How to start your own business without investors | Nicholas Hänny | TEDxHochschuleLuzern

[Music] hello everybody i'm nicholas heny i'm the ceo and co-founder of a startup a young sustainable clothing brand that plants one tree for each product that we sell but i'm not here today to talk about sustainability or tree planting i'm here to talk about how to build a business without investors i'm talking about that because i built my business with only 5 000 francs and we don't have any investors up to this point so two things i want to tell you before i start talking about my tips the first thing is we never had a business plan and never needed one so that's one thing i want to tell you just start without the business plan and the second thing is that the five tips i'm going to give you now are actually pretty basic and simple and might seem obvious to most of you but i'm trying to go and putting it into context that you see some examples of how we dealt with that so the first tip is actually pretty simple it is it's not about the idea it's about the implementation what i mean with that is that a lot of times people come to me telling me hey i want to start my own business but i don't have the idea i don't know what to do but the thing that i'm telling them then is that you don't need a great idea it's not about the idea that you're successful it's about the implementation so you don't need a great idea to start and neither to be successful i want to give you know three examples of companies that exactly did that the first example is actually pretty famous one it's of actually the biggest social network in the world it's facebook facebook when it started it was a terrible idea in my opinion they wanted to build a social media social network which at that point was already pretty a bad idea because myspace was huge myspace dominated it facebook also only started with harvard students but after time they started to implement it better had better ideas improved it and now they're one of the biggest companies in the world the second tip might be a little bit less for example might be a little bit less famous it's lyft lyft is basically the same as uber uber started in the states and actually everybody knows what uber is now so lyft took the same idea and usually it's a bad idea just to copy someone but they did it better they implemented the stuff better in the process did certain things better and now in certain cities they're actually bigger than uber then the third example is maybe the most famous one it's google google was not the first search engine it was not the great idea to just do another search engine when they started but as you know they improved their algorithm better their search engine is better and now they're the biggest one in the world so all of them actually just started with not a very great idea but implemented it much better so just do something it's not about idea it's about the implementation now let me go over to the second tip the second tip is to not strive for perfection so what i mean with that is when you start the business you usually don't really have a lot of money you cannot afford the people that are the experts to either work for you or pay them that they consult you and help you so it means you have to do everything yourself and that's not always that easy so let me give you actually four personal examples of how we did that so the first one the first example is of our first t-shirt that we had the first t-shirts were from asia and only then we shifted it to europe but we didn't know that the sciences from asia are totally different from european sizes so our excel was actually more like an m and customers are not that happy about it however we sold the product we got feedback we learned about it and by that we got better and better and better and it was much better just do it and sell it and by that have a faster learning phase so that was already very important now the second example is of our first photo shooting in switzerland where we started to take product pictures for ourselves we didn't have money to pay a photographer we were thinking of it but it was just way too expensive so our setup that you can see is only like 30 dollars the lamp was from a local construction site the camera was borrowed from a friend the thing i have in my hand in the picture is styrofoam and the thing in the background this is actually the only thing that cost us 30 dollars the pictures were not great but they were good enough to start and by that we got again feedback we learned and we were faster than like others who waited for perfect pictures so now the third thing is an instagram post from us in the beginning if you look at it it looks pretty horrible in my opinion but we posted more more than other companies we had a higher posting frequency we got by that more engagement more comments more likes more everything and in the end we actually won by that we also learned which posts work well which not and it was just more important to just do it rather than waiting for the perfect post now the last example is actually my favorite example because it's our first towel that we had our first towel though had a problem when he went to the beach or to the local swimming pool and you were lying on the grass on the beach and you took it up the towel you basically ripped away all the leaves and all the grass so he took away almost the whole forest that was horrible customers hated it but some actually liked it but nevertheless we learned from diller more about material the next one was much better and again we sold it we got some more customers and so on and that was super important to not wait for the perfect product to just do it now the third tip third tip is also pretty obvious and many people of you know that probably but it's ask for help a lot of times we just ask people be it people we know be complete strangers if they could help us in something and you'll be amazed at how many people actually want to help how much good there's out there and also don't forget the worst thing that can happen is when you ask to just get a no so let me give you two examples of which the first one is more of a personal one in the picture you can see the parents of my co-founder in the beginning we had a lot of demand for our winter hats so we asked them if it could help us actually manufacture them so you see them stitching the labels onto the winter hats they also packed until three in the morning our orders and also we asked friends if they could help us and all of them helped us for free so you just have to ask but it's not only about people you know it's also about complete strangers so the next example shows a situation when we moved into new office and we needed new furniture we thought that it might be that it would make more sense to actually use used furniture so we asked if some people have it in the seller because all of you probably also have some furniture they don't use in their seller so 17 people commented 20 people direct messaged me and in the end you had more offers for good furniture than we actually needed so this actually shows that in the end you just have to ask the worst thing you can get is a no and if you don't know how to ask the right people go on linkedin google it there's many many many places where you can find out who to ask in the end now the next tip also a simple one but if you don't have a lot of money and you're starting your own business super important it's be flexible and by flexible i mean be really really really flexible it's again the same story you cannot hire people that are doing the hard work for you you cannot hire people that do 24 7 customer service for you you have to do most of the things yourself in the beginning so i'll also give you examples the first example is an example of our first meetings we did not have an office we did not have the money to rent one so we had to do meetings in bars or restaurants we did that either before our regular jobs or studies or afterwards as you can see in the picture it was of course afterwards now in this situation and we did that for around one and a half years until we could actually afford our first real office now the next example is if you look at the picture it's a toilet and you must might ask yourself why the hell is the toilet in the picture so that was a place where i had to work a lot it was super important for me it is because with the customer service ourselves and when you got a customer service request you had to answer it pretty fast so i use these five minutes doing whatever people do on the toilet to tell customers yes you can send back the package and yes we're going to send you another one i did that all the time i had to as well as using five minutes in the bus to write an email and these minutes and this flexibility really really matters in the beginning so now going to the last tip the last tip is that you should read the best book in the world a lot of times i get asked by people how do i do marketing how do i find a supplier how do i do video editing how do this that or this and first of all if you go back to tip number three of course i help them in that moment but at the same time i also tell them hey read the best book in the world because it's all in there and so the best book in the world is google as simple as it might sound but all the things you want to know there on google google how to build sustainable business google how to do facebook ads how to have a sustainable clothing brand and so on and it's almost all written in there of course if at some point you have a list of 20 things and you know these things you have to do then it might help if you ask someone with experience to tell you on what to focus but then go back to tip number three again which is asking and they then i might ask you or may tell you what you have to do in the moment so that's it these are my five basic tips and just one more message i would like to give you is if you really want to do something you don't need a great idea just do it if you just go out there and do it remember this that you're already ahead of 99 of all potential entrepreneurs and so it's basically just about doing it and everything else comes in the process and implementation so thank you very much for your attention [Music]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 114,649

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Business, Fashion, Sustainability, Trees

Id: owS4NQmzv2w

Length: 10min 14sec (614 seconds)

Published: Thu May 28 2020