Online business and marketing lessons from what's working out there, researched and handed to you every Thursday.
💰 She launched this business for $22
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Everyone wants a cool business idea. Something that sounds good when someone asks what you do. Something with an aesthetic, maybe a logo you could put on a tote bag. Bookkeeping is not that. No one brings up bookkeeping at a dinner table. It doesn’t get saved on Pinterest. There is no viral reel showing someone living their best life because they sorted a client’s QuickBooks account. And yet, there was this story on Entrepreneur. A 26-year-old woman started a bookkeeping side hustle about a year ago for $22 total and is now making $2,800 a month from it, on top of a full-time job. $33,600 a year. From the business nobody thinks is cool. So yeah. Here’s what actually happened. She got certified as a QuickBooks ProAdvisor. Free certification, free listing in their public directory. A local business owner found her profile, booked a meeting on her calendar, and hired her. That was client number one. No marketing. No social media posts. No logo, no website, because she didn’t even have those yet. The business was running before any of the stuff people spend weeks overthinking was ready. Now here’s the part I keep thinking about. Nearly every client who came to her had the same problem. They didn’t know how their business was actually doing. Financially, I mean. Money was moving in and out, things felt busy, but the picture was blurry in a way that quietly stressed them out every single day. After she cleaned up their books and called to say the work was done, she said she could hear the relief in their voice. That she could physically feel the weight lifting. That’s not data entry. That’s what she’s actually selling. And every small business owner on the planet needs it. But she made one mistake early on. After landing her first two clients, she locked herself into recurring monthly bills she didn't need she didn't need yet. The bills went up before revenue could cover them, and it got tight real fast. What you take from this is simple. Stay lean longer than feels comfortable, and use free tools for as long as you possibly can. On that note, if starting a solo business is something you want to actually try, a free, basic website is still more than enough so clients can find you and feel confident about hiring you. There is a free tool that gives you the website. I already covered that here. Talk soon, Minosh P.S. Also, the thing people struggle with is finding that first client when you have no name yet. If that is what you are thinking about right now, read this. |
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Online business and marketing lessons from what's working out there, researched and handed to you every Thursday.
Most of us picture starting a business the same way. I mean, you pick a name, build the website, and then spend months (sometimes years) trying to get the first few customers to even notice you. Every time, you start with nothing. I was reading Business Insider the other day and found a story about a guy in Japan named Kengo Ohama. It kinda made me look at the whole thing differently. He’s 31 and always wanted to run a café. Earlier this year he found one listed on a business succession site....
Most of us were told the same thing at the start. Don’t go too niche, you’ll cut down your market. Sell to more people and you’ll get more sales. Sounds logical. But real life is starting to look different, maybe a lot. Shopify surveyed 18,000 shoppers across nine countries for its holiday report, and 65% said they’re likely to use AI for at least one shopping task this season. That’s not Google, not scrolling Amazon for an hour. They just describe what they need to ChatGPT or whatever they...
There’s a salt works in Malden, West Virginia. Population about 3,000 and surrounded by the Appalachian Mountains, sitting on top of an ancient ocean buried underground for hundreds of millions of years. A sister and brother revived their family’s salt business there in 2013. Everything is done by hand, brine pumped up from 350 feet below, dried in sun houses, raked, packaged, shipped right from the farm. A staff of fewer than a dozen people. Their salt ships to high-end restaurants in Tokyo...