This is the first post of many in which I show you how to build a business in 24 hours or less. If you like your 9 to 5 job and you believe you have an amazing life, this guide is not for you.
Who should read this 24-hour business building guide?
This guide is for people that want to test out if their business idea has any merit.
This guide is for people who want to validate if a certain business can become successful quickly.
This guide is for people that do not want to make large investments of their time and money into a business idea of which they don’t know if it will work out.
And finally, this guide is for those people that want to start a business in a structured and easy way without too much hassle and without to much pain.
So basically this guide is for smart people that want to learn how to quickly start a new business.
What are ‘my’ rules for this 24-hour business building challenge?
No challenge is a real challenge without some restrictions and rules.
Below are the rules for my personal 24-hour profitable business building challenge (you don’t have to follow these rules when you follow the steps yourself):
- I only have a maximum of 24 hours to build and start a brand new business but I can spread out the 24 hours over a longer time period. I don’t have to build in business in 24 hours straight in a single day.
- I need a paying customer within 24 hours of working on the business.
- I can only spend a maximum of 500 Euro’s to start the business.
- I am allowed to leverage my 6000+ followers on LinkedIn to promote the new business.
- I need to document the entire process so you guys can learn from my mistake.
Why do a ‘build a business in 24 hours’ challenge and write about it?
At the time of writing this, the Corona Crisis is hitting the planet hard.
People are getting laid off by the millions and they are saying things will get even worse. The ability to provide for yourself is more important than ever. I want to show people that starting a business should not take long and does not have to cost a lot of money.
I want to show you guys that starting out a business is pretty easy once you follow a few simple steps. Go through the guide once and you’ll be able to churn our new businesses almost every other month.
And finally, I want to inspire you guys to start your own businesses. Entrepreneurship is a beautiful path, a hard path, but a beautiful path.
I would recommend it to everyone that dares.
Disclaimer:
I never graduated from business school and I haven’t learned any of these skills from professors or lectures. I’ve learned everything you read here by doing, by trying and by Googling. This guide is built on the backbone of me trying things out for thousands of hours over a period of 8 years.
Resulting in a track record of multiple successful business ventures on a young age and owning a multi-million dollars business at the age of 27. Now I’m sharing my learnings with you so you can become even better than me at this.
What I’m working on the first 13 hours:
Building a business is the same as completing a mission in a video game.
It’s simple once you know where to go and what to do. I’ve tried to make the process as easy as possible. Think of the steps below as a quest that you need to complete within 24 hours. Evey steps take one to five hours to complete and once you’ve finished one step you’ll go the next one.
Every step will feel rewarding and productive. You’ll even start to enjoy working. Who would have guessed that??
Now read on and check out the first six steps of the 24-hour business building guide. In later posts, I’ll go into the steps in detail. Below is the outline of the steps so you’ll get a sense of the mission.
- The first hour we’ll answer some important questions. You probably have an idea already so we’ll need to translate that idea into a real business ‘template’. We will use the business model canvas as a structure to define how the business operates and how everything is set up in the business. Check out this link to use an online tool to quickly map out your own business model canvas.
- The second and third hour will be spent on a product/service description. You’ll need to clearly define what you’re selling. Without having a real product or a real service we’ll try to imagine the product or service in our heads and we’ll sketch that out and write it out like it’s real. Sounds vague? It is, but trust me. To start a business you just need a story and an imaginary product or service. I have a simple structure that I follow to define the service/product of a new business. We use this description later when we build the WordPress website for the business.
- The fourth hour we’ll use to come up with a name for the business.
A name is important because it defines the business and it is what people will remember when they think of your business. And most importantly, we’ll need a name for the business when we register a domain for our website. - The fifth and sixth hours will be used to register a domain name, set up a website using WordPress, fix the hosting for the website using GoDaddy, setting up the DIVI website builder on your website and we will set up a free DIVI website template. This looks complicated but it’s not.
IMPORTANT: For those of you that are freaking out right now.
Don’t worry, we won’t be writing a line of code so don’t worry. - From the seventh to the 12 hours we’ll work on the website to make it look like you’ve been in business for 5 years using images from Unsplash and some other tricks that I’ve learned over the years to give your website some extra panache. We won’t lie but we’ll make it look like the business is larger and older than it really is to have some extra conviction. Doing Sales and marketing is all about emotions and we want people to experience the right emotions, like trust and a sense of quality, when they scroll through your website.
- The 13th hour we’ll register an email address to make it easy for people to contact you to buy your product or service.
Let’s take a quick step back from the guide to address some questions you might have by now:
Why am I not registering a legal business?
Registering a company for real costs too much money as this stage!
And to be honest, the whole idea of this guide is the test out new business ideas without investing to much time and money. Once you see real interest in your product or service, only then will we start investing money in registering the business for real. Plus all the added headache like taxes, administration and paperwork is all dull work that slows you down.
Also, at this moment in time, you don’t have any customers yet. I believe that you need to have customers first before you register your business for real. When your business fails to bring in its first customers, we can just abandon the project without much headache. (I will show you how to unwind a failed project as the last step.)
Finally, I believe it’s allowed to make a sale without being a business.
As long as you don’t make any money from it yet.
Long story short, we’ll register the business after we made out the first sale so that we can bill the first clients. And the first client will never know that we registered the business only a few days before sending out our first invoice or bill.
Why not spend more time on building the product or service?
Again, this guide is specialized in testing out a new business idea.
We want to test if people are interested enough in your product or service idea. Are there people that want to buy your service or product?
We are looking for real customers but our product or service will be nowhere near completion.
This is the whole point. We’re doing this to save a shit load of money because we don;t yet know if people want to buy our services. It would be unwise to invest a lot of time in building a product without knowing if it will sell.
We’ll think about the product and well pitch the product like it’s done but only to validate demand.
So what are the next steps?
If you want to know that you’ll have to wait for the next blog post in which I’ll go into depth into getting your first customers onto your website and to get your first clients.
The next step in the 24-hour business building challenge will be out soon so have a good one for now.