want to start a business? watch this video

in this video I'll show you guys 10 tips that I used to grow my own business from just an idea to a fully functioning business in just 3 months as a college student without further Ado let's Dive Right into number one number one is finding your business idea a business must be based on something you genuinely enjoy so let's use an example let's go with my good friend Steve now Steve loves photography he just goes out into his backyard and takes pictures of things in this case that would be a good idea for Steve's business Steve might want to make a business in photography choose something like that for your business all right so now that you have a general sphere of what you want to make it in you have to understand the two different types of businesses there is B2B and b2c businesses now first a B2B means a business to business that means that you're selling a good product or service to a different business and for b2c you're selling it to Consumers as in a large base of ordinary people now there's a lot of pros and cons to each one however my personal recommendation is starting with a B2B business the main reasons are because for B2B you don't need that much of an explicit marketing budget and second B2B businesses tend to be easier to start and stop so for example if you want to stop your business you can just leave on good terms with your clients and kind of shut it down whereas for a b2c business you have a whole customer base you have to keep on continually growing and fostering however on screen here I've listed some more detailed pros and cons about B2B and b2c so just consider this when you're starting and we can move on from here step number two is niching down I want you to understand this there's no such thing as this one brilliant idea that will somehow change every Market almost everyone can have ideas so it's more about finding a market where your idea is new than trying to find a completely new idea all across the world so how do you choose a niche for your business well it's very similar to how you choose your business idea what is a niche that you actually have experienced in so for me as an example my Niche for my business is specifically in the Minecraft sphere now why did I choose Minecraft it's because I have so much experience with it right I've been playing Minecraft since I was literally 5 years old and I know this community inside and out which would make it a strong Niche so choose a niche that you actually enjoy and you somewhat understand how it functions so next your Niche must have a good mix of small and large firms and the third criteria for a niche is there must be at least a, firms in that Niche that are in business this is because if you don't have at least a thousand you're going to Simply run out of leads to outreach to to sell your services and again this is specifically for B2B and in terms of b2c again you should have a customer pool of at least 10,000 to 100,000 potential customers so you can actually build a customer base let's tie it back to this character building of Steve so Steve has chosen his business right it's a photography business that's B2B two great things already decided now Steve has to decide his Niche now let's just say for example Steve loves cars and he's always active in the car Community he loves going to car meets then there we go that's a great Niche for Steve to start and now his business is going to be a B2B car photography business all right everyone now for step number three which is research if there's one takeaway you get from this video it is to not skip research now here's what you need to understand your idea probably isn't special and probably someone's already doing it or if someone's not doing it there's probably a reason why they're not doing it it's a lot better to spend one week doing heavy research than spending one year on a business figuring out your entire idea sucks and having to stop it all the way down the road so let's big down the process step one is just a gut test you thought of this idea you thought of a niche everything sounds really great to you now it's time to just let that idea sit Ponder on it don't get to work making a website don't start outreaching people don't start watching guides on YouTube all right so suppose you waited for one or two days with the gut test and this idea still seems pretty solid to you now it's time to analyze some supply and demand now if you have a physical business where you're actually going to be going in person and doing some service for people then your best bet is going to be through personal connections and Google Maps so on Google Maps you'll just search up for competitors so for example for Steve he would search up car photography firms in his area and if he sees that there's car photography firms that are just outpricing him and impossible for him to compete with then he might want to choose a different business idea now for Steve to analyze demand for a physical business it's definitely harder because remember this demand for something is not the same as a number of potential leads right so for example Steve could see that there's a hundred different car dealerships in his area but he still won't know if there's actually demand for car photography so in that case the best way to get a little bit of a test of demand is just to go up to people and ask them hey do you think there's demand for this and then just ask a few people get a general understanding and then you can kind of monitor demand that way now for a digital business which I think many of you watching this video are interested in one great tool I recommend for supply and demand is called apollo. io so you can search up for businesses with similar keywords to you and see all the lists of competitors and assuming that a digital business can operate worldwide it'll give you a good understanding of the total competitors that you have now Apollo also has a way to actually measure demand for something and that's through its customer buying intent so with this you can just search up buying intent of certain services for your ideal customer industry and then from there you can see are the firms that your niches in actually interested in the service you're offering all right now the last step of doing research is actually talking to Industry professionals a lot of the times on paper this sounds good but there's some underlying thing that's known in the industry that will make this idea completely obsolete that you have so make a LinkedIn account it's great for finding people and business professionals I think if you're not selling anything to anyone you're just asking for advice most people will really not have any problem helping you and at least like you know three or four professionals will get you a good understanding and from there you will have a much better understanding of if your business idea actually works or not now it's time for step number four which is designing your service what does this mean because it sounds easy on the surface right for example for Steve's car photography service Steve would be like oh this is so obvious right I'm just going to email a person they're going to say yes I'm going to go to their car I'm going to take photos of their car and send them the photos but you need to actually really dissect this and figure out every single little step of the process because it actually uncovers many holes in your business idea I know from personal experience and don't think about marketing or sales when you're doing this okay assume this client is already interested in working with you so you'll realize quickly that this needs an insane amount of thought and this is what I want you to do take a marker have a whiteboard and just circle around your room in deep thought just think it's going to it's going to be a lot of thinking you're going to be very confused but that's fine the more confused you are the better because that means you're uncovering a lot of these very very deep ingrained problems or things that will come up anyway it's a lot better to think about this now and create an actually well-thought solution than think about it later when you have a client that you have to fulfill and you have no idea how to do this for them I want you to spend at least one entire week on workflow now at the end of this week when you've really thought about it and designed your whole business workflow you want to present it to someone and I would seriously consider just making a pitch deck like that's what I did I literally went on canva and made a pitch deck as if I was talking to investors about my idea and I literally went to my family and I presented this pitch deck to them and my family found a lot of holds in my idea I'm not going to lie but that's fine and you can even reach back to the industry professionals you talked to earlier and just ask them for another meeting right again this is all ties back to planning your business properly before you start so that way when you actually get started you know what you're doing and you actually have a solid foundation to build off of all right guys now it's officially time for Branding more of the fun part so to speak speaking of branding if you think my brand this video is pretty cool just consider dropping me a sub so I know that this video is helpful and I should make more content like this thank you now the way I Define branding is anything that displays The Entity of your business to other people so this means your website your name your logo Etc so here's a rapid fire guide on all the branding you'll need when just starting your business now the very first thing you need is the name of the business now if your business is a B2B business especially if it's a service business for example Steve's photography business we're building here then it's honestly pretty simple you can just choose some name and whatever service you offer so for example my company is called hot slicer media because we your media company uh just like that you can come up with any basic name here don't overthink it and there you go just do one thing though check the trademark for that name so go to the trademark Registry make sure that the trademark is actually available so that later down the line you won't have legal troubles for having a certain name of your business so the second part of branding is your logo now I'm pretty sure after this video all of you guys are going to spend the next 6 hours on a free logo generator trying to make the perfect logo now logo is important so here's some pointers for you guys first I recommend just one or two colors and make sure the colors work well on a white and a back background this is the mistake I made personally so next make sure you export the logo as a high quality PNG with a transparent background so that way you can add it to any creative assets you might have for the rest of the business and next I just recommend something nice clean and simple just don't go crazy with the designs and canva is a great source for Logos just search up logos on canva scroll through that's how I got my logo and it's a pretty good source there all right the next third step of branding is going to be your domain and your email any serious business does not use an @gmail. com address in fact most companies you might be outreaching to have a filter against that which means like literally your email won't even reach your prospect's inbox if it ends with gmail.

com that's why you need a company. com or. org address now the way you do this is pretty simple you want to sign up for a Google workspace subscription it's about $4 a month and then you also want to buy a domain from Google for about $1 a month now setting up the authentication and then getting a good spam assassin score and all that can get pretty complicated so for you guys only for this video I have created a free pdf this PDF is a complete guide of this entire video and it features very helpful guides on YouTube that I use personally to set up all of the stuff mentioned in the video so if that interests you join my Discord server in the description it's completely free in one of the channels and you can download the PDF there and use it along with this video so after you've set up your at compan email address you'll also want to do a bit of email setup so you'll want to have a nice email signature just your company logo your name your title any important links will get the job done and also make sure that your profile picture is a nice clean head shot of you so an important thing to remember is that you are a representative of your business right so your business is never reaching out to someone you are reaching out to people but you're representing your business which means that your profile photos should never be your business logo that just comes across as very artificial and you know people like talking to other people not like this random entity that's a business right all right next for Branding we have the website now people obsess a lot over websites and it can be helpful but at the end of the day I want you to remember something that web sites and the brand and all of this stuff it's really only to show the clients that you're legitimate business when you're getting started and you don't actually have proprietary softwares or login Pages you don't actually use your website for gaining leads or actually gaining some traction so the only thing it should do is look clean and show to clients that you are a legitimate business and not a scammer so even for me personally up until just a few weeks ago I used a simple WordPress onepage website that just explain what we did and only recently did I build it out into more case studies and a better design so you don't actually need this just make something simple that shows what you guys do and it will work out all right now the last part of this branding little quick fire around is LinkedIn if you're working with a lot of tech companies or just companies that have a LinkedIn presence having a well-built out LinkedIn profile is very important so I've attached a guide in the PDF as I mentioned about how to make a good LinkedIn profile and also make a LinkedIn company page for your business so you can list your business as one of your experiences all right and that is the crash course on branding now branding goes very very deep it's an entire subject of its own and honestly after you set up this basic branding it's definitely a good starting point to do more branding so from there you can discover all sorts of different funnels to increase your brand awareness and even generate organic leads through branding but this is a good starting point I wouldn't do more than this when you're just getting started all right so congratulations if you fought up until this step you now have a full Foundation of your business and you have your branding to a random Prospect your business is going to look like a legitimate entity which is great but there is some backend software and setup that you need to have in place so that when you actually start outreaching to people you know what to do and you aren't again in a panic so there's quite a few different softwares and tools that I found incredibly useful so I'm just going to list them off here I recommend you guys use every single one of them all right so first of all is a calendar if you don't have a calendar already you need to start one right now you cannot be a business owner and not have an extremely detailed and midiculous calendar now in accessory to a calendar you're going to want to set up a calendar booking app this is an app that lets other people schedule time in your calendar to set up meetings or Discovery calls Etc now personally I used to use an app called calendly and I think if you just have one meeting you need to do that's enough just use a conly link but if you do think you're going to have multiple meetings of different durations and with different people then I recommend an app called cal.

com because for free it lets you have more events at once then calendly but bottom line set this up and it'll stop this email Hot Potato of when to actually do a time and most industry professionals use this so if you don't use it it's going to be a big red flag to any of your prospects of why is this business not using calendar apps all right so the next thing is going to be a payment method this is something that often happens happens that you know you finally have a client you did all the delivery youve put all this work in and now you don't actually know how to collect payment from the client generally for payments there's two things there's going to be an a bank transfer where you just give them your routing number and your account number and they just send you an invoice that way or there is stripe now personally I recommend you just use stripe stripe does take a fee of 2. 9% so make sure you charge your clients at stripe fee so you don't lose out on your profits trust me I made that mistake and stripe is very easy to set up you can just link your bank account to it and from there you can send your customers invoices directly to their email and they can pay for it now personally I honestly suggest you make a separate bank account for your business you don't want a situation where your personal finances and your business finances are kind of muddled together so have a bank account and also keep books books as in records of all your transactions and revenue and profit now in accessory to that you want a really good file management software for me personally I just use the Google Suite I have a Google drive folder I really really meticulously add subfolders and supporting documents and uploads to that and in general you just have to be very organized with this stuff because you will end up generating a ton of documents and data that you need to constantly look back on tons of spreadsheets and presentations and PDFs Etc in general legal requirements are not that much when you're starting um you can generally do business as a soap Proprietor in the United States when you're getting started which means you don't need a business license you don't need to register an LLC it's pretty simple but what you do need is a contract always always have a contract even for the smallest things so for a contract I recommend using jot form they have a lot of free templates for any contract you can imagine and there's also a lot of pro bono lawers associations pro bono means like they're basically just lawyering for free in general if you're doing something simple like photography like Steve is then I think it's jot form will do the trick but if you're doing something more complicated definitely check it over with the lawyer now to actually sign this contract once you've drafted up in PDF format I recommend an e signature software now jot form is pretty bad for E signatures because it only allows five signatures per month which is pretty terrible like you know we got to be balling out here right we can't only have five clients a month so um I recommend a software called bold sign they allow for 25 contracts a month uh which is much better I mean if you have more than 25 clients a month at that point just you know pay for it and make sure the contract has their address their actual legal name and like information like that it's very important all right guys we're here now on to number seven finding and outreaching clients let's go you know it's pretty crazy that all these gurus they want you to start with this step they literally start their guides with oh here's how to set up an Outreach software and start emailing people which I find completely ridiculous because just look at how much prep work is needed beforehand this prep work is not something you do when you actually have a client that's knocking on your door this is something you do before you have a client so you can actually do a good job now since you already chose a niche that has small and large firms as I told you in the start you already know a pretty decent route to take for outreaching to clients you want to start with the smallest possible company you can find now generally these tiny companies are not going to be found on outreaching softwares like lead ER or Apollo IO so instead a really great tool I like is Discord for example if you have an online editing business so a great way to start if you're an editor is just literally go on Discord use the server Discovery tool and search up for example YouTubers or search up content creation servers Etc and these are going to be very very small little micro businesses that you can pitch to first so that's why I recommend I personally got my first few clients through Discord as well by literally just coming up with my account and pitching to them and it's also good because you're right there right you're talking with them directly it's not just an email because emails can just be you know blasted out by bots so emails are generally ignored uh but Discord messages have a much higher reply rate in general now once you start hitting these budgets of ,000 to $2,000 this is a great time to start moving on to actual Outreach platforms like apollo. io and snov.

io now these Outreach platforms have a registry of over 400 million employees employees at all these companies now since you already did some supply and demand analysis from Step number one you should already have a decent idea of which companies to outreach to with Apollo so uh yeah look at that look how much time this saves you when you frontload this work instead of figuring it out just right off the bat so to get started with Apollo definitely filter the companies by industry and also by employee size to 1 to 10 employees this is what you want to Target now Apollo has a really great and completely free email automation software just built in I have a tutorial on Apollo in the PDF I mentioned earlier because Apollo does get a little complicated but essentially just search up the companies add the contacts to lists import those lists to an email sequence write the sequence and by the way for the sequence have at least five follow-ups and then from there you can launch the sequence and then those emails will be sent out with your at company name email address which you conveniently also set up earlier because you're smart and you're watching this video lead generation should be one of the first things you Outsource and the reason is because it's not that complicated but it's very timec consuming on Fiverr and upwork there's all these people you just got to Outsource this stuff to them and for two reasons first frankly you should be spending your time on better things that more specifically improve your business and second it's also because these people on Fiverr Network actually have paid subscriptions to things like LinkedIn sales Navigator and also apollo.