How to Start a Business

How do you turn your passions and ideas into a long-lasting business that can support you? Here we will define your passions, think of the potential products or services you can sell, and find competitors doing the same.

Starting a business will take much more effort than that, but this is the very first step in a long and successful journey that begins now.

If you’re anything like me (back in 2012), you’re probably finding it very challenging and confusing to become an entrepreneur, and start selling your products or services. 

Perhaps, like me back then, you don’t even know what to sell. 

Maybe you don’t know how to get started. There’s a huge amount of information available out there, dates to prepare for, documents to gather and more.

It's easy to get confused.

That’s why I created this guide. Here you’ll find my view on the best way to set up your business for success.

To start with, you’ll need to answer these questions:

• What exact products or services will I offer?
• Who are my customers?
• What’s my USP (unique selling proposition)?

In this part of this guide, we will go through these questions and a process to help you out to find the answers.

List your skills

Start with making a list of your passions, talents, strengths, and anything else that you think will help you create and run a successful business.

You should sit down with pen and paper (or digital ones) and spend at least 15-20 minutes doing this. 

Don’t you worry if those sound strange for now. Just write down everything you can think of.

Here are a few examples of skills:

• Writing
• Video editing
• Passionate vegetarian
• Speaking and communicating
• Digital drawing and graphic design

Tip: If you’re stuck here, you can always ask a friend or family member to give you some ideas. People close to you know you the best and will give you good advice.

Define your services

Now it’s time to make a second list. This is a list of potential services that you think you’d like to offer.

For example, let’s say you want to get into digital marketing, you could break down the services you can potentially sell. 

These would be subcategories of digital marketing, such as:

• Website design
• Landing page design
• Logo design
• Brand development

Get inspired by others

It’s very important to understand if you can actually sell the services you have thought about. How do you validate that? 

One of the easiest ways is by looking at others’ success. You can learn a lot by looking at businesses that are already offering similar services to the ones you want to offer.

When you find them, make sure you review their websites, their pricing structure, how they describe their offerings, what tone of voice they use etc.

Now that you have taken the first baby steps into this journey, let’s take a look at how to build a brand and a narrative to understand your (future) customers better.

‍NEXT GUIDE: How to Build a Brand and a Narrative [4 Templates]