually testing it and there are so many ways you can test the product like creating a landing page with getting a response and getting the test done it is just. So easy these days you don't have to have fifteen thousand dollars you don't have to have anything to test your product.
4. How we test our business
So we created a landing page where people can do something pay for something. When I posted about the thing that we're doing I was like if I get zero purchases that is fine because we haven't developed the whole platform. We've done a lot of brainstorming around the idea but we haven't spent too much time.
Just coding the whole thing and it might happen that way that nobody needs it. So starting with a very basic test,
Asking people to buy something and then doing everything manually is the way to start and if the test goes well then.
Iteration would be maybe code something else but I would never start with just coding the whole product and then realizing it might not work and I also totally realized that some products you can't test without coding them. This is where you get creative I guess in our case it was kind of easy just without coding but always look for ways.
At least try to or otherwise you end up spending too much time. Maybe I don't know but the main thing when you start is to see whether people resonate with the idea and whether they would buy the thing. You're proposing or they'll be just like not that good but then you know it's great.
If they tell you that right from the start because that means you know you can do something else instead and you get all your time back that you could have spent just coding. An unnecessary thing and also another quick piece of advice when you're just starting. What is success to us are there several conversion numbers conversion rates that we're looking at or do?
We need a minimum amount of purchases like what would be a success rate because sometimes you would be tempted to run a test just to see what's gonna happen but then something happens and you're like is it good or is it bad. Do I continue pushing this idea or do I pivot to something else? So before you run the test tell yourself.
What is a good strategy talk to maybe talk to other founders just sit down with yourself and tell yourself? Okay if I'm going to spend $50 on ads getting 10 dollars back on my early idea is it good or bad or do I need $50 back from my ads like just rely on your gut there is no good or bad thing.
There are no tables or numbers you should refer to because all the conversion rates all churn rates are for developed businesses not for an idea. That's gonna be tweaked around not an idea that gonna grow into something bigger a bit later it's all about your mindset as an entrepreneur.
If I see this response from my customers will it motivate me to proceed even further to love the problem to tackle it? If I get this or that number would it be something like I don't want to do this I don't want to work on this because people don't need it?
So when you're coming up with a number what's good or bad for the test. Answer one question will this motivate me to proceed or will this be a good indicator that I should work on something else.
Conclusion
So guys that is how to start a profitable online business. Now, in my opinion, you must have to start a profitable online business. I wish I could tell you that if you just picked the key points in this article then you have a great online business.
Do leave me a comment below and let me know your opinions.