Business advice for young entrepreneurs

Hey guys it's Nathan again. Um this is a video for anyone who is looking at starting their like first business. Uh one of the questions I really get quite frequently is people asking like when is the best time to launch a business, or even like quite varied questions, but generally people just looking for like a reason to push off like starting their business, of why they think it isn't the right time. Um particularly for like first-time entrepreneurs, or like people — when I say I mean people who are in an existing job and they're looking to like make the shift over out of like the nine to five work life into their own business. So I just thought I would share like my experiences, like my advice, and what I think you should do.

So to start off with, I started my first business when I was about — which wasn't successful at all, never made any sales in fact. So the first business I ever made that actually brought in some sales was when I was about 19, 18, and it was actually an Instagram marketing agency. So the reason I started that was because I had about forty thousand, forty five thousand followers, and I would get people messaging me asking how did I grow my Instagram to that many followers. And I just realized there were people interested in it, there was some demand for it, people actually offered to pay me money. So then I decided to make a website, and that is how I actually started the first business. It was managing people's Instagram accounts, originally just like four or five people, and I grew it from there.

But the thing that I was always very happy about is that I started my entrepreneurial journey at quite a young age. So for anyone looking to start their own business I would tell them start it as young as possible. So even if you're 15, 16, 17, 18 watching this, 100% start your own business. If you're older than that and you haven't started your own business yet and you've had an idea that you're sitting on, just go out and launch it. The reason for that is a few things. Nine out of ten businesses fail, and the chance of your first business being successful is quite small. Um really quite small, because you've never — you've just never done it before. You've got no experience in business. So I wouldn't focus so much on the actual idea itself, rather focus on just getting started with something, even if the idea isn't perfect, just to start your journey. And I promise even if the business isn't successful it will be 100% worth it. You will just learn so much. On the next time you set up a business it's going to be much better.

And that is just like the general process of entrepreneurship. In fact so many, they launch something and then they actually start a new business based on a problem that they encountered when they were running this old business. I've done it so so many times. Like inspiration comes whilst you're starting one company and you realize there's a problem that you have whilst running this company that other people have as well, and it opens you up to a new business. So like I've started over like 20 companies in total. Um so it sort of like leads on from like one to another. Like they really quite naturally connect, each different business that you work on. So just get started because you will just learn so much. It's 100% worth it. Chances are if you spend like another year thinking of like business ideas it's not even going to matter. You would have got so much more value from just starting one business, dealing with like real world problems in business, and it will lead you on to have more ideas, and you will actually have started your journey as an entrepreneur. You will have started learning how to actually build and scale businesses, which is the most important thing anyway.

On top of that, starting once you're younger — one thing that I was always massive, like really very grateful for, is that I didn't have any um any major like responsibilities when I started my companies, because I was like originally I was 19, so I was living at my parents' house. The worst thing that would have happened is like the business just didn't get any customers. Um and I also had very — I didn't have any investment in the business at all either, because I didn't have any money to invest. The only thing I bought was a domain which was about 10 pounds, and I would host the website for free on GitHub. I taught myself how to edit like HTML templates, so I would use free HTML templates to build and launch the website. So I literally had no investment, so there was nothing for me to lose. And it's not like if the business failed I would be homeless, or I had children relying on me, or like a wife, or um anything like that. So that is another reason I think it's great to start whilst you're young. And even if you have already got a wife and kids, it's still the best time to start now, because generally your financial responsibilities are only going to increase. So just start now. But do like minimal investment, like bootstrap your business, as I said before, because it means you haven't got so much to lose. But on top of that, and probably the bigger reason, is it forces you to be creative in your solutions.

The first problem that you're going to encounter once you have like a website set up and you've launched this idea is you're not going to have any customers, or you may have like I don't know a few friends or some referrals or something, but you haven't really got a business until you have like an acquisition channel that is bringing in customers for you. So the two most important things you can learn: sales and marketing, a hundred percent, for any entrepreneur. The two best skills to know are sales and marketing, and because as soon as you learn these you can literally come up with any idea that you want to execute on. And sales and marketing are like transferable skills. Yes, okay, there can be some like expertise within a specific industry or not, but I can guarantee that I can set up a business in pretty much any industry at all except for maybe some very strange niches, and I can get customers, which is like a very good position to be in as entrepreneurs.

So for any new entrepreneur I recommend that you learn how to build a website in HTML and CSS. You can use website templates and then you're literally just editing text. It's like the easiest thing ever. I've got a video on it on my channel. There's going to be hundreds of other channels on YouTube that explain how to do it. And then you want to learn sales and marketing, which if you're following this channel already, most likely you're already interested in sales and marketing, so you're in the right place. Don't necessarily look at like Google Ads and Facebook ads as like your initial channels.

You want to start off on my first ever channel that I've started working on, with Reddit, where I would promote — I had the Instagram marketing business — so I would put a post in a subreddit saying what is the best Instagram marketing agency, or what is the best Instagram growth service, and I would pay to get about 50 upvotes on the post so it would actually get some traffic and views. And then from a second Reddit account I would go and say I've been using this service, promoting my own service, I've got this result, um like highly recommended or whatever. And then I would buy a load of upvotes so it was like the number one comment on this, but it looked like a load of other people had also upvoted and agreed with this. And I would do this with about two or three other accounts so that my service would keep appearing on this Reddit thread, which was just fantastic social proof, and it worked very well. It was the first ever — I was bringing in about three or four customers per day, so I was making about 120 dollars to 160 dollars per day, just from this free acquisition channel, because the Reddit threads were ranking on Google. It was just bringing in organic traffic.

Because Reddit threads after six months, that's what Reddit calls archived, so you can no longer have any input on that particular thread, on that particular discussion. So if you're promoting your business and that is like the highest rated comment, it will remain like that forever. And Reddit is like a very high like domain authority website, so the questions rank really well on Google. So what you can do is actually look for specific search terms that um the people are looking for related to your business, and then do this on Reddit. And this was eight years ago now when I first started doing this, but it still works to this day. Not that I'm particularly focused on it, but Reddit is a 100% — it's a fantastic traffic acquisition channel.

And rather than being like one of these entrepreneurs that you see who um I don't know, they'll try Facebook or Google Ads and they'll put like a hundred dollars or a thousand dollars into it, and then they won't get any sales, because the problem will be their website, will be their product, it will be their marketing, the copy on the ad, like whatever the case may be, probably all of them if they're a new entrepreneur. It just takes time to develop these things. And then they will say oh Facebook ads don't work, Instagram ads don't work, Google Ads don't work. The problem isn't the ads at all. It's you. It's your business. Um so it's a case of figuring out why is it not working and optimizing from there. So instead of like wasting money on these channels to start with, because most likely you're never going to get them to work first off, you should start on the free channels. Take on some customers. Understand the customers. The customers will also give you feedback. Most likely it's a new business so you can improve from there. Maybe they'll give you feedback on your website. Um constantly innovate and make improvements from there. And then after a couple of months you can start to perhaps invest in some like paid acquisition channels, just testing them out. But if you're not able to get them to work I can tell you now the problem is you. It will be you. It doesn't depend on like volume, but 100% you can guarantee that there are people looking for pretty much anything that you're selling on Google, and the question is only like how many, and how much does it cost for you to acquire them. And then you will start to move into like the optimization game of improving your website.

But anyway I've sort of now moved much more like deeper into like the marketing side of things. Anyway the general idea of this video: start a business. It doesn't matter what it is. Just do it for the experience in the first place. Most likely you're not going to become a millionaire off of your first business. In fact it's very unlikely. Just start it anyway, because if you're wasting your time perfecting your idea that most likely is going to fail, you're just, as I just said, wasting the time. So focus on launching the business and just take the lessons, and don't be put off. Your business is essentially just solving problems every day. It's solving little problems to improve your company. This is pretty much all businesses, especially running a startup in the early stages. This is problem solving, so you need to really just push through that. You want to start this now. Now is always the best time to start a business, especially if you're young, because you just haven't got the responsibilities, financial responsibilities. Um you haven't got to pay the rent. You haven't got kids relying on you. And you want to start your entrepreneurial journey as young as possible. Don't be so worried about failing. The worst thing that will happen is you're in the same position that you're in now, but you've learned a ton of lessons from actually launching the business.

Yeah other than that if you have any questions about starting a company, if you have some ideas, if you want my feedback, I don't know, anything, just feel free to leave a comment and like I'll get back to you. Yeah other than that if you are, if you're not sure about starting a website, like I said there's actually a free video on my channel. It's called How to Build a Website for Free and Accept Payments Online, and it will walk you through how to set up a website in like 45 minutes and even host it for free. The only thing you have to buy is your own website domain, which is like ten dollars from Google, but everything else is completely free. Um other than that yeah any questions leave a comment. I'll get back to everyone. And yeah.