Starting anything new can be intimidating at the best of times. This is especially true of starting your own business.
Your own business is where you expose yourself, your experience and your ideas to the world in a way unlike just about any other life experience. This can be scary but it can also be liberating!
As entrepreneurs we believe there is a better way to do something and we want to provide the solution to people, but what are the things I wish I’d known at the start so that I could’ve made a bigger impact right away?
- Build it and they will come is complete rubbish! Especially in the early days, you must realise that it is ok to spend 80-90% of your efforts promoting your work. This also goes for grabbing attention for your blog, video or Facebook group!
- Find some great people to learn from. I’ve been learning from people like Ramit Sethi, Dan Meredith, Vincent Dignan… find the people that matter to your niche, learn from them and get to know them if you can. You may surprise yourself as you get to know them personally. If you have no-one to start with, ask me and I’ll find you your 5 people to follow personally.
- People don’t care what you have to say, start from there and work your way up until they do.
- Learn basic html. It should only take up 5-10 hours to crack on through the basics but it’ll set you up for saving tons of time down the line.
- Ideas are useless unless you have money or the capability to execute.
- Set up a professional email address on day one. Its cheap and easy to do!
- Start building your community yesterday in one of three places – email list, membership platform or my specialty – Facebook Groups.
- Twitter is easy to grow a large audience, but it’s hard to make them care about your message or convert them into buyers.
- You are going to find people who hate you, your project and everything you stand for. Just accept that this is part of the journey and is just another challenge to overcome. The happier you are to deal with this, the better you will be prepared for the biggest challenges your business will face.
- Learn how to automate or outsource processes – I could and have spoken for hours on this subject… but in short if you can get something done 80% as well as you can at the right price point, then you should stop doing it yourself.