By JOHN QUICK
Starting a business can be daunting. Back in the day, you would need a lawyer, a business plan, $500,000 cash, and you’d have to mortgage your house. And that was just the start.
Now you can have a skill set, start a listing on “Fiverr” and call it a day. No investment needed, you leverage your time and talent in a way to make money.
Here are three ways to leverage time, talent, and technology to start a business today.
Clothing or Home Decor Brand
If you own a gym and have a decent social media following or want to venture into the entrepreneurship field, this might be an excellent fit. You will need time and talent to start this.
You can open a Shopify account for free. This will be your storefront, website, and payment processing center. Shopify has easy-to-use free themes, which will help you develop your brand, and the company provides excellent support if you need it.
Once you open a Shopify site, you can integrate the Printful Application with your website. You can sign up for free for that app and then combine clothing, home decor items, and the list goes on.
Printify operates entirely as an on-demand print service, and you pay as you print. You won’t be sitting on lots of inventory, and they ship and mail it for you as well. No warehouse is needed.
You can use the Printify app to easily design your own clothing or home decor. It’s “plug and play,” and all you need to drive traffic to your offer is your imagination and creativity.
Even if you only sell a couple of things a week, it will teach you how to run an online business, follow up with customers, and create follow-up sales emails. Shopify has at least 100 other apps associated with it that will help you with everything, from marketing to emails.
Coffee Company
If you have a social media following, or if you already own a coffee shop or restaurant, starting a coffee company could work for you. Maybe you have not been as busy because of COVID-19. What better way to add revenue to your bottom line than by sending coffee to the front door of your loyal customers.
You can use this to have a “coffee of the month club,” or if you have your own big social media following, you can use this as your brand to market to your audience.
Even if you don’t have a big audience or own a coffee shop, you can learn the ins and outs of starting a business with little to no overhead.
How do you get started? It’s the same as my advice for opening a clothing brand. Start with a Shopify account and download an app. This time the app is made by the Doughty Organization. If you put this name into the Shopify App store’s search engine, the coffee app will pop up.
This app lets you add your brand to coffee bags and pods and place them on your Shopify website.
Someone orders the coffee on your site, and Shopify will put the fresh coffee in your company bags and ship it to the customer for you.
Freelancer
Maybe you can make websites, logos, graphics, edit videos, write copy or you’re good with Adobe tools. You get the point: If you have a skill that you want to leverage to make money, use a website like Fiverr to start your own business around your skillset.
Make sure your listing looks good. Look at other top makers on these sites and learn from their best practices. Advertise your listing for free in every Facebook group that you can think of. It’s free to post on Facebook.
These three ideas are going to happen with or without you. Take a leap of faith and give it a try. Most of the USA is stuck inside anyway, so what do you have to lose? You don’t want to be one of those people who always “shoulda woulda coulda.” Choose life, embrace the risk, and go live outside the lines.
If you think you need a little help still, Fiverr also has all the online courses you will ever need to learn from real-world entrepreneurs and at a reasonable price.
One of John Quick’s many super powers is to help your business discover how to best use social media and technology to connect with customers, drive traffic, tell your authentic story and increase sales. He’s entrepreneur and a former regional director for Samaritan’s Purse and is known as “chief implementor and red tape cutter.” Read John Quick’s Reports — More Here.