Honest & Brutal Advice on How to Start an Online Business
Tags: Passion, Hard Work, Persistence, Online Business, Business

Being successful in business comes down to 3 key components: Persistence, Passion, Hard Work

With sufficient persistence, you’ll be successful one day. You will have the persistence to learn, research, and hustle your way to find the solution to any hardship you face. Whether it’s financial, legal, marketing, sales techniques or etc.

Passion — if you love what you are doing or if you have a reason to do what you are doing, you will find enough energy and time to achieve it. If you are lazy and just hope for handouts or luck or fairy tale assistance, it will not happen to you.

Hard Work beats luck because, with hard work, you create your own luck. Nothing comes easy. Elon Musk famously works more than 120 hours a week when he is launching his Tesla. How many hours have you worked this week?

Business Ideas

There is no right or wrong to a business idea. It’s all about timing and execution. What may seem like a good idea may not be appealing to the market today because it’s either too early or too late. A great idea will not be successful if it’s poorly executed and this is why persistence, hard work, and passion all come into place.

So now, you have decided or are exploring to start your own online business.

There are no golden rules to how to start your own business but there are several things that everyone needs to go through, albeit in different sequences. Here is what we believe the most logical sequence of things that you need to do to start your own business in 2020–2021

1. Have an idea of what you want to offer to the world? For this, you should know before thinking to start your own business. Did you see something that the market is lacking? Do you have special access to something that is better/cheaper than what the market has? Do you have a skill that the market wants?

2. Do a quick competitor check / real-world check to see who else is offering that service. If you are planning to sell it within your area, don’t worry too much about competitors selling the same service in different parts of the world. Focus on your competitor within your area of reach / within the area where your target market resides or does business.

3. Understand your competitor. At this stage, many new entrepreneurs give up because they then realize that their world-changing idea is not new after all. The hard truth is most services you can think of are not unique either.

4. Find your niche. Do quick math. What do you expect from your business? How much money do you realistically want to make per month? For example, you want to earn USD3,000 a month then divide that with the potential profit you can get per customer or item. For example, if you are thinking of selling a one-to-one cooking class and recipe at $30 per hour per student. To achieve USD3,000 per month, you need to be teaching 100 hours. Assuming each session (on average) is 2 hours, you need to be teaching 50 sessions per month, and assuming each student will sign up for and pay you for 2 sessions per month, all you need to do is to find 25 students.

5. Now with this number and information on hand, do you think you can find 25 students with your city, reach, circle, neighbourhood? The answer is most likely YES!

6. Build a social media presence and a website. To build your own social media presence, all you need is some Hard Work, Passion and you will be able to do so. If you think you can’t, that’s because you are lazy because Facebook and Instagram have spent billions of US Dollars to make sure their platform is usable by everyone from the age of 7.

7. As for the website, there are many website builder solutions that are easy to use out there. In all honesty, you can do this at a later stage when your business gets a bit bigger or busier. You can either try to do it yourself or hire a 3rd party to do it. If it is cheaper for you to learn and do it yourself, then do it yourself else outsource it to someone who can do it better and cheaper than you.

8. Marketing, Marketing, Marketing! — Focus all your effort on marketing. Create a relatable story. Create a reason for people to have an interest in your service. Create a reason for people to like you. Create a reason for people to feel ‘They have lost out’ if they don’t get your service. Make your service easily shareable on social media. Create an easy to repeat tag line, slogan for your friends, customers to tell their friends about you. Give them a reason to talk about you.

9. Delivery — make sure you deliver as promised. It’s better to under-promise (but do not be too humble) and over-deliver than vice versa.

10. By now, you should be halfway to your monthly profit target and now it’s time to think about the 2nd stage of owning your own business.

11. This is the time when you should have a ‘feeling’ whether this is for you for the long term, can you grow this business even more, and if the answer is yes — congratulation.

12. Time to get your house in order. Now it’s time to look into proper account/record keeping, taxes, and legitimacy of your business according to your local laws.

13. In general, you will need to register your business with the authority, hire an accountant/tax agent, set up a virtual office as your formal business presence and also as the registered address to receive government notices, bank and other institution notices to ensure you comply with your local government laws.

14. Lastly and probably the best advice from us — Remember, everything you do, you communicate, is part of your marketing. Check for missed marketing opportunities — be it your packaging, receipt, invoice, the footer, or the closing of your video — every little extra marketing helps!

Good Luck!

From all of us here at UnionSPACE Bangkok