I am of the mind that everyone is an entrepreneur, as it is in our nature.
A steady paycheck is a useful stepping stone but harsh slave master.
Allow me to punch holes in your erroneous belief.
Let's Define Entrepreneurship And Business
Everyone is an entrepreneur.
How you've been conditioned to making money has hugely impacted how you think about the process of making money.
You think you can only make money by working a job and expecting a paycheck at the end of every month.
Why am I telling you this?
Because I’m tired of people thinking that “business” or “entrepreneurship” is reserved for those with startup capital or a certain personality.
What they don't understand is that traits are programmed. They are trained. They are conditioned. You can develop any trait that you want.
You are probably not an introvert. You are just in a culture that will lead you to think you are an introvert.
There are people out there who have the potential to build amazing things but they are raised to be afraid. They are programmed with limiting self beliefs.
Stop thinking of building an independent source of income for yourself as building a business if that doesn't resonate with you.
Think of it as becoming valuable, packaging up that value, and engaging in value exchange – the action that has been around since the caveman days, not just when the legal requirement became a thing.
Whoever tells you anything different wants to control your potential. Make you a useful worker and become subservient to the higher paradigm.
Employee Vs Employer
The difference between an employee and an entrepreneur is control over your potential.
Now here is where it gets interesting.
I hear many people say it was in their DNA, it's their talent, because their family was rich, bla bla bla.
Entrepreneurship is not talent. It's a skill. A combination of skills and everyone can acquire those skills if they put their mind to it.
There are so many others who have succeeded not because they are special or more intelligent than you are, but because they committed to self improvement and put in the work to change their situation.
“When people say, “I don’t know what I want,” what they’re really saying is, “I don’t want to do the work it takes to get what I want.” It’s not that you don’t know what you want.
It’s that you know what you don’t want—meaning you know what you want—and are hiding from the pain of reinventing yourself. You are hiding from the slow structural redesign of your identity.” — Purpose And Profit.
- When was the last time you read a business book?
- When was the last time you attended a business seminar.
- When was the last time you listened to a business podcast.
You can complain all you want but If you can spend 8 hours building someone else's dreams, you can spend 1 hour building your own.
Self-improvement is about solving problems in your life.
Business is about solving problems in other people's lives.
There are four eternal markets in business:
- health
- wealth
- relationships
- and happiness
These are where all burning problems and meaningful goals exist in your life and in others.
Solve your own problems and sell the solution.
How To Start A Billion Dollar Company
Instead of starting a company that requires huge startup capital, start as one person.
If you can't turn your interests into income, you don't have the skill to start a business that requires 10 times the resources.
You as an individual have the ability to attract an audience to your work and put a valuable product in front of them.
This isn’t a new fad business model, this is the reality of the modern world.
You have the ability to learn anything on the internet, build anything on the internet, and accept payment from anyone on the internet.
And yes, you can start with $0 to your name.
Acquire the skills to solve the problems in your life, which is an automatic filter for value.
Then turn the solution into a product for others.
You only have so much time in the day.
You will spend the same amount of time building a brick and mortar coffee shop (limited to a few hundred thousand dollars) as you will any internet business (with close-to-zero startup costs and income limits only dependent on your creativity.)
Mathematics is a simple understanding of the system itself and what you need to do.
If you want to make $1 million in 1 year, break it down.
$1,000,000 / 12 = $83,333 per month
$83,333 / 30 = $2,777 per day
Now, there are a few ways to do that.
- Sell 18 $150 products a day
- Sell 111 $25 products a day
- Land one $5000 client every other day
- Land one $10,000 client every 4 days
- A combination of both. 1-2 clients a week and a few product sales a day.
This alone determines a lot of your decision-making.
If you go the client route, you will probably need a team (or have the service so productized you can handle fulfillment yourself).
If you go the product route, you will need a lot of traffic.
Let’s assume you’re skilled at social media.
You can get 50-100,000 views per YouTube video or 1-5 million impressions on social media per month.
Of course, you’ll have the occasional anamoly of much more views or impressions.
To make 18 sales a day on a $150 product, you would need to send 720 people to a product page with a 2.5% conversion rate.
If you can’t do that with 4-8 videos a month or an active social account, that's a skill issue. Get better. You’re in control of how many views you get and how many clicks result from that.
But how do we do this?
2 Levers To Make $1 Million In Your 20s
You need a product (or service).
You need distribution (an audience).
Beyond that, the entirety of your success comes down to experimentation and iteration. Trial and error.
You can supplement with courses like Fullstack Writer for distribution and Self Monetization for product, but courses are simply other processes for you to experiment with in a less error-prone direction.
The Only Way To Make An Independent Income
To avoid confusion, I use the word product to define anything that you sell. That can be a service as well.
Many people think they can’t sell a product because they’ve gotten results, but they didn’t use a specific process, program, or framework to do that thing.
What you don’t realize is that’s the perfect place to start with a product.
How does anyone create a product?
You don’t just plagiarize someone else’s framework.
You create your own. Creating your own requires real world feedback from customers after you experiment for yourself.
You create an MVP (minimum viable product).
You get a first round of customers or free users.
You listen to feedback and gauge results.
You implement feedback and attempt to make your product better.
Then, once you have solid results, you can market harder and be confident you are able to do this.
It’s the same as a beginner freelancer landing clients. They do it for relatively cheap until they are very confident in their abilities. They gain real-world experience as opposed to just theory they’ve learned about and personal projects they’ve built.
My entire product philosophy is:
- Build a product you’ve used before, but better.
- Solve your own problems and sell the solution.
- Build a product you want but doesn’t exist.
Most people should start with the first one, advance to the second, and once they have cash flow, move onto the third.
But you have to realize that you can create any product you want.
How many productivity planners can you find on Amazon? A billion.
You can create one too by:
- Purchasing 3-5 planners
- Using them and noticing what doesn’t flow
- Mapping out your own planner
- Using it and improving it over a week or two
Then, package it up and sell it.
Listen to customer feedback, make it better.
Simple. Now you have the ability to make money, but you need one more thing:
Distribution.
We'll talk about this in another letter.
Thanks for reading.
-Patrick.