How to Start an Online Business in 2021

today we're going to talk about things that you need to think of before starting an online business in 2020 just to give you a little background on me if you're seeing me for the first time i started an offline business back in 2011 and 2015 together with my two co-founders we started an online booking platform for study abroad then in 2017 i started my own business specializing on online education and basically i've been in online business for over five years and i'm really happy to be able to share my insights with you in this video so first of all if you were thinking of starting an offline business maybe in 2020 you realize that even if part of this business will be offline something has to be online in case the next lockdown happens now you know we have a completely different agenda we don't really want to go outside so you really need to think of making part of your business online and when you start i know you want to think big i know you want to think about conquering the world and changing the whole market but if we think of bigger companies like facebook for example facebook started as a small social network in one university in harvard and then it started growing growing to other colleges the thing is even when building a huge company you need to start really small airbnb started with brian chesky and his co-founders renting out their inflated bed in their san francisco apartment so when you start you really need to think small you need to identify a local problem that you have in your community in your life and think of ways that you can solve it yes it really matters to think about bigger picture because you need to know where you're going but if you only focus on the bigger picture you won't be able to figure out the next steps and this is what i see a lot in first-time entrepreneurs they're like i want to create the next social media whatever i want to create this huge booking platform to do this this and that but you don't have cash you don't understand how the industry works and when we were working on linguatrip when we just started the prototype of it in 2011 which was an offline agency we manually send students abroad and i was doing everything by myself and this way i understood how the industry works i understood what problems students had and after understanding the industry after understanding there's an opportunity for a bigger investment we decided to move online so i really encourage you to think of smaller problems first of all it's a lot easier to start with them second you will get an understanding of what's happening in the market and then you will understand how to scale your business to reach a broader audience the next thing that you should do is research your market and some people get really scared when they type something on google and they realize that there are so many competitors you're like oh my god this niche is over saturated i don't have an opportunity here the thing is again when we started a study abroad business there were like hundreds of agencies in our small town but we were doing it in a different way and having a lot of competitors only gave us an understanding that the market exists and i want you to look at this in this way so if you see a lot of competition see how you're going to be different and having a lot of competition means it's easy to get into the market because there is a completely different example like if we think of building another mobile network and we're looking like oh we have t-mobile we have atm t there isn't a lot of competition you know we have verizon maybe i should start my own mobile network this is a completely different market the barrier to enter this market is really really high and this is why there aren't a lot of competitors there so if your market already has a lot of companies it just says the demand is there you need to figure out whether your solution to an existing problem would be different and that will be your key advantage by the way if you say there are no competitors on my market i'm starting something very unique you need to be really careful there because first of all maybe people don't even need your product and the problem doesn't exist and the problem exists only in your head that might be a big mistake but the second thing if you are inventing a new market that's like the best you can do but just make sure that the demand is there by the way quick story i came up with the name linguatrip back in 2015 and again it was a huge luck that this domain name was free because you know normally when you come up with a brilliant name you're checking.com domain and it's normally booked or costs one hundred thousand dollars and you're like i could never afford it as a startup the great thing that there are so many domain names that you can use instead of dot com for example dot store radix the company who owns dot store is the sponsoring this video dot store domains are not really oversaturated and that means you can create a unique name with a dot store and make it memorable and make it stand out for your customers it is recognized by all search engines creates a powerful retail brand and has high availability of good quality short names and you know having a store like a marina dot store or whatever your name is whatever your company's name is is a lot better than having something really really long and then dot com because people see so many companies online and they just forget your name a lot of huge companies like emrates and formula one are already using dot store domains for their product and even pewdiepie has a pewdiepie.store domain and because they're sponsoring this video they're giving you guys a special promo code svg with this promo code you're able to get a domain name for just 199 per year instead of paying 29.99 per year again all you need to do is visit get.store redeem my promo code svg and pay 199 a year for your brand new domain instead of paying 29.99 the link will be below the next thing i would do is assess your risk profile just like in investing so what you will be doing in the next few months you're going to be investing your cash your money you're going to be investing your time in something that has 9 out of 10 chances of failing but there is a 10 chance that this is going to be something that is going to change your life and you will become a great entrepreneur so here i would really sit down and think when do i stop how much am i willing to invest in this business until i understand that there is a dead end and nothing is happening my two cents on this problem a lot of businesses die during the first 12 months because they are the hardest and this is when a lot of people give up but if you survive the first 12 months it's gonna be a lot a lot easier so if you have a job right now maybe you should start your online business as a sidekick if you don't have a job and if you're risking your time if you're risking your savings then tell yourself okay i'm going to give it like 2 000 and one year of my time if it doesn't work out then i'm gonna find a job so give yourself an understanding when you're planning to stop and pivot because otherwise you can just keep doing things that don't work out for you then once you've researched your competition once you've understood the problem that the market has you need to figure out what kind of business you're actually building because there are so many types of businesses you can build online these days it could be a store then you start a store on a platform like etsy or shopify or amazon then it could be a website where you sell your services and there you would use wix.com squarespace and other platforms where you can build a website yourself or the third type of business is when you really decide to build something new on the market like the platform that we built with my team was coded by our own technical people so it wasn't like we took somebody's website we created everything from scratch but this is the riskiest thing that you can do because it requires tens of thousands of dollars of investment and a lot of working hours from your city or your technical people and for that type of business you would also need to think about the team because if you can't code yourself you really need someone on the team part of your co-founding team to help you with that i'm not really a fan of outsourcing things when you're building a product in it because if you outsource the core thing that you have your product that might lead to a lot of problems later because it could be overpriced uh people would demand more money from you to fix issues and you won't be able to go to another agency because everything is coded from scratch by this company that is demanding more money from you if you're still deciding what kind of online business you're trying to build my advice here would be start with something that's really really simple because your main goal for the next few months is to start making money because you need to figure out whether people need your product and something you can build really quickly is called an mvp minimum viable product something that works for an end consumer that they can order something or they can click and buy something and on the back and there would probably be you managing everything and for a client it would seem seamless as if a machine is doing everything but this is how it works at the beginning the founder is doing everything on the back end now another thing that you should think of before launching your business is your marketing strategy it could be facebook ads it could be instagram ads google ads it could be affiliate marketing it could be just talking to people in the street it could be knocking on doors and offering stuff maybe not the best idea in 2020 but still you need to research what your competitors are doing what is working for them maybe there are articles maybe you just see that your community is flooded by leaflets or whatever and i'm not saying that you should stick to only one marketing strategy you should try a lot of things put a hundred dollars here put a hundred dollars there work with creatives because one creative can work perfectly well another creative would just eat your budget so it's about experimentation and i wouldn't really outsource marketing at the beginning because you are the one who needs to understand the customer and you are the one who needs to understand what kind of message you're sending to your customer for them to buy your product and the last but not the least once you launch the business you need to hire a personal assistant i think this should be the first hire for any entrepreneur because this way you can delegate a lot of different things instead of just hiring for example a marketing manager this way you would only be able to delegate marketing once you hire personal assistant you can delegate shipping you can delegate dealing with the documents you can delegate some financials customers support etc so this should be your number one hire a person who would help you with multiple tasks and once you started it's all about trying different things constantly iterating trying different marketing channels and i also want you to understand that it's okay to fail because even if you fail you've gone through this whole process and you now understand how online business works and um i wanted to wrap up this video with a phrase uh from one of the investors in silicon valley he said the writer is important but the wave is even more important so what it means is that you can be an amazing entrepreneur but you started a business that doesn't really have a future and yes i believe that an amazing entrepreneur would come up with something that would help this business grow still but if that entrepreneur put the same amount of effort into a market that's growing fast the result would be dramatically different so if you feel that your niche is dying that there is no demand in your product it's okay to pivot it's okay to change the product it's okay to look for something else because our energy is limited our time here is limited and it's really important to put it into the right place thank you guys so much for watching this video up to the very end if you're not yet subscribed this channel and you're interested in starting and running a business.