Starting your own business is probably the most exciting, frightening, rewarding experience in life. I’ve raised children, got married twice and these are amazing adventures but starting a business is something else. It’s really out of this world.
Are you made for this?
Starting a business is nothing like getting a job. It’s not “work”. Starting a business is something that comes from deep inside. It’s the need to express yourself in the world by creating something from your heart. Whether you’re into workout, science or manufacturing, only a strong passion burning inside will get you there. So how do you know it’s the right thing for you?
Well, in 2025 there’s a new hybrid technology that can actually tell you if you are an entrepreneur. It’s capable of decoding the world’s matrix to discover who you really are, what you’re made for and how things are going to happen.
How do you get started?
Do not listen to all these YouTube gurus that always have the “miracle recipe to retire before age 30” or the “how to have passive income”. Starting a business is never about passive income and if you’re for real, there’s no way you can even think of retiring at age 30… Or at any age actually.
What makes a business successful in 2025 is no different from what made a business successful in 2000 or in 1950. Find a pain in people that you can alleviate, build an awesome offer and come up with the most amazing customer experience possible. It has always worked and it always will. This pain can be as simple as finding a solution so that your button up shirt doesn’t come out of your pants 50 times a day, or developing a new AI that will replace a marketing team for small businesses. It’s all about bringing a lot of value for the most affordable price possible.
Wait what? No secret recipe, numbers game, nothing? Nope guys. Anyone who actually grew a business will tell you the same thing. Find something you can do with passion, that enough people will love and that you can scale and you have a business. Everything else is BS.
What does the roadmap look like?
When I got started in business I heard that it takes 9 months to bring a business to life. I did not accept the idea at the time but over the past almost 20 years, I’ve seen it again and again. It does indeed take about 9 months to get your business up and running. So here’s my roadmap:
- Define your offer precisely. Ask your future customers for blunt feedback and iterate over your idea again and again until you have something that starts looking like a “product”.
- Make it public. Build a website right away and start marketing your business immediately even if you don’t have it all figured out just yet. It’s never too early to share your idea.
- Figure out the pricing strategy. I don’t care how much your product costs, it’s irrelevant for now. What matters is to figure out how much those interested in your product are willing to pay.
- Figure out the feasibility and profitability. Now that you know how much people are willing to pay for your product or service, it’s time to make sure it’s actually doable. The math is super simple: How much do you charge? How much do you pay (your cost)? If you charge more than you pay, it’s profitable, else it’s not the right offer, go back to step 1.
- Build your pitch. Your product’s quality doesn’t matter if you can’t pitch it right. The best products aren’t always the best sellers. If they were, there’d be no Ikea, no McDonald’s and no Wish. People do judge a book by the cover so you need to build an amazing cover. This is where you need to spend a lot of time. I see too many young entrepreneurs spend a tremendous amount of time in building the offer or the product itself and almost no time working on the pitch (and all the marketing elements that go with it). I can pitch you something you’ll want to buy for me right now without even having this thing ready to go. Pitching is the most important skill to have in any business so if it’s not your forte, find someone who can do it right.
- Go out there and sell baby, sell. It doesn’t matter if you’re short on inventory, if your offer is still unstable or if you’re not capable of scaling yet. You’ll figure that out later. But you need to go sell, sell and sell. Period. Anywhere you go, people need to know what you do. I always wear a tshirt with my latest business idea on it and a big QR code in the back with my call to action. Your customers are everywhere, so always be ready to pitch. Anyone, anywhere.
- Reinvest all the profits. Most small business owners (and I’ve done that too when I got started) are using the profits to start living a more comfortable life. A nicer house, a new car lease, fancy clothes. Forget about all that. Your money needs to make you even more money. Why would you invest this money in a 401k that’s gonna bring you a 5% return on investment when your own business can bring you 1,000%? Right? Use this money to hire the best people you can find at the most strategic positions. That’s marketing, sales and customer service. And then dedicate the rest to improving your product.
- Scale. Now that you have the right people at the right position and they’re all so much more knowledgeable than you, it means you made it to stage 2: scaling. This is when your focus and your time will be dedicated to growing your business. Opening new locations, new countries, new verticals. If you thought that the early days were a lot of work, well, now you know it wasn’t the case.
- Exit. Yes you heard that right. Real entrepreneurs think of their exit from day 1. Exit does not mean retiring. It means cashing out and starting something new, because we kinda get addicted to the roller coaster, don’t we? Exiting might be about selling your business to the highest bidder or it might mean doing an IPO. Whatever your plans are, they need to include the “exit” part because people who are good at starting a business aren’t necessarily good at scaling it of stabilizing it for the long haul.