A lot of people have a weird misconception in their head that a business is “complicated”. In their minds, a business includes lawyers, HR departments, sales staff, office premises, costs, etc.
While large businesses might need all of those things, most people forget how simple a business actually is.
A business really only has two main parts.
1) Something to sell
2) A source of generating leads
Something to Sell
The primary thing any business does is sell something. If you’re not selling anything, it’s not a business.
Just like how if you’re not having sex with a girl, she’s not your girlfriend.
The product could be anything from:
- Consulting
- Business services
- Access to a software (Photoshop)
- Physical products
- Tickets to a show
- Membership to use something (sports clubs, gyms, etc.)
- Food (restaurant)
- Entertainment (casinos, comedy clubs, etc.)
- Exposure (Google selling ads)
- Sex (hookers)
- Sympathy (charities asking for money)
- Edible food-like substances (McDonald’s)
- Sugar and cake sludge (Starbucks)
- etc.
As long as you have something to sell, you have one half of the business ready.
To be a business you need to be selling something. Saying you have a business without actually selling anything is like having a girlfriend that you never had sex with – it’s not a business and she’s not your girlfriend.
Note that you just need to have something to sell. It doesn’t mean it needs to be your product.
Affiliate marketing has been my most profitable business and all it involves is selling other people’s products for a commission. If you look around you’ll find many digital products and software you can sell for a commission.
For example, the LMM affiliate program offers 50% to 75% commissions for each sale.
I even wrote a guide on how to make some quick cash by spamming affiliate links on Reddit – it’s one of the easiest ways to make money fast because you don’t have to create a product or sales page. You just need to go and sell.
Lead Source
Ok, so you have a product to sell. Now what?
The second half is having someone to sell it to.
You need to have some kind of a lead source – people you can actually reach out to and talk about your great product or display it in some way so people who might be interested might buy it.
This could be anything from:
- Having a shop in a prominent location
- Physical advertising (hoardings, pamphlets, billboards, etc.)
- Online advertising
- Paying influencers
- Cold email and DMs (Free guide on cold outreach you can download here.)
- Having your own audience (social media, blog, etc.)
- Food delivery apps (for restaurants and cafes)
- Standing on the street in skimpy clothes (hookers)
- Piggybacking someone else (eg. setting up your grilled chicken shop right outside a busy gym)
- etc.
It’s really that simple.
Business = Having something to sell + a source of leads
It’s nothing complex like how people seem to think.
Of course every business has logistics.
If you’re selling omelettes outside a gym, you need to find an egg supplier and need a permit.
If you’re running a consulting firm, you need talented consultants.
If you’re in the software business, you probably need GitHub.
All of that is business specific and very easy to figure out when you actually get down to it.
Things like lawyers, HR, accountants, sales taxes, etc. don’t even enter the picture until you’ve hit a certain level of scale.
The product part itself is not that hard either. You can just affiliate for someone else and sell their product instantly.
The hard part is always selling. Finding lots of people to reach out to and increasing your conversion/close rate.
When people say it’s hard to make money with the internet, they are telling you that they are lazy and incompetent.
If you ask them “what ways have you tried?” and the answer is “I haven’t tried anything yet, I’ve only been thinking about it” or “I tried it but didn’t see success in a month so I dropped it“.
It’s just absolute laziness and cope.
When they claim something is “hard” they no longer have to feel bad about their lack of trying and their lack of success. They can instead blame their lack of results on the thing being “hard”.
Some of the very first online money I made was writing reviews for products on a simple WordPress website with a cheap Namecheap domain and spamming the links on social media.
It wasn’t a lot of money, but it wasn’t “hard” either. It got me started.
You make your first $1 online and your entire life changes.
This is the 100% god’s honest truth.
The problem is that people give up before they make their $1.
They say things like “business is complicated and risky” even though you’re only risking… $50 worth of web hosting and a domain in most cases.
Look, here is what I want you to do:
I WANT YOU TO GET MAD.
I WANT YOU TO GET PISSED OFF.
I WANT YOU TO SCREAM INTO THE AIR.
And when you’re done with that, I want you to put your head down, decide a super simple business idea like web design, blogging, X creator, YouTube, selling services, or anything else.
And then I want you to execute it every day.
Be a producer, not a consumer.
When you’re at $5-10k a month in profit (shouldn’t take more than 3 years), I want you to tell me… was it really so hard and complicated?
It was a lot of work, sure, but it definitely wasn’t hard or complicated.
But I get it. When you’re a loser, you think everything is hard and that type of thinking actually does make everything hard.
When you think everything is easy, everything actually becomes easy. Mindset is everything.
But that’s fine. We need the losers to think that making an income with the internet is hard because the world needs its paper pushers, desk jockeys, “associates”, and so forth.
– Harsh Strongman
