Questions

Absolutely, now more than never!

If you take aside the psychological factors (motivation, strong desire, etc.), business success in general is dependent on 2 key variables : money and time (*not* experience).

You cannot start a business with no money and no time.
But if you have either of the two, you can make it happen.

As per how, with all the dogmatism of brevity I would say:

The easiest is to create a service that you can learn and deliver yourself (zero cost, only requires time to learn the required skill - could be writing content, teaching a language, coding apps, walking the dog, etc). Check out craigslist for about a thousand more ideas.

Even for a product, you can ask your first customers to pay for it in advance (to cover development costs) so you get the funds to pay tech peoples to create it.

Either way, there are 3 skills you must master if you want to have success :
- get good at asking questions to find where people's problem are (the seed of any business is in resolving a problem, so you got to stop talking and listen!)
- get good at asking them what their ideal solution would look like (you would think that people already looked for a solution if they already know what it looks like, but this would be over-estimating human behavior - you will find many were not even *aware* they had a problem before you started asking)
- get good at hustling to put this solution together for them and then sell it!

One word of caution : the real challenge in starting a business is in finding a profitable niche that can sustain you over the long term doing work that you love.

To achieve this, you must approach it the same way a child learns how to walk. By falling down, and trying back again.

If you want a fantastic example of what this kind of hustle can create, look no further than Clarity's founder Dan Martell (check out the 'About Me' page on his website for a great example of the "entrepreneurs' journey")

To get the proper mindset, I also suggest a total immersion in the entrepreneurial world : listen to podcasts (free), read blogs (also free), and invite entrepreneurs for lunch to pick their brains (ok, that one is 20$).


Answered 10 years ago

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