You Don’t Need More Business Advice
If you’re six months into reading Dan Koe’s newsletters, scouring YouTube for Hormozi videos, or pouring over Justin Welsh’s sololpreneur content – and you still don’t feel that you have momentum in your business…
Then business advice isn’t your problem.
In fact – you have way too much business advice. And most of that advice doesn’t apply to you right now.
Let’s run an example.
Let’s Pretend That Your Toilet is Broken.
It simply won’t stop running. You are able to flush it, but the toilet just keeps running no matter what you do.
Where would you start? Would you search:
- How to become a plumber?
- How to fix pipes?
- House Maintenance.
or would you search:
- How to fix a toilet that won’t stop running.
So let’s compare that to the Social Media “Start your own business” crowd. You login to TikTok, YouTube, X, or LinkedIn. You get smacked in the face with advice.
- Start an email list.
- Learn how to cold DM.
- Build digital leverage with content.
But none of that advice is useful to you right now. Because that advice is for people with something to sell to their audience.
And if you don’t have something to sell, or you haven’t learned how to package that in a way that people want to buy – then the other advice isn’t helping you.
- Learning how to cold DM better is irrelevant. You have nothing to sell in the DMs.
- Learning how to generate more leads is irrelevant. You have nothing to lead those people to.
- Learning how to market yourself on social media is irrelevant. You don’t have a product to market.
You Need The Roadmap to Start a Business Online.
So let’s focus the rest of our attention there. There are three steps to actually starting your business that will impact which advice is going to be relevant for where you’re at.
1. Choose a Business Model.
Before you pick which advice to apply, you need to understand what type of business that you’re starting. Your next steps are going to heavily depend on how you plan on making money with what you’re doing.
For most people who don’t know how to code, build physical products, or understand how to source merchandise – you’re business model will likely fall into one of the following categories:
- Live Streaming – Doing cool stuff for other people’s entertainment, and relying on donations/sponsorships to fund you.
- Affiliate Marketing – Building a niched audience and advertising products to them that are relevant/useful.
- Service Provider – Using your skills and experience to help solve problems for people without those skills or experience.
Why does this step matter?
Well – if you are a live streamer, then your actions will be:
- Get really good at a game, profession, trade, or creative pursuit such that people will want to watch you do it.
- Learn how to be super entertaining.
- Figure out how to market your stream to the right people.
- Figure out how to grow your stream audience fast af.
If you’re an affiliate marketer, then your actions will be:
- Find a niche you can write about all day.
- Build authority in that niche.
- Sell other people’s products to your audience, using your authority and trust.
And if you’re a purpose-driven coach, advisor, or consultant, then you probably want to keys to creating a service based business.
Since that’s the people I’m most interested in helping, you’ve got two next steps.
2. Package Yourself.
Pretend that you’re in a supermarket and grocery shopping.
You’re in the cereal aisle.
How do you choose which cereal to pick?
Well – if you’re a health conscious person, you might buy cereals that talk about being high in fiber. You are probably more drawn to boxes that have green or “earthy” colors that reflect your desire to be more “natural”.
If you’re someone who just want a flavor explosion – you are probably more drawn to a box with more explosive colors and have a name that reflect a feeling like “pop” or “crunch”.
In the same way – you need a way to package yourself (solopreneur) and package your service (everyone) in a way that helps people understand “this is for me, I will like this”. Is your service “natural” or “flavor-packed”?
This is where almost every coach I’ve met gets lost.
Because most coaches have a wide breadth of skills and approaches that could help anyone. And so they’re unable to find the right packaging to attract the people who they are mostly likely to help effectively.
We’ll talk about exactly how to overcome this in my four week webinar series (running December 2 through the end of the year) that you can register for in the form below.
3. Validate Your Service.
Last – you need to actually go out into the world and validate whether your service and packaging work in the real world. We all know how a plan that goes perfectly in our head can blow up the minute it meets the real world.
And as soon as you have packaged yourself up into a set of clear services, you need to go test those rapidly against the real world.
This will give you the feedback you need to understand:
- Do people want this?
- Am I targeting the right people?
- Are they willing to pay enough to make it worth trading my time for?
- Can I fulfill it without killing myself and burning out?
- Can I get people the results I promise?
Bonus: A Lesson from Silicon Valley
If you’ve read books like “The Lean Startup” and “Lean Customer Development”, then you’ll understand that the highest probability of success is…
Moving through these steps as quickly as possible.
The secret to finding a business that works is to get from idea to validation in weeks. This is how you actually create a meaningful business in 2024 as a coach, advisor, or consultant.
How Do You Move Through These Cycles Rapidly?
Well – you can go google search a bunch of terms. I just gave you some of them:
- Lean Startup
- Lean Customer Development
- Packaging/Positioning
- Service Based Business
You can learn all of this on your own.
You can follow this blog (form at the end of this page) and wait for more nuggets.
Or – you can sign up for my December Webinar series (every Saturday in December) where I’ll walk you through each of these steps. It’s absolutely free, and it will give you tools to apply to your own business to move from idea to validation fast af.
Not only that – you’ll be able to reuse these over and over to create new ideas and quickly validate them (without needing to join any other webinars or courses).
If that sounds like a deal – register in the form below.