ESYB2 016 - Practical Approach to Starting an Online Business
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[00:00:00] In this video, let's talk about a practical example of what happens to most people, including myself, when they start an online business or passive income. And I've been in this field for over 10 years, and I've coached many, many people on this, and I see so many perspectives with my students, so I really get a full picture of this business, and I can really share what happens.

So when you start out, there's a tremendous amount of hope. This is what this little image here represents. You feel like this is what's gonna happen. Because, oh, online business seems easy, everybody sort of understands it, kind of. And then you get into it, and then, you know, it's a little different in how it plays out than what people hope.

Because you kind of have to work for free for the first few months, right? Let's say you build a online course, or you build some product, or you write some book. Or even in my case, like my first semi successful online business was a mobile app. Well, that's one to three months [00:01:00] of just working. without really getting paid.

This is filled with fear, anxiety, frustration. There's a lot of unknown. It's not a great place to be. But you're carried by this hope that when you launch, things will be great. But, when you launch, usually it either fails or it's lukewarm. It's nothing specific to any individual, this is just statistically what happens to most people.

Think of any industry you want to get into. It's filled with professionals and experts. And when you enter that field, you're sort of like starting out and there's all these mistakes, a lot of challenges you knew that were going to be challenges and a lot of challenges you had no idea that were going to be challenges.

So there's just a learning curve and that's why things typically don't succeed on the first try. It's just part of life. It's nothing special or unusual. So then the process is you take a month or two to figure out what you did wrong, improve and relaunch. And then you think, okay, now [00:02:00] it's going to work out.

But the problem is that you only get sort of marginal improvements each time you improve. And so this can stretch things out for you an extra six to 12 months, even more, right? So these time ranges, one to three months. One to two months. If you add them together, you know, you get maybe a year or two or three of struggles.

And so you have a lot of stagnation, right? This graph that is supposed to be up and to the right is kind of stagnant, you're struggling. And most people quit at this point or sometime much earlier. Because imagine how long you have to work for free. It's a far worse situation than having a 9 to 5 job.

Even though a 9 to 5 job may not be fulfilling. This at the moment is far worse. Very few people make it out of this phase. This is why online business is so hard. You never thought you're gonna have to work for like pennies an hour on average. It's not something [00:03:00] anybody wishes for themselves. And throughout this journey people will try different online businesses.

For example, people might try affiliate marketing. They try affiliate marketing, they get no traffic, make no sales, quit, and try something else, okay? They try to sell on Amazon, they buy inventory, make no sales or few sales, quit, and try something else. And this cycle will go on with many types of online businesses.

Same with creating courses, books, and other ideas. This can take years. And instead of just a flat line, what it really feels like is you're just going down, right? Because not only you're not making money, You're going through your savings and this is just mentally really hard, like in terms of mental health.

How long can a person take of this? So let me tell you how to reverse this graph and what actually creates success. And this will be exactly what I do. So there are two paths to succeed as I see it. One is [00:04:00] to look for tomorrow's. So you can write that way up instead of struggling when it's crowded. The reason people struggle today with all these businesses like affiliate marketing, I didn't mention it in this video, but also blogging, also freelancing, also writing books and selling them on Amazon, creating physical products and selling them on Amazon.

All these things people try, the reason they struggle so much is because they enter the gauntlet like a really difficult competitive environment and looking for tomorrow's businesses helps you avoid that. We'll talk about that in a second. So that's the first path to succeed, just to stop looking at yesterday's businesses.

The reason most people look at yesterday's businesses is when they go online, all these teachers and gurus tell them, Hey, affiliate marketing works. This other thing works. Blogging works. Yes, it works. Like 10 years ago. So, you know, it was [00:05:00] easier, far easier. So all these half gurus recommend these not so great businesses today.

And that's why the new entrepreneurs kind of gravitate towards the old businesses, which are fine. You can still do well in them. All of these businesses, blogging, affiliate marketing, Amazon, you can still do amazing, but there's a caveat. You have to take the time to become the top 1 percent of any of these.

Like most Amazon sellers struggle. The top 1 percent are millionaires. Same with blogging. Same with affiliate marketing. Same with almost all the online businesses. Top 1 percent do really well. Everybody else struggles. So either you take the time to become amazing at one thing and just have that singular focus or look up and look at the smartest people out there and see what you can do.

What are they doing? Because they're [00:06:00] doing businesses of tomorrow. Innovation. Innovation that hopefully doesn't have too much risk. Let me give you an example. Here I am on Twitter. This is an account of Michael Arrington. He's a relatively well known guy. You see he has almost 300, 000 followers. He is the founder of TechCrunch many years ago.

And then he sold TechCrunch, and now he's doing a lot with cryptocurrency. And I know that cryptocurrency has a lot of controversy. A lot of people don't believe it. A lot of people feel like it's scammy. Hold that thought for a second. I'm not saying you should do it. I'm just using this as an example.

Now, let's take away your opinions of cryptocurrency for a second, but Imagine, just purely financially, how amazing it would be if you, let's say, got into cryptocurrency in 2012. And for just pennies or dollars, you bought like a thousand bitcoins. Okay, you'd probably be retired by [00:07:00] now, right? All of your financial needs would be solved forever.

But how do you know about this moving forward? Well, if you follow people who are really in the know, who are open about sharing, like this guy, Michael Arrington. Now he's managing a fund. for cryptocurrency. And you know what? He's extremely accessible. Just like he's accessible to me, he's accessible to you through Twitter.

Of course, he doesn't share everything, but he shares enough. So here's a tweet he made. This one. And I specifically wanted to show you this one. Here's the tweet. A new cryptocurrency is debuting. Okay. What if this one, let's say, starts selling at a penny. But goes to 5 in like 10 years and let's say you bought a bunch of this just like you would have bought Bitcoin before.

Okay, that will also solve all your retirement needs, right? Now, of course things are not that easy and probably that won't [00:08:00] happen but this is exactly an example of how to get on something on day one and I don't have to be a genius. I don't have to know more than you. I just have to follow smart People who are in the know, they're all over social media, they share relatively freely.

So it's not so difficult to find tomorrow's ideas. And if you think, oh, Alex just gave this cryptocurrency idea, it's easy. Okay, here's a very different guy, Robert Scoble, his name is Scobelizer. Right now he's huge into virtual reality, augmented reality. It's not for everybody, but at the same time, he'll literally be telling you exactly what's coming around the corner with Apple, with Facebook, with all of these big companies doing this.

And so if you follow him, you might get ideas of what parts of VR or AR to get into. Of course, it's a little technical, but it's nothing you can't learn with hard work. But again, [00:09:00] these are ideas of tomorrow. They're very out there for you and really takes extremely little effort to find them. And if you do, things will start going well because you'll avoid that whole competition and you'll ride the wave up.

You can also do what I did with online courses, like I, for example, kind of stuck it out. It took me years to learn how to film better, how to present better in a more engaging, interesting way, how to structure the courses better. And I actually became one of the top instructors. In a very difficult environment, but it was possible through years of perseverance, but now I can do both I can look at forward thinking businesses and I can keep growing my course business today But it's not like I just landed on this it came from persevering the long long time of working an equivalent of like pennies for our and Struggling and failing and I made it out of the other end of that and if you can do the same thing Then you can do [00:10:00] well with an online business.

So you see, it's quite different than how you probably may imagine it before this video.

