 If you're thinking of starting an authentic business, you might have some questions like, is the timing right? How much do I need to invest? How much should I expect to spend on starting a business? What kind of demand will there be for my product? Will there still be demand in five years? I have multiple ideas. Which one should I choose to start a business with? So that's what this video is going to be about. And if you have any additional questions about starting a business, please feel free to comment below. And I'll try to get back to you within a few days as a reply to the comment. All right, so first of all, let me explain to you what I mean by an authentic business because that's the kind of business that I am best qualified to help people start and grow. So an authentic business is one where you are not just in it for the money. Yes, of course you need to make money, you're going to make money and you might be making a lot of money, but it's not about the money, it's about the meaning. It's about the service, it's about the self-expression. So that's what an authentic business is. You're not just selling somebody else's product, you're selling something that either you created or you might be selling someone else's product, but you add your own flavor, your own self-expression to it, you're able to control the modifications of that product. The more control you have over the product or the service, the more authentic it is to you. And also the way that you grow your business, the way you market it, get clients, get customers is also authentic. So I talk a lot about authentic marketing and I've talked some about starting an authentic business. So let me first, let me go into each of these commonly asked questions about starting an authentic business. Is the timing right for me? And I've written some notes here, so I'm gonna be referring to my notes as I go here. So the question of is the timing right? Is it right for you to start it now? Assumes that the thing you're gonna start is exactly the same as what lots of people have started. And if lots of people have done exactly the same thing you have, then you can then study their business and look at the timing. Oh, this person didn't start at the right time. Well, that person started at the right time. Well, this person, the problem is this, the definition of an authentic business means that it is authentic to you, which means it is unique to you, which means the timing question, you can't borrow that from anybody else's timing. Okay, so is it right to start right before Christmas? Fine, is it right to start, the beginning of the year or in the summer or is it right to start in 2019 versus in 2020? The reality is that here's the reality. You're going to have to figure a couple of things out. To have a successful business, authentic business, you will need to build an audience, okay? People who care about you, who enjoy your content, who would probably love to buy your products and services, people you love to serve, okay? You need to build an ideal audience, okay? You need to discover what they want, okay? You need, in the realm of the things you could offer, like let's say you could offer 10 different things and you need to discover among the 10 different things what they would want the most from you, okay? You need to try offering them different products. Even if you decide, I'm going to offer them, try thing number three and thing number seven. Well, even in thing number three, you could try different ways of offering it. Is it going to be one-to-one service? Is it going to be a group program? Is it going to be an online course? Is it going to be a t-shirt? I mean, okay, so you need to build an audience, discover what they want, try offering them different things to see what they take you up on and you need also explore your authentic marketing style and guess what? All of these things take time. Okay, so if you are able to work 20 plus hours a week on your authentic business, well, it might take you three to six months of strategic effort. Now, that's where some of you need to really learn is what is strategic effort because some of you have been trying and kind of just going left and right and up and down and trying to build your authentic business for years because you haven't understood what strategic effort is, but if you did strategic effort 20 plus hours a week for three to six months, it probably will be enough time to start making money. Maybe sooner, maybe a little bit later, but three to six months, I'd give it strategic effort 20 plus hours. Yeah, I could bet on that, right? If you were spending only five to 10 hours per week, okay? It would probably take you anywhere between six months to two years of strategic effort depending on how good you are at audience building and whether or not you're good at discovering what they want. I mean, there's so many factors depending on how tech savvy you are. If you're not tech savvy, it'll take more like two years, right? Rather than six months. Do you still need to learn what strategic effort in business and marketing is? Well, then it'll take you longer. How much can you invest in support? Getting a business coach will take you much shorter time than if you just try to figure things out on your own. Do you have money for paid ads? Do you already have a network of potential clients or referral sources? What is your ability to be disciplined, to stay consistent in taking the actions that might feel scary because you haven't done it before, right, so that you can learn quickly? So there's all these factors on how long will it take you? Is it three months or is it two years or is it three years or is it 10 years? Depends on all these different factors, okay? So what's the bottom line for what is the right timing to start? The sooner you start, the sooner you get going on figuring these things out, honestly. Right now, I happen to be recording this video a few days before Christmas. If I were you and you're watching this video, I would start the business today or I would start the business on Christmas. Start it any day. There's no such thing as beginning the year and there only is that after you've built an audience, after you've discovered what they wanted, after you have drafted your sales page or what you're gonna sell, then the timing question matters. Then it's like, well, obviously, if you're gonna sell something that's about personal growth or transformation or something, probably you shouldn't do it two days before Christmas. People are on vacation or whatever. You should probably start it sometime in the first couple of weeks of January. That makes sense. So the question of starting a business, the timing question is not right. The timing question should be start it now. Start building an audience now. That's the first thing you should be doing in an authentic business is building an audience, not coming up with a perfect product because the problem is you're in your own head if you're thinking of coming up with a perfect product or service. You're just in your own head. I promise you, you're gonna be shocked trying to market the thing that you created for five years you spent creating. Nobody gets it because you have your own life context you've lived how many years of your life. You have all this context that makes your product the most brilliant thing in your mind but nobody else in the entire planet has the same exact life context you have. So then you realize, oh my God, nobody wants my thing. Well, it's not nobody wants your things. You built it entirely in your own head. Build an audience, that's step one in building an authentic business and when is it right time to build an audience now? Because you have to figure out what you're gonna say, how you're gonna say it. And so the timing question is, the question is when are you gonna start figuring out your calling? When the kids are out of the house? Well, maybe, maybe then you'll have more time because you need to focus on building your family right now or whatever it may be. But even if you're building a family and lots of you are, some of you are, you should be doing it in evening hours or the hours when the kids are at school or at sleep. Because you need to start figuring out how to write. Okay, how to speak. All these things are important skills of building an authentic business. Writing honestly is one of the most valuable things I've had to learn in the past couple. I only started to really learn how to write in the past couple of years. Spent 40 years of my life hating writing, having writer's block. I just didn't wanna do it. But I decided to just start practicing, so when's the timing? Now. Now is the time to start practicing writing, speaking to build an authentic audience and then to discover what they want and to sell it to them. So create something that's a intersection of what they want and what you love and then sell it to them, right? So the timing is now. The timing is the best timing to start immediately. All right. So I hope that helps with that timing question. The second question that's frequently asked is, well, how much money should I expect to spend? So there are some guidelines here I wanna offer to you. You should expect to spend about $150 to $100 a month. $50 to $100 a month, monthly operation costs. Things like website hosting, I recommend Weebly. That's what I use for my website, W-E-E-B-L-Y. If you're gonna use WordPress, then I recommend SiteGround, S-I-T-E-G-R-O-U-N-D. So Weebly is non-wordpress websites. That's what I use and WordPress tries SiteGround. So website hosting, if you're gonna have clients, you need a scheduling tool. I recommend Acuity Scheduling. That's what I use. If you're gonna meet with clients virtually, video conferencing is what you'll need, a tool. I use Zoom, Z-O-O-M. So things like that. So $50 to $100 a month is about how much you should expect to spend total on those kinds of operational monthly costs. Another thing you should really expect to spend is on some kind of learning or support. Even I'd spend money on hiring coaches and taking online courses. So even at my level, I still do it. But certainly in the beginning, you should definitely be budgeting for online learning and maybe coaching if you can afford it. If you can afford hiring a one-to-one coach or joining a business coaching type of program, you should expect to spend anywhere from, I don't know, 150 a month on group programs to $400 a month on a one-to-one business coach. And I would only join programs or hire coaches that come highly recommended by a friend or a colleague. Honestly, don't just sign up for something because it looks good. That's one of the biggest mistakes I've seen people make. Oh my God, this looks so amazing. And look, they have a discount right now, right? Or they have a 30-day guarantee. Don't, everything, anything can look good. Anything can be made to look good. And most of the things I've bought that looked good were not that good. So only do it when it comes highly recommended from a friend or a colleague who has used enough of that product or service or, you know, persons, coaching or whatever to really honestly say, yeah, this is really effective. This is really good. And ideally you hear from several people, okay? And not, don't look at the testimonials on a website because anybody can look testimonials, make it look good. Somebody you actually know who says, yes, I actually use that person's service and they come highly recommend them. So be aware, be very aware of buying business coaching and programs. Many of you have probably wasted thousands of dollars or don't say wasted, everything's a learning experience, but you probably could have spent that money better, right? And so just be careful, just be very careful. Of course, I offer my own online courses on how to build a business, how to do marketing, all that stuff. In my courses, I try to keep it affordable at about $60 per course. And if you take even two of my courses a month, that's more than enough for you to work on. Probably one course per month for me is enough for you to work on. So $60 a month buying courses for me is probably a good time. If I had my courses when I first started, I would have been very grateful for it. Anyway, so that's something to budget. And lastly, I recommend budgeting something for paid advertising. It's the simplest and quickest way to build an audience is through paid advertising. Facebook ads right now in 2019, that's what I would recommend. It's still the best deal in 2019. And I would recommend that you start with $30 a month, three zero, a dollar per day basically for Facebook ads so that you can start learning it. You can start experiencing it, trying different things and seeing what might work and then increase it to $300 a month eventually or even more, but just aim to like, okay, I'm starting at 30, I'm gonna get to $300 a month. Once I see that it's starting to work then you just gradually increase it. Next month you spend 60, and then next month you spend 90 until you get to $300 a month. That's my recommendation anyway. I teach a Facebook ads course, so you might want to take my Facebook ads course to learn how to use your money effectively and pay that. All right, so I hope that helps with the question of what should you expect to spend. The other thing I might wanna mention here is that I'm going to mention here is I teach an intro to authentic business course. And in that course, I go through in greater detail what kinds of things you should be spending money on to get to that $50 to $100 a month of effective spending in terms of operational costs, et cetera, et cetera. So you might wanna take that intro course if you haven't already done so and look into the document, look at my teachings for my experience of what's worth spending money on. Okay, next question is, will there be any demand for my product or service? And this is an important question, of course, it makes sense and I'm glad you're asking it. And after 10 years of successful entrepreneurial experience and lots of failures along the way and having personally coached hundreds of clients, probably thousands, probably over a thousand by this point, the only real way to know whether there's demand for your product or service is to offer it to your audience and to see if they buy it. So honestly, no business coach, no marketing expert can tell you, oh, this is gonna be a successful product or service, no one can tell you. They can make guesses, but even the guesses oftentimes are wrong. The only way to know is to humbly offer to say, hey, audience, I've got this now available. Are you interested? Will you buy it? That's the only way now. So you have to build an audience first. You have to discover what they want. And then you have to try offering different things and see what they buy from you. Now, of course, you might say, well, well, I've already given you just now the plan for how to determine demand, right? But even before then, if you were very risk averse and wanted to get a sense of, well, what might I offer in the future, here are a couple of ideas. One, ask your own network, your friends, colleagues, past clients, if you have any past clients or if you don't ask your friends and your colleagues, has anyone bought, has anyone bought the kind of thing you're thinking of offering? Ask your friends and colleagues. Now the problem is, of course, your friends and colleagues, your network might be completely different from the actual market that will buy it. So this method is questionable too. Like I said, you won't know until you build an audience and offer it, but maybe your friends and colleagues, if some of them are actually your right market, may be able to give you some insight into what options they consider when they were buying your kind of thing and what they wanted to see. So it might be helpful. The other thing that might be helpful is to use Google to Google the product or service you're considering offering, okay? And then contact the people at the top of the Google searches who are selling the thing that you're thinking of selling and ask them, hey, is it easy or difficult for you to make sales because I'm thinking of getting into this market? Now, as you can imagine, most people aren't as collaborative as you or me and most people will see you as a competitor and of course they will not want it to answer your questions, unfortunately. But the reason why you cannot judge whether a business is successful or not by how good the website looks, I promise you. And a lot of you probably have already discovered that. You may have spent thousands of dollars, some of you, spent thousands of dollars creating a website and then nobody bought anything from you. Nobody has signed. There are millions of websites out there like this. People spend thousands of dollars creating an amazing looking website. It looks like an established business. It looks like it's a myth. They have no customers. They have no clients. But nobody would know that because the website spent thousands of dollars creating it. So, and also there are some kind of crappy looking websites that do very, very well. You cannot judge whether an industry is worth getting into by how great the websites look, okay? The only way to know is to talk to the people behind those websites and say, hey, is it easy or difficult? And then if people are gonna be honest with you, some of them will say, oh my God, it's so easy. Lots of demand for this. Or some of them will say, no, I know my website looks great but it's really, really hard to get clients in this industry. You don't know until you talk to people. So, and maybe some of your friends and colleagues are in that industry or offering that kind of thing. You can ask them to. But then again, one person's feedback may not be accurate to what the industry is actually experiencing until you ask many, many people. So again, the bottom line is that you still have to build your own audience, okay? So actually, I'll tell you what, the better question than will there be demand, the better question is to ask yourself, am I willing to adapt the kind of product or service I offer to what my audience will want from me? That is a better question. Because you will discover that being an entrepreneur means being adaptive. If you're gonna survive even, but you're gonna thrive suddenly, certainly it means being adaptive. It's not coming up with an idea and then trying to force that idea down everybody's throats to make them buy it. That's the old school way of thinking of business and marketing. That's Madison Avenue, they have this idea. And even Madison Avenue and the big corporations, they do tons of focus groups and they test out tons of products and lots of them fail and the ones that succeed, they put more money behind it. So even the big companies are doing this. I mean, if you look at Google, right? Google, one of the biggest companies in the world, how many products Google sells software, memberships or things that they state, the tools that they try to get us to use. The more we use Google, the more we trust it, the more they can sell ads, all this stuff, more people, right? How many products has Google introduced and then it's failed? I mean, even Google's own social network, Google Plus has failed. I mean, something as big as their own social network, competing with Facebook is failing. They're gonna pull Google Plus in early to mid 2019. I mean, it's ridiculous. So everybody who is an entrepreneur or a successful business knows that typically there are more failures than there are successes in their offerings. Did you know that? Did you think that you were gonna just, is there demand for my product? That's not the right question. Because you're gonna have more of your products not succeed than succeed. I'm sorry to say, if you're not, if you don't have the stomach for that, you probably shouldn't get into business, okay? Or you should reframe it to say, wow, business is a spiritual growth journey because learning to deal with failure, learning to be okay with it, learning to be adaptive is very much a personal growth journey. Learning to come from a playful experimentation mindset, learning to reframe failures as what can I learn and to continue to source your sense of security from a higher source rather than from what the market is telling you, oh, people didn't buy, therefore my sense of security is destroyed. Your ultimate existential sense of security and your self-esteem must not come from whether people buy from you, whether people buy this product or else you will have a very hard time in business. You will not enjoy your journey. So the spiritual or personal growth is very much alongside business growth. Okay, so another question is, will there be demand for my product service in five years? So this is the person who's saying, well, I don't wanna invest in this thing and it's not gonna work in five years. All right, you might imagine what I'm gonna say by now. Being a successful entrepreneur, I will tell you that you cannot predict whether there's demand for your product in even two years, let it on five years. That's not the right question because that question assumes that everything is static. Have you noticed that life is not static? And have you noticed that you are not static? You change your mind. Certainly within five years you'll change your mind. If not every other week, right? So you are not static. The market is certainly not static. The market is changing faster than it was last year, okay? And so that is no longer a question that can be asked whether there will be demand in five years. The only answer now is, are you willing to adapt? And the faster you can adapt, the more you are likely to succeed. That's bottom line, okay? In fact, if you're offering the exact same product service five years from now, the only reason you should be doing that is if it's been successful all along the way. But usually products have some kind of life cycle, okay? You will notice what sometimes it's like this, sometimes it's sometimes it's like this. I mean, there's many, many curves. The only way is to keep on adjusting based on what the market's telling you, okay? All right, next question is, well, I have many different ideas which one should I invest my time and resources in? Okay, it's a great question. And here's how I would decide, test every idea and then see what the market suggests to you and then invest more in that idea. It's not about figuring things out in your head doing a lot of journaling and figuring out through prayer and meditation, okay? You know, I think spiritual, the spiritual reality, the spiritual life, God, the universe helps you with your personal spiritual growth. I'm sorry to say, God and the universe does not help you with marketing ideas. Well, actually it does. God and the universe and your higher source helps you with marketing ideas through the market. God speaks through the market. God speaks to a business through the market. That's how God speaks. That's how the universe speaks to their business. That's how the universe gives you signs and signals of what to do is through the market, through the reactions of your audience when you offer things and they go, silence, that means they don't like it. Oh, lots of likes, lots of comments, that means they love it. So you have to test every idea. Now, if you don't have an audience yet, you might wanna start with testing with your friends and colleagues. I say might because there's a problem there is that your friends and colleagues might be completely different than your real market. I discovered that for myself. I could not test my ideas with my friends and colleagues. So nobody wanted to buy my thing, but when I started building an audience, then people wanted to buy my thing. I had to build an audience first and lots of people find this to be the case. Your friends and colleagues might not be your ideal audience. They might, if you're lucky, then they are. And you could test your ideas with them and see. But so basically, build an audience testing lots of different ideas with Facebook ads, build an audience with Facebook ads, test lots of ideas with them. It's actually the one and the same. You test, you use Facebook ads to boost different pieces of content on different things on your Facebook business page and see what people take you up on. And the other thing to do is to ask yourself, what has been the most sustainable interest for me over the years? And what can I see of the 10 ideas that I have? Which one or which ones have been the most sustainable over many years? Like I just feel like I've been interested ever since I was a kid or I've been interested year after year after year after and I'm still interested, okay? And I can see myself being interested certainly five years from now, I'm still interested. But those kinds of sustainable interests are, you'll have the energy to keep testing, right? You'll have the energy to keep on trying until, you find a way to talk about that idea that people want to buy, okay? So anyway, I think I'll end the video here and I'll give you additional resources. Honestly, I recommend my Intro to Authentic Business course not just because it's my product but people found it really helpful. I really think that for 20, right now I'm selling for $25, maybe it'll be 50 or 60. I think even if it was a $100 course, I think it's worthwhile. It's a great, great primer and framework to like, okay, how do I really start an authentic business with all the, how do you manage your time? How do you manage your money? How do you do your marketing from the get-go, from the start? So even if that course was 100 bucks, it might be at some point it's worth your money and it's worth your time to take my Intro to Authentic Business course. Please go and do that right now. As of this recording, it's 25. So get it at whatever price. It'll be worthwhile for you. There's a 60 day money back guarantee. If it's not the right thing for you, please let me know. And I will give you another course instead or I will refund you if you're happy with it but you could also just request another course from me instead. So my refund policy is very generous, 60 days. 60 days is when PayPal allows me to refund you. So please ask for a refund before 60 days so that I don't have to pay the fees for the PayPal. So Intro to Authentic Business, take that course. Otherwise, I also have a series of blog posts that where I'm journaling, me building a brand new authentic business on the side, I'm only spending two hours a week. So it really should take me a lot longer than it would take you. So I have a series of blog posts on how I'm doing that. It's not as structured as my intro course but you might get some clues on what I'm doing. I'm much more advanced though. So it might just be interesting but not exactly the right thing if you're a beginner or intermediate in business and marketing. So I hope this is helpful. You might wanna watch this video again to get some of the nuances that you didn't get before and thanks to those who were able to join me here. Let's see who joined me for this. Shweta and Alejandra, hello. Welcome to both of you and Jayce. Great to see you here. And let me now address some of the comments and questions. Yeah, Shweta says being adapted and flexible is important. However, I feel it's still important to make sure your joy factor is anchored in the adapting process. Yeah, certainly. And I think this is a personal growth question, a spiritual growth question is, can you source your sense of security and sense of joy from a higher source so that doesn't always have to come from external circumstances like did something work? So if you can source your joy from a higher or deeper source, then life is play. Then you can adapt easily, much more easily, right? So, all right. So Alejandra says, yes, since the market is constantly changing, how do we build a blog or website? If we got to be testing all the time? Well, a blog or a website is always changing too. That's the answer. So your blog and website, you should start your blog and website today and then change it as often as you want to. So there's this delusion, I think a lot of people have, some of you have like once you build something, once you build a blog and website, it's the same thing or somehow you are embarrassed if you change it because someone will criticize you in your life that you changed it. No, your audience will be grateful that you change your website as frequently as, in fact, audiences like novelty, they like new things. They like to see changes. In fact, your website hasn't changed. I know I haven't changed my website for a while. It's only because I have a very successful business and I do make changes, but maybe it's smaller changes. But until you get to a successful business, you should be changing your website all the time and until you get there. So, all right. And anyway, I hope this is helpful. I think those are the questions that I'm seeing here. And if you have any other questions, please go and comment below. The more you can say about your question, the more I can understand how to help you there. Maybe I already have an article, I'll let you know if I have an article, I'll give you a link to it. Otherwise, I hope to see you in the Intro to Authentic Business course. And until the next video, I wish you well, I wish you joy in being adaptive and excitement and playfulness in starting or growing your authentic business. Be well.