"I'm Broke, What Business Do I Start?"

So if you're broke or you don't know what business to start, by the end of this video, you will know what business to start, who you're going to serve, how you're going to serve them, and the exact message to send to get your first five customers. I'm a co-owner of School. com, where we help tens of thousands of new people every single month start their first business online.

And right now, one out of two people who start a paid community on School make their first dollar—one out of two. This process I'm going to show you works. There are five parts to this framework and then two bonuses: one is a set of advanced techniques, and one will give you next steps on what to do with this so you can make your first dollar.

So it starts with the "what," which is what your business is actually going to be about. I use something called the "Three Ps" framework. All right, so you can write this down: the Three Ps.

That's because almost all businesses get born out of one of these Three Ps. The first is "pain. " This refers to something that you went through personally and had to overcome.

A friend of mine has a wife; well, they're married and they have nine kids. In her going through this process, she was like, "Well, what would work for me? " I'm like, "Well, you have nine kids, so I'll bet you that just making lunch for nine kids every day is probably a process.

" She's like, "Oh yeah, I have this whole thing that I do. I organize it so everybody has their own bags, and they all know whose it is. Then I can do it at a time that's cheap for me and gets them all the food, all the protein, and all the other stuff.

" She stated, "I have a system around that. " And I was like, "That is the beginning of a business. " The second is your profession, meaning what you do for a day job or what you've done in the past.

I recently made a video about a lady who quit her job as a registered dietitian at a hospital and then started teaching other registered dietitians how to bill insurance. The reason that she learned how to do that was that, at the hospital, she had to work six days a week and work 12-plus hours per day as an RD. So she only had one day a week that she could bill her personal clients on the side, and she had to figure out this really complex billing system and how to do it really quickly.

She took something that she learned from her profession and made a business around something really, really narrow. A lot of people think it has to be this big crazy thing. If you solve one very specific problem for somebody, that is a business.

You might think, "Oh, how am I going to get a huge following from all that? " This particular individual has 5,800 people who follow her on Instagram, and she takes home almost a million dollars a year in income. So if you're an accountant, or you do HR, or you edit videos, or you do whatever, like every single job that exists in a business means that fundamentally, people exchange money for the skill you have.

Any professional skill that you have in a business can be done as a consultant, as an independent contractor, or by teaching other people in that profession. There are lots of tree branches that come off of that, but this is the second big category that businesses are born from. The third bucket of Ps is "passion.

" These are the things that you're always interested in; these are the articles you read, the YouTube videos you watch, and the podcasts you listen to in your spare time. It's the stuff that you're just inherently interested in, the things you can't get enough of. For me personally, I was someone who was into fitness; it was what I was reading.

I was reading T Nation, which none of you guys have even heard of, but it was this blog online that had all of the lifters and all these trainers and coaches talking about stuff. Every night, I would eat my meal and read whatever the new T Nation articles were. I did that every single night, and that was my passion.

When I went to work, the guys that I worked with were like, "Dude, if you don't start a gym, I will. " They even offered to front me the money to start the gym because I was so obsessed with fitness at the time. So if you're like, "Okay, well, I overcame food allergies, or I am an accountant, or I'm into painting model cars.

Got it. But how am I going to turn that into a business? " Don't worry; that's what I'm covering in step five.

Let me break this belief for you really quickly—that you need to get the perfect pick on the first try. The reason this isn't accurate is that it assumes that you, with zero context, having not talked to customers and gotten zero feedback, are going to pick it right. The reality is that picking anything is the first step because that begins the iteration process of feedback so that you can get it right.

The five-step process I'm going to walk you through is going to get you to your best bad idea as fast as possible. The reason we say "best bad idea" is that we want to get it out there so that. .

. We can make it less wrong over time, and if you keep making a bad idea less wrong, eventually it becomes a good idea. Then people say, "How did you pick that right on the first shot?

" and you will smile, knowing that that's not actually how it worked. So great, if you have your first P, you say, "I know what pain it is," or "What profession? " or "What passion?

" Now we move on to step two, which is the who. So who are you going to do this for? There are three categories that the who's are going to fit into.

The first is people like you; the second is people that you've helped before, and that can be for money or not for money. But I'm assuming if you're watching this video that you haven't helped them for money; you just did it as a favor, which I'll tell you my story about that in a second. The third is people who you think are underserved.

Now, this is probably the more formal way that people look at markets that are growing. You think there's an emerging trend; it's people that have this huge demand and they're underserved. This is probably the most formal way of doing it, but most businesses that come from, I would say, the heart or the mind come from one of these two things: It's, "I went through this thing, and then I took a long time to figure it out, and now that I've figured it out, I want to help other people who are like me figure it out.

" Sara Blakely was like, "Man, none of these underwear hide the bad and show the good," and so then she created Spanx. Spanx went on to sell for a billion dollars to Blackstone, I think, earlier last year. You can absolutely build a massive business just trying to solve a very personal problem for yourself.

Different, Zuck started in his dorm room to make some sort of platform for horny college kids that eventually would become Facebook. For me specifically, the reason I made my first dollar, the first actual dollar that I ever made, was because there was a lady at the gym. She came to me and said, "Hey, can you help me with my food?

" It was just because I looked in shape, and I was like, "Sure. " I didn't know her super well, so we met at a pizza shop ironically. She asked me to talk to her about her food, and so I just asked her what she was buying for her groceries and gave her a couple of, you know, recipes that I did to increase her protein intake.

At the end of me sitting at that pizza parlor with her for like an hour and a half, she just took out her purse and wrote on a check, "$100," and she handed it to me. I didn't sell her. I didn't say a price; she just handed me $100 for the amount of help that I'd given her.

It was really weird because we walked out of the pizza parlor, and then she got in her car. I opened up the check again, and I was like, "Holy, I could get paid to do this! " It was this huge moment for me, and I was forever always grateful to Sandy Smith.

So once you've figured out whether it's someone like you, someone you've helped before, or an underserved market, you pick one of these three things, and then you plug them into this, which is a callout. The callout describes the person back to them. This is going to be important for what we use in one of the later parts of this.

That's why if I had to pick one for you, I would have it be this one, because you already know what it's like to have the pains of this person. You're usually in the demographic, you're in the age group, and so you probably know a lot of the aspirations and dreams that they do rather than having to do the research. So this is the quick and dirty way, and many, many, many businesses are started this way.

In my opinion, this tends to make mercenaries; this tends to make missionaries. What I mean by that is people who start purely based on analyzing markets and trends and things like that—they're in it for the money; they don't really care about the product or even the customer. But if you're helping people like you overcome something that you overcame before, you know their pain, and you will care that much more to deliver an exceptional product and improve their experience over time.

I think this is what keeps you in it for the long haul. When you look at some of the biggest companies out there in the world, many of them started with a founder in a garage with some problem that they hated and then tried to fix. So let me draw this on a new page to give you a really clear idea of why this next part is important.

If you're just like people like me, that's not descriptive enough to get really clear on the avatar. I think about it as having five frames that I use to narrow down my avatar. I've got the age, gender, profession, and like before because if you are going to use the profession, then you might as well say it's got their problems or their pains, and then we've got their interests or passions.

You'll notice these are more or less the three Ps from before. If you want to pick three, let me give you an example. So, if I'm looking for 35-year-old men, it's not narrow enough, right?

Or if I just said 35-year-old, it's still not narrow enough. I need 35-year-old men who are accountants. Now I can get even narrower by adding more, but you have to have at least three.

You want to do three or more, so 35-year-old male accountants who are bored at their jobs—right? Great! Well, that's a pretty clear avatar if I say that, and there's a room full of 35-year-old male accountants who are bored at their jobs.

That other room should light you up. So think about it this way, from a visual perspective: If you could fill a room with just a certain type of person that you'd get excited to go in there and help, what does that room of people look like? What are they interested in?

What are the problems they're suffering from? What's their job? Now, you could do the same thing and not have the profession, but I'll give you an example.

So if I said 35-year-old or 45-year-old women who are struggling to move up in the workplace—okay, that's at least three. Get the idea? You just want to get narrow enough that they know you're talking to them.

Let me break a second belief for you: If you get really narrow, it doesn't mean you're not going to be able to make as much money because you don't have as many people to sell to. The other part of that is the more specific you get, the more you can charge. So, let me tell you something that might blow your mind.

If I sold time management as my thing, that's really, really broad. All right, that's my "what. " Okay, well, I might be able to charge for my time management PDF, I don't know, $19.

Now, if I said I've got a time management product for sales, then all of a sudden this is probably a $199 product. If I said I have time management for outbound salespeople, then that's going to be even more specific, and this might be a $1999 product. And if I said I have the entire outbound time management system for gardening and power tools, then this could be a $10,000 product because anybody who's this specific with their niche knows that they're going to be able to make a couple of sales with this new system and more than pay for it.

So, as you get more specific with your prospect, you can get more premium with your price. And if you're the best at time management for outbound sales reps that deal with gardening and power tools, how many competitors are you going against? Almost no one.

You're selling in a total blue ocean where it's just you with the life raft, and all of them are in the pool around you struggling. When you have your life raft and you're the only boat in town, they've got to pay whatever you want to scoop them out of the water. If you're enjoying this process, I run something called the School of G.

A. M. E.

You can go to schoolofgame. com, and you can start for free. I'll help you build your first business by taking you through frameworks like this and many others, and give you the platform to do it—make your first dollar right now.

More than one out of two people who start the School of G. A. M.

E. with a paid community make their first dollar online. I'm very proud of it.

So if you like that, go check it out. You can start for free. So that's step two—that's the "who.

" Now we go to the "how," and there are two parts to the "how. " So let's cover those now. With "how," part one, we think about the upside.

This is all the good stuff that you're going to help them achieve or experience as a result of using your thing. All right, so you want to think about how much easier their lives are going to be as a result of using your thing. You want to think about how guaranteed the outcome is.

Now, as a result of using your thing, you want to think about how much faster they're going to be able to get what they want by using it, and you want to be able to describe to them how it would feel to experience their dream scenario. If these look familiar, these are the four elements of the value equation but written in the positive. The perfect offer is something that is incredibly easy, guaranteed to happen, immediate, and is exactly what they want.

The sub-part of this is exactly the way they want to get it. I'll give you a B. A.

B. example from Gym Launch: The average gym makes $30,000 in their first 30 days using the Gym Launch system. Now the average gym owner makes $36,000 a year in take-home income.

So if they make $36,000 a year as take-home income, then we can help them get what they want easier, guaranteed, faster, and exactly what they wanted to do, which was to fill their gym up and make money. Whatever benefits you sell, there’s some good stuff. So we want to say, "Hey, here's all this good stuff you want, and here's how I make it easier, faster, guaranteed, and this is what it looks like when it's right.

" That's what we explain with the "how," part one. Now that we've listed out all the good stuff, let's flip over to "how," part two, which is going to be the bad stuff. If you think about motivating an individual in.

. . General, you fundamentally only have two things that are going to increase the likelihood that they do what you want.

You either have to take away the bad stuff that they don't want, or give them more good stuff that they want. That's it; that's all you can do. Thinking about it from this framework has helped me so much in copywriting and sales.

It's like you're either going to get this thing, or you're going to avoid this thing you hate. That's it. It's just how well you can describe either of these things that makes it more and more compelling, which is why picking someone like you makes it easier to describe the very intricacies of their pain.

For example, if I said, "Lose weight fast," that might have worked in the 1900s, but people quickly learned that they can't believe things that people say. The more specific you are about the pain and the benefit, the more likely they are to believe you. If I say, "Hey, stop feeling your thighs chafing when you're out in the sun," that's a very specific pain, right?

Someone would be like, "Oh, I experience that. " It would pass their guardrails and their banner blindness around ads and copy and marketing because it's very specific to their pain. You want them to be like, "I can't believe they know this about me," because you know it about you, and you just describe it back to them.

Now we're going to talk about the bad stuff. These are the inverse of the things that I was mentioning earlier. Instead of the guarantee, we're going to talk about the risks that we're going to help them avoid.

Instead of how fast it is, we're going to talk about how slow it is for them, that they're not going to have to experience that slowness. Instead of it being easy, we're going to talk about all the pain, sacrifice, and suffering that they have to go through in order to experience the benefit. The nice thing with this one, particularly because there's going to be the most meat here in terms of what you're describing, is that the guarantee is where you state stats and show what you've done and what you plan to do.

For the fast and easy, you put a timeline around it and what they can expect, versus the timeline of what's bad. With the ease, there are two sides to this: one is, what are all the good things they normally have to give up that they no longer have to give up with your system, and what are all the bad things that they would normally have to start doing with other products or services to solve this problem that, with your product, they don't have to start doing. Let me give you an example.

Weight loss is simple. If I have to start working out and waking up early, then that's something bad I don't want to start doing. If you use my system, you don't have to start doing this bad thing you don't want to do to get the result.

If I want to avoid the negative thing that you don't want to give up, which is, "Hey, you like doing Taco Tuesdays and eating out with your friends," normally you'd have to give that up, but with my system, you can keep that thing you like without sacrificing it and still get the result. By showing both of these, it makes it easier. What makes things hard is doing things we don't like and giving up things we like.

If we have our solution, they don't have to do things they hate and can keep doing things they love, then they will like that better. You might be thinking, "Okay, well I get the good stuff and the bad stuff for how part one and how part two, but how do I get all this stuff? " Well, first off, if it's you, then you know what these pains are.

If it's not you, then you do the three-letter method: you ready for it? Ask people you want to sell to. You get on the phone, reach out to people, and essentially do an interview.

Now, a good interview basically functions like a sales call, which is: What are the problems you're struggling with right now? How long have you struggled with them? What makes it painful specifically?

Can you describe what the experience is like when it's not right? Could you describe your ideal experience if it were done the right way? What are some of the things you have to stop doing that you like doing, that you don't want to stop doing?

When you've done things in the past, what are the things you have to start doing that you hate doing? In either of those scenarios, in all of those scenarios, you're learning more about the customer—you're learning about their dreams and aspirations, but the pains that they've experienced along the way. The culmination of all of those answers becomes how part one and how part two: the good stuff you're going to help them get, and the bad stuff you're going to help them avoid.

If you're still wondering, "How am I going to make money from all this stuff? " don't worry; we're going to get there right now. Step five: putting it all together.

Combine. This is the Mr Miyagi moment in "Karate Kid," where you've been waxing on and waxing off this entire time so you can get to the moment where you can finally get your car. So, we're going to.

. . Do Osim Money Mad Lib.

We're going to drop everything in, so I help who, which we got from step two, which is the combination of what the big thing's about and then narrowing it down through step one and step two. I help 35-year-old male accountants get a new income stream, whatever the good thing that they want is. Right?

Which is how part one, without how part two—the bad stuff through. And this is going to be the bonus that I'm going to cover in a second, all right? Which is something called a unique mechanism.

All right, so I'll cover that in a moment, but fundamentally, you could ignore this last part, and this is the basic version of it, and this is the more advanced one once you get some reps. The reason I'm going to explain that one in a second is because if you haven't done it yet, you don't have a unique process. And so, if you're just starting out, this is me meeting you where you're at.

I help who get good stuff without bad stuff. I help 45-year-old women who just had kids get back into their high school jeans without giving up time with their family. I help non-fiction business authors get on the Wall Street Journal bestseller list without looking cringe.

And listen, it doesn't have to be like—you don't have to perfectly do this every time. I could just say, "I help young guys starting school for the first time pick their community in under 30 minutes. " It's just if you can nail them, then the person's like, “Shoot, that's me!

” Right? The more you add these pieces in, they’re like, “That's exactly what I'm struggling with; this is exactly what I want,” and then the unique mechanism makes it nice and sexy. So now that we hit the bonus, let's go to the bonus section.

So bonus number one is going to be something called the unique mechanism. All right? Now, the reason I wanted to combine it before the unique mechanism is that if you are starting out, you might not have a unique process yet.

All right? But a unique mechanism is something that differentiates your solution from other people's. So if there are two people in your market or ten or 100 people in your market, one, you could probably go narrower on your “who” and the problem you're trying to help them solve, but let's assume that you did that, and there are still ten people that all help 35-year-old male accountants, you know, watch Friends reruns because that's your passion without feeling the judgment of other people because you have a cool streaming platform or access between all these other ones that allow them to do it for free—whatever.

Okay, so let's say that that's your niche, and there are ten other people who are serving them. What you want to have is some unique mechanism, and this is not a new marketing concept. You want to have some sexiness or some special sauce that makes the prospect think, “Oh, I'm going to push all of my hopes and dreams into this process.

Like, if I had only had this special sexy thing, I was six inches away from gold, and then I just needed this thing to get me over the hump. ” And the point is that that's what they should feel like: “Oh, if I just had this thing all along, I would have already been successful. ” So it's like you have this secret that you can help them be successful with, and the proof is in the pudding.

And so even if you think about this YouTube video as a product, if you wanted to, the unique mechanism is the five-step process or the five-step niche narrowing—the niche narrowing nunchuck, right? Because it's a wax on the head. So let me explain how this works: you're going to either have a list or steps that someone has to follow to achieve a result.

Fundamentally, that's what it is. You're either going to say you have to do all these things—so just think of a checklist. Like, once you have done all four of these things, you'll achieve the outcome—or you have to follow this in sequence.

You have to do one, and then you have to do two, and then you have to do three, and then four. The difference here is that these don't have to be in order; you just have to do them all. Here, you have to do them in a specific sequence.

But either way, you're going to have a list or a series of steps that someone is going to follow, and then all you do is wrap this whole thing and name it, because this becomes your proprietary process and that proprietary process becomes your unique mechanism. If you've heard me talk about content, we have promise, proof, plan. And so it's, “Hey, I'm going to help you pick your niche by the end of this video.

” Proof is that I've helped tens of thousands of people do this on school, so I'm pretty good at it. And then the plan is, “We're going to follow these five steps. Ta-da!

And here we are. ” And so that process, we can call the Mosy Money Niche Method—whatever. So if you've heard of P90X, the unique mechanism they had was muscle confusion, right?

And obviously, a zillion fitness influencers—there’s no such thing as muscle confusion, and they're right. But the thing is, it was a unique mechanism, and they sold hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars of fitness programs using it. If you look at Weight Watchers, they have a point system.

The point system is their unique mechanism. If you look at some of… These other ones, they have their XYZ portion control thing; like, they all have a unique mechanism, their way of doing it. Think of this as the vehicle; this is going to take them from where they are to where they want to go, and you're the one who's piloting this ship with them in the back seat, or they're piloting it with you in the back seat, with you as the guide.

The point is that that becomes the special sauce, and everybody should do this. That's where you can have the naming conventions. I cover naming stuff in my last chapter here on the Offers book, where I either like something that rhymes, or I like alliteration, if I can.

So, as promised, if you're following this process, then you got the "what," which helped you narrow down the "who. " You followed the steps in that to niche down to figure out very specifically who the Avatar was—someone like you, someone you've helped before, or someone who's underserved. We did the good stuff, we looked at the bad stuff, and we put it all together into one sentence so you can immediately use it.

If you're a little more advanced, then you figured out your unique mechanism, or your system, or your process, or your method to put it all together so they're like, "Wow, this is exactly what I need. " So, what's this last bonus? Well, I said I'd help you get your first five customers, so let's do that.

Alright, I'm going to give you the absolute simplest system for getting your first five customers using what we just had. What you do is greet someone—greetings, hello! You will mention something specific about them; that's a compliment.

You'll insert that sentence that we just came up with, and then you'll ask them if they know anybody who could benefit from that. You will do this for four hours per day, or until you reach 100; I don't care which. You can do four hours a day or until you reach 100, and if you do this every day and make this process that you reach out to people, you will get five customers.

I outline this entire process inside of the Leads book in the first chapter called "Warm Outreach" to help you get your first five customers. If you'd like me to help you lead along and you want to do it via community, you can go to school. com games.

I literally walk thousands of people through this every single month, so we're pretty good at it. Like I said, more than one out of two people make their first dollar online, so check it out!