5 Steps to Start Your First Business

starting a business can sound like an impossible task you might think that you don't have what it takes you might think you're not very entrepreneurial and you might know the stat that 9 out of 10 startups fail but what I've learned over the years of building my own multi-million dollar business and interviewing dozens of successful entrepreneurs is that starting a business is actually a step-by-step process and if you follow those steps then actually things can become a lot more manageable okay so it might be a case of copy pasting hey friends welcome back to the channel and to another episode of money Club the ongoing Series where we discuss the principles strategies and tools that can help us on our shared Journey towards Financial Independence and building a life that we love in this video I want to introduce you to the step-by-step Castle method of building a business and this video is going to be aimed at beginners so if you've been thinking of starting a business but you maybe haven't started one yet then I promise if you follow the first two steps of this method you will create a working minimum viable product hopefully in under two hours throughout this video we're going to be designing a business completely from scratch and I'm going to be going through the castle method on this template over here and if you want this template it is available completely for free along alongside a Google doc version if you don't like notion that'll be linked down below we've got the difference between J curve and non-jco businesses you've got all of my highlights from this book over subscribed and a bunch of other resources that'll help you because this video is going to be ridiculously long and so we're just going to pile all the other information straight into that template again it's completely free just hit the link down below and you can download it if you like so let's start with step one of the castle method and that is conceptualize and to illustrate this I want to tell you a little bit about Cedric the strapping young rad must be Cedric am I right Cedric is an 18 year old who has just graduated from school and he realizes that he wants the freedom fun and flexibility and the money that building his own business can lend him his family haven't had much money growing up and he's seen the power of financial Independence and so he really wants to start his first business so one step is ideation ideations coming out with at least 10 ideas and then figuring out which one would be the best or which two or three ideas would be the best so that's an actual process called ideation um and most people jump from first idea to action rather than coming up with nine other ideas and saying well why did I choose that one that's Daniel Priestley he's a Serial entrepreneur and he's also a coach for CEOs and for business owners and he's written a bunch of books that are all about starting and growing businesses and Daniel's book oversubscribed as my most highlighted book of all time and the knowledge I got from this book has directly translated to over two million dollars worth of sales for my own business so Step One is ideation so what Cedric needs to do and what you need to do if you're starting a business is just generate lots and lots of ideas for what possible business you could start if you wanted to and if you look inside our template we've got some more instructions here that you can follow around brainstorming researching the market identifying the problem that you're solving developing a unique value proposition and ultimately refining your idea and because Cedric is intelligent he understands the power of artificial intelligence to help him come up with his business ideas and to refine his value proposition as well now at this point you want to look through your list of business ideas and you want to try and combine two different things you want to combine what you think there might be a genuine market for with what you personally might be potentially interested in or what you have personal expertise in and this is an idea from Jim Collins book good to great and it's called the Hedgehog concept and it's basically this Venn diagram intersection between the things that the market wants the thing that you could potentially be the best in the world at and the thing that you personally enjoy and if you can find something in the intersection of that Venn diagram that's when you really have a business that could flourish but within this Hedgehog concept especially if you're starting your first business by far the most important thing is trying to focus on the problem that you're solving for your customers trying to focus on being of service rather than being selfish Cedric might decide for example that he really wants to start this magical Fitness Studio but if he looks at the market can realize is that actually no one really cares about magical Fitness and there's tons and tons of Fitness studios in the area even if Cedric is super interested in Fitness himself it's probably a pretty bad idea to start that particular business because it's a real uphill battle to get customers for that particular product and so thinking in terms of what he's interested in also what there's a market for Cedric looks at his list of business ideas and he thinks oh wand Maker's Workshop what if he starts a business where he could potentially sell custom wants to people who want custom ones and Cedric liked this idea because when he was in school he just found himself being quite interested in the idea of wand lore and started reading books about it and so there's a little bit of a passion there as well and now Cedric comes up with a name and because again he's just using AI because it's just a fairly quick thing he decides you know what let's go for the one Studio that is Cedric's new business now step two of the castle method is to assemble your minimum viable product and again this is where so many people get it wrong people think that to start a business you have to put in so much work to build a product and then once you put in six months a year two years of effort building a product then you prefer it to the market and you hope that people will come but the castle method and the method that Daniel Priestley talks about and in fact the method that every startup who is intelligent in the world follows these days is starting off by building a minimum viable product where the objective is lead generation so you want a very simple MVP it's just lead generation at first so all you're trying to do is can I generate leads because everything is Downstream from lead generation and this is a golden law of business everything is Downstream of lead generation if you cannot generate leads for a business there is no way in hell you're ever going to be able to generate sales for a business and a lead is basically any indicator of Interest so the point of your minimum viable product your MVP is to generate those leads and the way you get those indicators of interest from the market is by giving away something of value for free and seeing if people are potentially interested in it I personally recommend giving the thing away for free rather than charging for it because if it's free and you can't get people to sign up for it there's no way in hell you're ever going to be able to get people to pay you for anything so what are the MVPs that you can create for free well there's a bunch of different options but there's two that I would recommend and that is either a scorecard or a free webinar so in the case of one Studio they could if they wanted to create a free webinar and they could do it on one making techniques and on the history of one making or something like that let's say you don't want to do the one thing and maybe you want to start a business offering Financial Services now you probably wouldn't just go to the market and say hey buy my financial services you might offer a free webinar that teaches people about the current trends in the finance markets and because it's free people are more likely to sign up for it you've got your indicators of Interest you've got your lead generation and you've validated your business idea so it doesn't take long to put one of these webinars together and again in this template we've got a bunch of different tools that you can use to schedule them completely for free and you can use that as a way of testing your business idea but one thing I've started to use recently in my business is to create scorecard minimum viable product now my scorecard is basically a glorified online quiz and these are great because a people love filling in online quizzes and B you can ask a load of questions to validate your business idea so we are just going to create one of these scorecards for Cedric's one studio and I'm going to show you how easy this is to do now if you want you can do this on a Google form or a type form or anything but there is a specifically designed app called a score app which is actually a company owned by Daniel Priestley and he actually has a book on it called scorecard marketing and that's the app that we've been for the last six months I'll put a link down below and it's also in the template for a free 30-day trial if you want to try this out but I'm going to log into my account and you can see we've got productivity quiz podcaster Brandon come side Hustle YouTube growth scorecard The Wheel of Life like we use scorecards for a lot of things to generate leads for our own business and our own products but we're going to create a scorecard for the one studio and I'm going to show you how easy this is so let's hit create scorecard and we're going to use the AI Setup Wizard by the way quick heads up score app are not sponsoring this video but I am an investor in the product I invested in it like two weeks ago because I just freaking love it because we've been using it so much so feel free to explore the market if you like but if you end up using score app then it looks good on me because it shows that I'm a good investor because I've plugged the product or something like that whatever you can do whatever you want this is one way of generating quizzes or scorecards for your product but you can use dozens of other software as well if you really want anyway I'm going to create a scorecard so my primary goal for the scorecard is to generate new leads and I actually think something like a witch wander is right for you scorecard would make perfect sense so I want a single outcome I want to tell the customer what want type they're going to go for how would I describe my business Uh custom wand how would you describe your target audience Harry Potter fans cosplay Enthusiast magical performance yeah that's called a Harry Potter fans why not what do you want to help your clients improve achieve or prevent by using the scorecard find your perfect one match is pretty good now choose what you'd like the possible outcomes to be here are some suggested categories and let's keep it at three we're allowing people to either end up with Dragonheart string Phoenix Feather or unicorn hair just to keep things simple next Phoenix Feather bravery and card Above All Else Fierce loyalty and let's go Justice and fairness why not that's for Phoenix Feather gave another feather just one other okay good so I've got my single outcome find your perfect one match Dragon heartstring Phoenix for the Unicorn hair nine questions create my scorecard let's see what happens discover your perfect one match with a profile test answer nine questions we'll send you a personal report sick all right let's go take the scorecard boom enter my details this is clever because when you're doing lead generation and you ask it to enter the details initially it means you get the contact details so it's nice obviously there's like contention all that kind of stuff which you'll you can ask for at the end of it do you have a strong desire for power yes do you believe that the end justifies the means hell yes do you believe in loyalty above all this yeah why not do you value honesty and integrity nope do you believe in second chances hell no and are you compassionate towards other lull absolutely not congratulations on finding the perfect one match Dragon heartstring this is your profile and now when I was doing this in the screen recording that didn't record I adjusted this text to basically say create a custom call to action are you interested in a custom wand if you'd like to order a really nice beautiful custom one let's jump on a quick no obligation 100 free 10-minute Zoom call and if you want you can use something like calendly but calendly is really good you can literally just get people to hop on a 10 minute Zoom call with you and it's completely free but literally in a very small amount of time we have created a minimum viable product and this is where so many people go wrong with businesses I've seen so many friends and colleagues try and start businesses where they try and charge people from day one don't charge people from day one offer them something for free free create a minimum viable product because everything is Downstream of lead generation now once you've made loads of money by using a business like this then you're going to need some way to invest that money and that's why the sponsor of this video comes in and that is trading 212. trading 212 is a fantastic online platform that offers zero commission investing and also fractional shares and it was actually the first platform in the UK and Europe to offer both of these Services I've been using trading 212 since last year to manage my own personal stock portfolio and one of the things I love about it is the fact that you can Auto invest which means every month you can put in x amount of money into your stocks and shares portfolio and the other really cool thing about it is that they've got these social pies now social pies are interesting because basically loads of other investors have created pies of stocks and shares of funds or a little basket of Investments and you can look at what these pies are and you can compare the performance of these different pies and look at who created the pie and then completely for free you can just copy and paste the pie into your own account and so you can copy the exact asset allocation of all these famous investors now as you guys know if you've been watching my videos for any length of time I prefer to generally invest most of my money into broad stock market index phones like the S P 500 where I have the vast majority of my net worth but I do keep some amount of money aside to play around with individual stock picking and that is where I personally find trading 212 and the social pies feature particularly helpful trading 212 is also great because if you're not yet fully comfortable with using real money to invest because of course your Investments may rise as well as full then they've got a whole way of investing using fake money where you can just use fake money to invest in the real markets and you can see how you would have done had you invested real money and then whenever you're ready you can just switch to the real money version of the app now if you're interested in potentially signing up for trading 212 to start or continue your investing Journey then head over to the link in the video description you can download trading212 on the App Store and if you enter the promo code allay in the promo code section of the app then you'll get a completely free share with a value of up to 100 pounds so thank you so much trading 212 for sponsoring this video and let's continue now we are on to step three which is shape your product towards product Market fit product Market fit is adjusting the product to meet the market so you imagined the product would be red but everyone wants it in blue and you're like uh okay as much as I thought it should be red it needs to be blue now generally when people are building actual startups in the real world they spend several months if not sometimes years on continuing to refine their product until they've got product Market fit in my wand maker business I might think that people really want custom ones and will be willing to pay a hundred dollars for them but as I hop on Zoom calls with people and try and sell my custom ones for 100 I realize people don't want that people want a really basic one because they want to learn about the introduction to WAND lore in the first place and so my product might actually change instead of it being I sell custom ones I might realize through Market validation and market research actually I should make a one craft school because people are way more likely to buy an online course in one lore and then I can upsell them on my fancy custom one further down the line rather than get them to buy a fancy one straight up and that's something I wouldn't have known had I not actually validated my idea by talking to my customers and testing the idea out we really noticed this in my own business when I created my part-time YouTuber Academy so we started off our minimum viable product was actually just a quiz at the time score app wasn't a thing so we just used a Google form we asked people when it comes to starting your YouTube channel what's your biggest challenge now the product I had in my mind I thought I was going to make a course that taught people with over a hundred thousand subscribers how to scale their systems and delegate and hire a team and build a business around their YouTube channel but when we put the scorecard out on my email list and on Twitter turns out 99 of people had not even started a YouTube channel in the first place and like 0.01 of people that filled out the survey had more than a hundred thousand subscribers and so that was completely like whoa okay I thought I was building a product for a tiny tiny tiny component of the market which is what they needed but turns out actually my audience is broadly full of noobs no offense when it comes to YouTube and so the product molded to become way more beginner friendly because in my mind the product was very different but what the market told me was something else and so we got product Market fit and then the part-time YouTuber Academy ended up being a multi-million dollar product now there are some other caveats here like this is a really really huge topic how to start a business um I want to talk about Jacob versus non-jco businesses and what type of businesses that you should start but this video is going to be way too long for the algorithm I mean it's probably still too long and all of the information that I want to say is now inside this template again it's completely free there's a link to my website down below you can just download the notion template so that will give you the five-step castle framework and also way more information around the other stuff that I couldn't quite squeeze into this video because we have to keep we have to keep the time step four is to launch your product I.E go to market go to market is once you've got product Market fit and now you're ready to launch and you're ready to put marketing Firepower behind your product and at this point you might be spending money on paid ads you might be hiring influencers like me to Shell your product on their YouTube channels you might be going out and I don't know old school knocking on doors and like trying to sell the product to people you're doing that kind of stuff to get more people in because you validated your idea and you've molded your product based on a small number of customers that you had earlier on um the other thing that triggers every single sale is a combination of emotion logic and urgency so um some and I've found that all businesses are only really naturally good at one so some businesses naturally are good at generating emotion in their customers but not logic or urgency some businesses are really good with the logical side of what you should buy but they're not very good at the emotion or the urgency and great businesses they understand how to do logic emotion and urgency in the right doses so a company like apple for example is really good at all of these different things they create logic because it makes you feel like I'm buying the new iPhone for a reason because of all the marketing materials that say oh hello the camera is X percent better than last time they create emotion because all of the stuff in the Apple Keynotes and the ads make you feel an emotional sense of like ah I really need to have this iPhone so then I can be a cool person and they create urgency by allowing you to pre-order even your pre-order because you know that the iPhone your iPhone is going to sell out and therefore there's a sense of like ah I need to have this now rather than further down the line and then step five E is expand and scale up scale is multiple locations now we're gonna go out in so we might start in London and then go out to Los Angeles and New York in different locations so we're going to go scale is normally new products new markets new territories this is a place where very few people get to because very few businesses actually get to the point where they even launch because people get hamstrung along the way by not giving things away for free and scale is basically multiple locations multiple markets this is stuff that I am just now dipping my toes into but I'm nowhere near an expert on it and so I don't really want to kind of overex my expertise on this particular area this is where it's really helpful to have a CEO coach or a business coach we spend thousands of dollars a month on my own CEO coach Eric pateker he's great he's got a bunch of businesses in the past he's really helping us with scaling ours like all of that fun stuff comes in if you're interested in learning more about these sort of marketing principles and how to get customers to buy your product then two amazing books I'd recommend the first is 100 million dollar offers by Alex formosi and the second is.com Secrets by Russell Brunson and also if you have a launch based business over subscribed by Dan Priestly which as I said is my most highlighted book of all time for business stuff those books will teach you a lot of what you need to know to get your product out there but I suspect if you're watching this video you probably haven't started a business yet it will be it'll be too much this book is not aimed at beginners start by conceptualizing by assembling your MVP and by getting product Market fit and once you've done that and you've got some customers for your product which you've molded to meet the needs of the market at that point you can worry about copywriting and sales and marketing and emotion logic urgency and all this kind of stuff but the main thing to remember from this video is that every single thing is Downstream of lead generation find a way to validate your business idea by getting customers in for free via a scorecard or a webinar landing page or whatever you want and then once you've validated your business idea actually have conversations with your customers to get product Market fit and then you can worry about all the stuff later and we do talk in way more detail about all of these steps in the long form podcast interview that I did with Daniel Priestley so that is on my deep dive podcast Channel over here you can also find it on iTunes Spotify Apple podcast wherever you get your podcast but that is sick so if you liked this video and you've gotten to the end of it you will absolutely love that episode the comments on it are like oh my God I can't believe this is free so check it out completely for free over there thank you so much for watching I hope you like this video and I'll see you hopefully in the next one bye

Channel: Ali Abdaal

Views: 1,044,043

Keywords: Ali Abdaal, Ali abdal, how to make money fast, how to make money online, if i had to restart my business, easy ways to make money online fast, make money online, make money, work from home, how to make money from home, how to make money, how to start a business, starting a business, starting a business step by step, starting a business without money, starting a business from home, how to start a business without money, how to start a business as a teenager, business advice

Id: bXLZ8I7s8tw

Length: 17min 1sec (1021 seconds)

Published: Wed May 10 2023