We now live in a world where it’s more dependable to work for yourself than it is to work for a company. It obviously didn’t use to be this way.
It feels like not too long ago our parents were telling us to go to school and then start a career. But can you call it a career when there is a chance that you’ll be laid off or required to work insane hours? We don’t think so.
This is why so many people are looking for alternatives and what better alternative is there than learning how to become your own boss?
But to learn how to do this we should do something special. Let’s show you how to become your own boss in 12 months or less starting with no money.
Is that possible? It sure is and we’re going to show you how. But first, we need to understand what a business is.
The Simple Formula Every Business Follows
You don’t need a business plan to know how to build a business. You don’t even need to take a class. You can sum up a business with a simple formula.
Audience x Offer = $$$$$$Every single business in the world, whether good ones or bad ones, follows this formula. They have an audience and they present that audience with an offer.
That’s it.
That’s business. There is no need to try and make it more complicated than that.
So that means to start a business you need to figure out who you want to help (the audience) and what you’re going to help them with (the offer). Once you figure those two things out you have yourself a business.
There are many ways to go about doing this, but let’s show you the way we have taught over 1,000 people to build an online business.
How to Become Your Own Boss in 7 Steps
Remember, we said we were going to do this with no money so that makes things a little bit harder, but not too much and that’s okay. We’ll be sure to also share the alternative plan that you can use that still requires less than $100 to get started.
1. Who Are You Going to Help OR How to Choose a Niche
If you already know what you want to do then you can skip this step, but if you don’t know what kind of business you want to start then the best thing that you can do is figure out who you want to help.
You might have already come across business advice that tells you to pick a niche and many people believe that means choosing a topic. While that can be one way to do it, we like to think about who we are going to help.
Why?
Because that helps us decide if it’s worth doing a business around these people.
For example, let’s say you decide you want to start a business helping Kindergarten Teachers. That sounds admirable and we love teachers! But there is a big problem.
Do Kindergarten Teachers have the money to spend on extra resources (we believe they should but this is different from reality)? They don’t so building a business around people that don’t have much money doesn’t make much sense.
And that’s why it’s important to understand who you want to help.
For this exercise, let’s choose a person. A new mom.
2. What Do They Want?
Another big mistake that people make is thinking they have to offer people what they need. You’re not their Mother. Yes, you may know what’s best for them but people don’t buy what’s best for them.
They buy what they want and we can only hope it happens to also be what’s best for them.
So what do New Moms want? Lots of things and we could build out a list, but to speed things up we know that New Moms want to sleep through the night.
That’s hard to do when their babies are waking up every 97 minutes. So now that we know what they want we need to see if we have a solution to help them get there.
Lucky for them we happen to be sleep training experts (we really aren’t but work with us here) so we know exactly what they need to do to get their baby to sleep throughout the night.
Okay, so now we know what we can help them with but we need to package it up into an offer.
3. Create the Offer
Whoa, this seems pretty extreme. Don’t we have to do months of research and testing? Umm, you could do that or you can speed things up and experiment to see what people will pay for.
In this case, we are going to put our knowledge into an ebook to sell. If you think it takes long to create an ebook, that depends on how much you want to procrastinate. We teach our students how to create ebooks in 12 hours or less so that they can get them out to see what’s working.
We can easily create the ebook in Google Docs because it’s free and it does the job. Once we are done creating the ebook, we export it as a PDF and now we have an offer!
But don’t we need a fancy cover and other things? We could do a fancy cover, but to get started it’s not necessary. People care about the solution that we are going to offer them and if we can provide that then we are good for now.
4. Host the Offer
Now we need to put our ebook on a platform where we can sell it. We are not going to sell it on Etsy or Amazon because we want to get most of the money and we want to sell it for more than $4.99.
Because we are sticking with free we are going to use Gumroad in this example. There are better alternatives, but we are sticking with free for right now. The trade-off with Gumroad being free is that they take a higher percentage of the money, but it’s a good starting point.
5. Create Content That Sells
Alright, we know the audience that we are going to help and we have the offer that will help. So how do we sell?
Before you crawl into a cave because you hate the idea of selling, it’s important to know that in today’s wonderful world of social media, you can sell without selling. Social selling allows you to interact with your audience in a way that gets them to want to see what you’re offering.
In this case, we are going to hop onto TikTok and start to create two types of videos:
- Outcome
- Problem
We are going to create content that shows people the outcome that they can achieve if they buy our book (a night full of sleep) and content that shows people the problem (not getting any sleep).
There are many different ways that we can convey these messages so we don’t dive into them in this article, but just know all you need is your imagination for this.
Once we get to 1,000 followers we can insert a link in our bio and that link can go straight to our book. If we price the book at $19 and we create content that attracts people then the book will sell.
Let’s Play the Numbers Game
To make this a bit more realistic let’s play a numbers game. Let’s say by month 3 of posting content on TikTok you are now getting 10,000 views daily across all of your videos.
10,000 views across all of your videos might seem like a lot, but it’s not much when you consider going viral with one video will net you over a million views.
If you sell 5 books a day that’s $100 a day which is $3,000 a month. That means you need 5 people out of 10,000 to buy your book each day. Doesn’t that seem possible?
6. Rinse and Repeat
That’s all you need to do. Every day you post content on social media (even though we used TikTok you can use any platform that you prefer, we just like TikTok) that pulls in your target audience and then you let them know you have an offer that will help them.
And you’re good to go.
If it was this easy why don’t more people do it? It’s pretty simple. Remember the formula we mentioned above?
Audience x Offer = $$$$$$People don’t continue to look at the formula to see what they’re doing wrong. Either they are targeting the wrong audience or they aren’t giving them an offer that they want. There isn’t any complicated troubleshooting that you need to do to figure out why you aren’t making money.
Also, most people quit after a couple of weeks because they aren’t getting instant results. Humans love their microwave results but business is cooked over a small open fire.
But if you follow these steps outlined then you should have no problem in learning how to become your own boss and quit your job.
The Best Way to Become Your Own Boss
What we’ve outlined above is a great way to become your own boss, but if you have a little bit of money to spend then there is a better method that follows a similar path.
You’ll still need to find an audience that you want to help and you’ll still create an ebook to help them, but here is where things differ.
- You’ll set up a blog (similar to this one) where you can also create content that will bring you passive traffic via SEO. You’re still creating social media content but it’s important to have content on a platform that you own.
- You’ll set up a mailing list that will allow you to send emails to your audience which makes selling a lot easier. You can even host your ebook on the email platform (if you’re using ConvertKit) to make your life easier.
- Offer higher-priced packages around your ebook. This makes it a lot easier to scale your revenue over time.
We go over all of this in our Playbook that you can grab for free.
But what if you want to make more than $3,000 a month? The great thing about this business model is that it is infinitely scalable. The limit isn’t $3,000 a month. The limit is what you want to make it.
Would $188,000 in 10 months allow you to be your own boss?
How about $2,500 a day?
Or over $100,000 in a week?
All of these numbers were made through the business model that we’ve outlined in this post. There is no reason to make it more complicated than it needs to be.