When I was little I figured you had to be rich to start a business.
Considering that I was born in 1980 that made sense, but we are in the 21st Century now and the Internet is a thing.
Seriously, the Internet has changed the game when it comes to starting a business.
You’re here because this post promises to show you how to start a business with no money and that’s exactly what it is going to do.
Now, you must keep in mind that people pay US to teach them how to build online businesses so you have to ask why would we bother to show you how to start a business for free?
Because it’s the right thing to do.
And that’s the first rule of business that you need to learn.
Always do what’s best for your audience.
With that out of the way are you ready? Before you learn how to actually start a business with no money you need to first understand what is needed for a business.
The Formula of Business
If I asked you what you needed to start a business and make it successful you would probably give me a list of things.
Money might on there as well.
But what if I told you that business itself is pretty simple. It’s so simple we can explain it with a simple formula.
Audience x Offer = Money
That’s it.
That’s all you need for a business.
An audience and an offer.
If you have those two things then you have a business.
The difficulty lies in finding an audience that wants to buy your offer.
We’ll get to the audience later in this post, but we need to understand what the offer is.
The Offer
The offer can be many things. With us it’s courses, webinars, challenges, and workshops.
For you it might be books, live person events, challenges, or printable.
There are a ton of options when it comes to offers.
But what about ads?
More specifically, what is the offer if people are making money with ads?
You might know a blogger or a YouTuber that makes decent money from having ads on their site or channel. What is their offer?
You would think it’s the content that they create, but that isn’t true.
The people that are paying for those ads aren’t paying to consume the content. They are paying to get access to the audience.
So in the case of the people that want to build their business around the idea of ads, the offer is the people that come to consume their content.
Their audience is the companies that want to advertise with them.
And that’s the problem when it comes to building a business based on ads.
To make good money you need to bring in a LOT of people. That can take a lot of time.
But what if you could start to make money with your business from day 1 after it launches? Wouldn’t that be more ideal?
You and I both know it would and so that’s why we focus on helping people put together their offers.
Because once you understand your offer, then you just need to find the audience for it.
The Audience
First, let me say that your audience isn’t everyone. It doesn’t work that way.
Why?
Because not everyone will want your offer.
I wish that were the case but it isn’t.
Your audience should be the people that have potential to buy from you. If you spend time trying to figure out all of the people that won’t buy from you then how is that going to help your business.
Remember, the question is can you make money from a business from day 1?
If the answer is yes, then that means you’ve found people that are willing to buy your offer on day 1.
That’s not a random group of people.
That’s a specific person.
We call this person the Hero so when you see me reference that term, that’s who I am talking about.
To get the Hero to buy your offer you have to talk directly to them. You have to let them know that you’re the one that is going to help them.
This is important because the Hero is receiving 1000s of messages daily from brands that aren’t speaking directly to them.
They’re speaking at them and sending messages that the Hero just doesn’t care about.
Your Hero is bored with those messages. They’re waiting for someone to speak to them because they need help.
So if you can figure out who this person is, then your life becomes a whole lot easier with regards to your business.
You keeping up with me?
You have an offer and you need to find the one person that is going to buy it.
Don’t worry, this one person actually represents 100s or 1000s of people.
From there what do you need to do? You need to fill the gap.
The Business Gap
The Gap is where you have your Hero and you have your Offer, but you need to convince the Hero that your Offer is for them.
That might seem difficult, but we’ve made it easy by creating the Pocket Business Framework.
- Get the Hero to notice you
- Get the Hero to pay attention to you
- Get the Hero to trust you
- Convert that trust into money
Make sense?
This is where people tend to spend money when it comes to building a business. Why?
Because it’s where the tactics are but it’s also where you get to find the free ways to make this stuff happen.
Let’s go through each step of the framework to see how we can possibly do this without spending any money.
1. Get the Hero to Notice You
First, you need to get the Hero to notice you. How can you do that?
Social media is usually the answer for this. Think of these:
- TikTok
- YouTube
- Quora
- Medium
All of these are free platforms in which you can post stuff. If you do something special, people take notice.
You can use any of these without spending money so that’s a good sign.
Let’s move to the next step.
2. Get the Hero to Pay Attention to You
This is where things get tricky because, especially on social media, your Hero is getting a million messages blasted in their face.
It’s hard to keep up with but more importantly it’s really easy to get buried in it.
So once you get noticed, you have to continue to provide something that will keep their attention.
If it’s a YouTube video then the content in that video needs to be engaging.
If it’s Instagram then you need to do a great job of telling a story through your photos or videos.
You’ll want people to follow or subscribe to you if you’re sticking with this social media only strategy.
Sidenote: We encourage you to have your own website so you can send people to it and they can sign up for your mailing list. But since having your own website can cost money (there are free options but none worth talking about here) we aren’t going to include it here.
3. Get Your Hero to Trust You
This comes down to two things: consistency and value.
If you can consistently bring value to your audience then they will begin to trust you.
More importantly, if you can show them that you’re able to help them obtain mini-transformations (here is how to peel an orange, here is how to setup a funnel) then trust for you will build over time.
4. Convert that Trust into Money
Now that you have their trust you can present them with your offer.
But doesn’t that require money?
Not at all.
Let’s say you’ve written a book in Google Docs. Then you can export it as a PDF, load it up to Gumroad, and then send people to the offer’s sales page.
And now you have a full-fledged business.
Follow the Formula and Framework
Always keep the formula in mind.
Audience x Offer = Money
That’s it for business.
Then to make sure you’re actually making money by converting your audience into customers you just follow the Pocket Business Framework.
- Get the Hero to notice you
- Get the Hero to pay attention to you
- Get the Hero to trust you
- Convert that trust into money
The beautiful thing about this framework is that it’s extremely flexible.
You might decide that you want to use Facebook Groups to build trust. In that case, you could create a Facebook Page with valuable info that would get people to notice and pay attention to you.
Once you build up the Facebook Group you could share your offers.
There are no restrictions when it comes to this framework.
So how do you make money on day 1?
It isn’t easy, but it goes like this:
- Either find your Hero or find your Offer. Find one of those first and then find the other.
- Present enough value upfront for the Hero so that it walks them through the Pocket Business Framework. Yes, this could all happen in a single post if you do things correctly.
- Present them with the offer.
And that’s it. I’m not saying it’s easy or likely.
It can take time to really nail down the messaging for your Hero, but once you do you can do beautiful things with your business.
If you liked this post and want to dive deeper into business building then check out our free Workshop on the Atoms of Business Building.