FROM ZERO TO 10K USD IN 1 MONTH CHALLENGE. [Insights]
I read a thread by @IrishSpring600 and decided to post this for everyone who struggles with a start. This is a guide with detailed explanation on what to do, how to do it and why. All you need is knowledge and skills you want to monetize.
If you don't have a decent skillset I would consider improving in your field first.
Introduction:
Last year we had a challenge "From Zero To 10k USD In One Month" with my friend. The idea was to execute a business from scratch with no use of pre-existing assets and resources. Which means: you can't use your website/connections/reputation and can't buy anything for your business with money you already have. PC/Cellphone allowed.
My friend is a professional luxury souvenir seller, atm his existing business was a $10k/day profit. I was a web designer/media marketing consultant with existing business making $10k/month. He was running his business for 10 years and I just recently started my own, but we both wanted to see how it's possible to build a business with nothing but knowledge. Quick.
We decided to focus on one single skillset and don't perform any actions irrelevant to our niche, i.e. - you could only use what you earned in context of this challenge, in your niche only, so the challenge would actually mean something instead of being a numbers chasing.
1. The Mindset.
Any business starts with intent. If your intent is to make money - you won't have a business, because successful entrepreneurship is based on constant search for answers and solutions.
"Searching", not "finding", because second is a customer/client perspective. For them you "find", what you actually do is search.
Once an answer/solution is found - you move on to the next one.
Oppositely, "I want money" is a loophole that is attached to every action you perform.
For a competent specialist with the right mindset it's not obvious - we don't try to sell because we need money, most of the times we don't even sell to those who don't really need our stuff from our point of view or can't benefit from it exactly how they need. (Bad for business in a long term). So we don't pay dearly for "I want money" mindset right away.
But if you're just starting out, driven by urge to "make money this evening", everything you do will scream about it. You'll seem a half-assed entrepreneur and people won't have a business with you just because they won't respect you. This is how people earn pennies, because nobody will trust them on a serious scale.
2. Preparations.
The right way to approach your business is to make it a response to what people ask and need. The other way around - you'll chase clients/customers until you're fatigued and frustrated to death.
To respond quickly you need a requisite. Once you see a potential client - you clarify his problem and use your requisite.
In a bigger-scale business you intelligently do it with ads, but when you have no budget - you need to do it in person.
Since I was unable to use any of my pre-existing assets, I needed to create one.
I've written a chapter for a book and wanted to narrate it, but I was unable to use my studio microphone, because in other circumstances I would not have it.
All my friend needed was a phone, his problems would occur in a conversation with potential partners. My problems would be easily solved with 5$ paid for studio time... which I couldn't use.
I decided to make my requisite appear as a webinar recording, which I didn't need a good microphone for. Actual webinar would be a waste of time, which I understood only because of this particular situation.
There are hundreds of other ways to create your requisite, make sure it will strike true with its substance.
Having a requisite that would work if I needed to showcase my competence as a web designer (with zero graphic content involved, think about it), I moved to community pages and searched for people who needed a website for their business.
A hilarious situation has happened when I posted a recording of "a part of my webinar" in response to a question coming from a potential client:
- Since I uploaded it to YouTube and allowed it to be viewed only on YouTube, a community administrator said "Conversion fail", thinking that people won't proceed to YouTube.
Later this client generated me thousands of dollars, starting with $2.5k only 3 days later.
Here I learned a thing that changed my vision completely:
3. Process.
When you search for your potential clients/customers, you need to look at the world from a perspective of those people. The most common misconception about money is that you take it, while in reality people give it to you.
Now stop and don't read any further for now, give yourself some time to think about it.
How your business works is a process. But it has very little to do with you, the biggest part of the process is what you don't even see. It's when your client randomly thinks about your products/services 10 times a day, when he looks at pictures, reads texts on your website, when you finish your conversation and drop the phone - this is when your process actualy starts. You form the circumstances, the enviroment in which your process happens later, when you have no control over how it happens.
In our challenge it allowed me to close a $2.5k deal within 3 days. It's 175000 in local currency, which is an average annual salary in a city like mine. How I did that?
It's all about perspective in which you portray your services and form a relationship with your client.
For your client/customer the world is different. He doesn't want what you want. Majority of reasons you consider strong enough to purchase your product/services mean nothing to an actual customer, unless you learn how to see the world the way he does.
Let's say you're a personal fitness trainer - why your arguments won't be sufficient enough for your potential client to hire you?
Because like majority of personal trainers you think that clients build good bodies because of your help. (Usually, majority doesn't even believe in it themself.)
In reality, your client sees a good body as a result of constant effort on his side. The minute he thinks of you, he already starts to imagine himself doing cardio, eating tastless food and overcoming himself on each workout. How do you think - how realistic this picture is for your potential client? He can't even stand up from his couch to do bodyweight push ups and squats, being at home.
It's appliable to any industry. When I've been forming relationships with my first client during The Challenge, he initially wanted to have a landing page but was afraid that it won't get him sales. He realized that he will still need to advertise his website.
I offered a partnership in which he gets 25% from this project, because all the other work is done by me, with the initial investment of 2.5k to get started.
What's better - to pay $1k and be on your own, with no gaurantee that you'll succeed - or pay $2.5k and have no problems to deal with?
The answer is easily observable in a world around us - people have money, but they are not willing to take the risks and the best offer they usually get has nothing to do with resolving this problem.
This is why a regular personal fitness training is worth ~$1000/month somewhere in US/AU where people have an average annual salary of $90k, while with one of my projects we charge our clients up to $3000/month in RU, where even wealthy people rarely make $30k annually.
4. Getting Past Your First Success.
Entrepreneurs usually struggle to make their first money, for some it takes a lot of time, but the real problem is to make your business require less effort and time from client to client. The difference between business and job is pretty much about that, if your business constantly takes your time - you are your own employee, with the only difference that hating your boss and hating yourself will be the same thing.
But how to make your business more and more efficient?
Learn to optimize.
Optimization is simple, but should be performed after each step you take, until the level of desired efficiency is achieved. Otherwise your business will become an "Environment of Decline" and slowly but steadily die from "waste" expenses. And you, personally, will die from aging faster than you have a fastlane business.
Once you have your first client/customer, it's good to ask yourself - “Why have I succeeded?”.
If you were able to sell once to a particular customer/client, it means that you have a higher chance of succeeding with people who are similar to this client.
What gender? What age? What kind of person your client is? Where you can find more clients like this? Write down everything that is related to your client and relevant for your business.
Having just one client is actually a lot of information. You need to analyze, re-evaluate and optimize after each one, to make your business a more and more perfect match for your potential clients. Don't make compromises to please all potential clients, because by trying to satisfy everyone - you'll be a perfect match for no one.
Once I made my first money as a part of The Challenge, I needed to be very smart about my further actions, because I had only 3 weeks to reach the goal of $10k.
My recent client gave me a good idea - $2.5k is more than enough to advertise at places where my potential clients dwell on daily basis, i.e. Restaurants.
People love to discuss business there and I wanted to give them a chance to do that.
I connected with an owner of one of our restaurants who never advertised anything in his place, so I made a suggestion to partner up with him and see how it goes, paying for design of new menus and ad assets and giving him 15% from each client who found out about my services from his place. With my price tag it's really a lot, but time was more precious.
Month later I just switched to paying upfront, because it turned out to be cheaper, but it could be different if I would just throw money upfront right away.
The place is comfortable and quiet, with no distraction and great food, so a lot of times I've been reserving a table and was doing my work from there. Restaurant owner saw me working on my projects and usually sat down with me to ask questions, and after I finished with the second client coming from his place he wanted me to create a new website for his restaurant, because an old one was never finished and took 2 months of waiting.
After providing so much value to a single business, that was a sum of affiliate marketing, web design, copywriting and online/physical marketing, it was obvious that providing complex full-scale solutions is a way to go. Majority of web design/marketing businesses are stuck in slavery of their own business model, my primarily objective was to avoid that.
This is how I came up with idea to make a complete transition from services to production/execution - i.e. with my primary business we don't work for anybody, we work with.
Only recently we finished working with this restaurant owner, making $60k from this project exclusively.
This is how business evolves from $2500 check to $60000 check over the course of 4 clients, if you optimize and rescale quickly.
It doesn't matter what you do, I have examples from fitness industry, niche perfume selling, vocal coaching and many others, we have high price tags everywhere and profit tremendously since the first month.
Same rules apply everywhere with a difference in details, which you, as a specialist in your niche, should know the best.
Afterwords.
The Challenge took me 23 days to get from zero to $10k, first week both I and my friend spent on preparations, on our own. Later we teamed up to increase our productivity and come up with better ideas, because both of us were more interested in breaking our boundaries than chasing numbers. btw, my friend ended $1.4k short of our goal.
If you have questions - feel free to ask. If you read this in less then 5 minutes than I strongly suggest to re-read it.
I read a thread by @IrishSpring600 and decided to post this for everyone who struggles with a start. This is a guide with detailed explanation on what to do, how to do it and why. All you need is knowledge and skills you want to monetize.
If you don't have a decent skillset I would consider improving in your field first.
Introduction:
Last year we had a challenge "From Zero To 10k USD In One Month" with my friend. The idea was to execute a business from scratch with no use of pre-existing assets and resources. Which means: you can't use your website/connections/reputation and can't buy anything for your business with money you already have. PC/Cellphone allowed.
My friend is a professional luxury souvenir seller, atm his existing business was a $10k/day profit. I was a web designer/media marketing consultant with existing business making $10k/month. He was running his business for 10 years and I just recently started my own, but we both wanted to see how it's possible to build a business with nothing but knowledge. Quick.
We decided to focus on one single skillset and don't perform any actions irrelevant to our niche, i.e. - you could only use what you earned in context of this challenge, in your niche only, so the challenge would actually mean something instead of being a numbers chasing.
1. The Mindset.
Any business starts with intent. If your intent is to make money - you won't have a business, because successful entrepreneurship is based on constant search for answers and solutions.
"Searching", not "finding", because second is a customer/client perspective. For them you "find", what you actually do is search.
Once an answer/solution is found - you move on to the next one.
Oppositely, "I want money" is a loophole that is attached to every action you perform.
For a competent specialist with the right mindset it's not obvious - we don't try to sell because we need money, most of the times we don't even sell to those who don't really need our stuff from our point of view or can't benefit from it exactly how they need. (Bad for business in a long term). So we don't pay dearly for "I want money" mindset right away.
But if you're just starting out, driven by urge to "make money this evening", everything you do will scream about it. You'll seem a half-assed entrepreneur and people won't have a business with you just because they won't respect you. This is how people earn pennies, because nobody will trust them on a serious scale.
Your mindset should be as if you will live 50-70-90 more years, not until the next week. Those who'll die the next week of course can't afford to use 2-week-term marketing strategies or wait until your client will lose his sleep for 2 weeks before he finally makes the right decision.
Competent specialist learns how to make long term strategies work today.
Competent specialist learns how to make long term strategies work today.
2. Preparations.
The right way to approach your business is to make it a response to what people ask and need. The other way around - you'll chase clients/customers until you're fatigued and frustrated to death.
To respond quickly you need a requisite. Once you see a potential client - you clarify his problem and use your requisite.
In a bigger-scale business you intelligently do it with ads, but when you have no budget - you need to do it in person.
Since I was unable to use any of my pre-existing assets, I needed to create one.
I've written a chapter for a book and wanted to narrate it, but I was unable to use my studio microphone, because in other circumstances I would not have it.
All my friend needed was a phone, his problems would occur in a conversation with potential partners. My problems would be easily solved with 5$ paid for studio time... which I couldn't use.
I decided to make my requisite appear as a webinar recording, which I didn't need a good microphone for. Actual webinar would be a waste of time, which I understood only because of this particular situation.
There are hundreds of other ways to create your requisite, make sure it will strike true with its substance.
Having a requisite that would work if I needed to showcase my competence as a web designer (with zero graphic content involved, think about it), I moved to community pages and searched for people who needed a website for their business.
A hilarious situation has happened when I posted a recording of "a part of my webinar" in response to a question coming from a potential client:
- Since I uploaded it to YouTube and allowed it to be viewed only on YouTube, a community administrator said "Conversion fail", thinking that people won't proceed to YouTube.
Later this client generated me thousands of dollars, starting with $2.5k only 3 days later.
Here I learned a thing that changed my vision completely:
You need to cut off everyone who you are not interested in, with more actions required to get in touch with you, with higher price tag, with phrasing that turns those people off, with anything that makes them want to never have a business with you and tell their like-minded friends to stay away from your business as well.
A lot of businesses constantly decline because they spend most of their time dealing with people they don't need to deal with, instead of focusing on right people.
This is why some companies have 1000 employees when they could use only 100.
A lot of businesses constantly decline because they spend most of their time dealing with people they don't need to deal with, instead of focusing on right people.
This is why some companies have 1000 employees when they could use only 100.
3. Process.
When you search for your potential clients/customers, you need to look at the world from a perspective of those people. The most common misconception about money is that you take it, while in reality people give it to you.
Now stop and don't read any further for now, give yourself some time to think about it.
How your business works is a process. But it has very little to do with you, the biggest part of the process is what you don't even see. It's when your client randomly thinks about your products/services 10 times a day, when he looks at pictures, reads texts on your website, when you finish your conversation and drop the phone - this is when your process actualy starts. You form the circumstances, the enviroment in which your process happens later, when you have no control over how it happens.
In our challenge it allowed me to close a $2.5k deal within 3 days. It's 175000 in local currency, which is an average annual salary in a city like mine. How I did that?
It's all about perspective in which you portray your services and form a relationship with your client.
For your client/customer the world is different. He doesn't want what you want. Majority of reasons you consider strong enough to purchase your product/services mean nothing to an actual customer, unless you learn how to see the world the way he does.
Let's say you're a personal fitness trainer - why your arguments won't be sufficient enough for your potential client to hire you?
Because like majority of personal trainers you think that clients build good bodies because of your help. (Usually, majority doesn't even believe in it themself.)
In reality, your client sees a good body as a result of constant effort on his side. The minute he thinks of you, he already starts to imagine himself doing cardio, eating tastless food and overcoming himself on each workout. How do you think - how realistic this picture is for your potential client? He can't even stand up from his couch to do bodyweight push ups and squats, being at home.
It's appliable to any industry. When I've been forming relationships with my first client during The Challenge, he initially wanted to have a landing page but was afraid that it won't get him sales. He realized that he will still need to advertise his website.
I offered a partnership in which he gets 25% from this project, because all the other work is done by me, with the initial investment of 2.5k to get started.
What's better - to pay $1k and be on your own, with no gaurantee that you'll succeed - or pay $2.5k and have no problems to deal with?
The answer is easily observable in a world around us - people have money, but they are not willing to take the risks and the best offer they usually get has nothing to do with resolving this problem.
This is why a regular personal fitness training is worth ~$1000/month somewhere in US/AU where people have an average annual salary of $90k, while with one of my projects we charge our clients up to $3000/month in RU, where even wealthy people rarely make $30k annually.
4. Getting Past Your First Success.
Entrepreneurs usually struggle to make their first money, for some it takes a lot of time, but the real problem is to make your business require less effort and time from client to client. The difference between business and job is pretty much about that, if your business constantly takes your time - you are your own employee, with the only difference that hating your boss and hating yourself will be the same thing.
But how to make your business more and more efficient?
Learn to optimize.
Optimization is simple, but should be performed after each step you take, until the level of desired efficiency is achieved. Otherwise your business will become an "Environment of Decline" and slowly but steadily die from "waste" expenses. And you, personally, will die from aging faster than you have a fastlane business.
Once you have your first client/customer, it's good to ask yourself - “Why have I succeeded?”.
If you were able to sell once to a particular customer/client, it means that you have a higher chance of succeeding with people who are similar to this client.
What gender? What age? What kind of person your client is? Where you can find more clients like this? Write down everything that is related to your client and relevant for your business.
Having just one client is actually a lot of information. You need to analyze, re-evaluate and optimize after each one, to make your business a more and more perfect match for your potential clients. Don't make compromises to please all potential clients, because by trying to satisfy everyone - you'll be a perfect match for no one.
Once I made my first money as a part of The Challenge, I needed to be very smart about my further actions, because I had only 3 weeks to reach the goal of $10k.
My recent client gave me a good idea - $2.5k is more than enough to advertise at places where my potential clients dwell on daily basis, i.e. Restaurants.
People love to discuss business there and I wanted to give them a chance to do that.
I connected with an owner of one of our restaurants who never advertised anything in his place, so I made a suggestion to partner up with him and see how it goes, paying for design of new menus and ad assets and giving him 15% from each client who found out about my services from his place. With my price tag it's really a lot, but time was more precious.
Month later I just switched to paying upfront, because it turned out to be cheaper, but it could be different if I would just throw money upfront right away.
The place is comfortable and quiet, with no distraction and great food, so a lot of times I've been reserving a table and was doing my work from there. Restaurant owner saw me working on my projects and usually sat down with me to ask questions, and after I finished with the second client coming from his place he wanted me to create a new website for his restaurant, because an old one was never finished and took 2 months of waiting.
After providing so much value to a single business, that was a sum of affiliate marketing, web design, copywriting and online/physical marketing, it was obvious that providing complex full-scale solutions is a way to go. Majority of web design/marketing businesses are stuck in slavery of their own business model, my primarily objective was to avoid that.
This is how I came up with idea to make a complete transition from services to production/execution - i.e. with my primary business we don't work for anybody, we work with.
Only recently we finished working with this restaurant owner, making $60k from this project exclusively.
This is how business evolves from $2500 check to $60000 check over the course of 4 clients, if you optimize and rescale quickly.
It doesn't matter what you do, I have examples from fitness industry, niche perfume selling, vocal coaching and many others, we have high price tags everywhere and profit tremendously since the first month.
Same rules apply everywhere with a difference in details, which you, as a specialist in your niche, should know the best.
Do you consider $10k serious cash? In my place it's worth an average biannual salary of a competent specialist, but it's still not big money. This is a kind of cash you can just throw out and never regret it, because acquiring really effective skills and information worth much more. Most likely you won't even have a chance to learn something for $10k on a truly professional level.
Afterwords.
The Challenge took me 23 days to get from zero to $10k, first week both I and my friend spent on preparations, on our own. Later we teamed up to increase our productivity and come up with better ideas, because both of us were more interested in breaking our boundaries than chasing numbers. btw, my friend ended $1.4k short of our goal.
If you have questions - feel free to ask. If you read this in less then 5 minutes than I strongly suggest to re-read it.
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