How to start a business with $10

Firstly, Please avoid all this advice about drop shipping, this will NOT work for you. Notice all their posts have affiliate links in the bottom to sign up for a service, they get money when you click that link, they are selling you!

What I will explain here is what I have personally done with ZERO startup money, I am not trying to sell you anything and I am not trying to get you as a client. This is literally as clean of advice you will ever get

When you have little to no money you are going to leverage your time for money.

It’s the most basic of business models.

I will explain what I did ( and am still doing it today)

I was on a podcast a number of years ago and a caller was complaining that “it was easy for me to start new businesses as I had money” So I took a challenge, That I would start a business without investing any money at all, and make it successful.

Back story – My wife had been using a Marketing Agency to market her business, they had done a terrible job, mainly because although they knew how to generate leads on online, they didn’t understand the business side of things.

After my podcast challenge, I decided to this would be my businesses to start. I would create a Facebook marketing business. The deal was I was not allowed to invest any of my own money, so no new money to invest in that business.

I had a computer, a phone, and a notepad.

#1 Learnt from YouTube how to do facebook ads – Total Cost $0

I headed to YouTube to see what gaps I had in my knowledge on how to generate leads for businesses, Turns out I had a fair bit, I understand the high-level stuff as I had been running businesses for years, but a lot of little details in making facebook ads work I just didn’t know.!

I spent literally tens of hours watching youtube videos learning best practices.

#2 Setup online presence, facebook page – Total Cost $0

Now I need to at least create some kind of presence on the internet. So I headed to facebook, created a business page with my name and another page for my company name. But my cell phone on both and started writing content for them.

Now as the rule was ‘no money’ how do I get around no website? My line if I was asked ( and I was) was simply. I don’t need one. I focus on Facebook ads, there is no need for a website, that is how good I am! – Bingo airtight answer.

#3 Finding prospects to contact – Google and LinkedIn – Total Cost $0

Now the hard part, where on earth do I find customers and how do I reach them?

So I realized that emailing people will be my only way at this stage, but How do i get them?. Firstly I went to LinkedIn and start searching for companies who I thought would buy my service, I was looking for businesses that relied on inbound leads flowing into their business

Insurance, home renovation, home service, the list is pretty endless as it turns out

I was heading to google as well, finding a major city, the going outside of the city and getting the contact details of every type of business I could.

How the really hard part, what do I say?

I knew that direct cold emailing of “hey, buy my stuff’ doesn’t work, so what Do I do?. So once again, back to google.

I googled effective cold email templates and found a company called woodpecker, who put a pdf on cold calling templates, what was awesome, was that they also gave a bunch of advice on best practices when using Gmail as well..

I settled on a 3 series email campaign, the plan was I would send a personal email, wait for 2 days then follow up with the next email, then wait and follow up the 3 days later with the final email.

So this gave me 9 days lead cycle.

I had sent personally 800 emails before I got my first interest. While getting them on the phone I kept emailing still.

#4 Calling prospects – Total cost ($0)

By the time I spoke to the potential client, I had sent 1100 emails!

I spoke with the potential for about 45 mins, and closed them! $1800 per month, payable upfront.

So, now I have $1800 minus the criminal fees merchant account charge you, in this case, Paypal.

Ad campaigns

I now immediately set up an ad campaign, paid Aapier so I can connect the lead gen from facebook to my CRM. I signed up for Close CRM , it was pricey, but i loved it had built-in calling and texting… so now as leads come in the go into my CRM, but I didn’t something else as well.

Automation

I set up Zapier to send an SMS to the lead as soon as they submitted their details, they get an SMS from me, thanking them and saying I will call them in a couple of minutes. – That was a terrible choice..lol

So, what happened was now people knew what I was calling for and in their mind, I was going to sell them. So I changed it to SMS me as soon as the lead came in. I got Zapier to send me the name, email, and phone.

This allowed me to call as soon as it came in.

If they didn’t answer, I texted them straight afterward.

Back to the CRM, I built a 21-day email and text sequence to send my new leads if I didn’t speak to them. There is an auto way to do this, but I won’t cover that in this post.

This now means that whenever I can’t speak to them they get texts and emails from me.

So, the CRM at the time was costing me $180 per month! Zapier cost about $50 and the rest I spent on ads.

Results:

The results are as follows:

On average it took me 9 attempts to speak to someone.

I spoke to on average around 50% of my leads

I closed about 40% of those.

It cost me $280 in ads to land a client. I charged out at $1800.

Now, I am not gonna lie here, in the earlier days I reduced prices to land people, this was a terrible mistake, My worst client EVER were all discounted clients.

Learn from my mistake, NEVER discount!

About 6 months after then I raised my prices to $2800 per month for my service, and added a bunch more value to the service.

I then recruiting an outsourcer to handle my facebook accounts at $400 per month and added some more value services that cost me about $200 per client per month.

So work out the profit.

$2800 – $400 ( FB mgmt ) – $200 ( other services) – $280 (CAC- Client Aquistation Cost) = $1920 gross profit. Guess what?

I put $1500 back into marketing.

Now my services are self-funding and growing my marketing reach every client we sign.

Here I am a few years later, I have a team that creates content for me and I don’t even use ads anymore for lead generation! The company is into the high 8 figures now, and my goal is to breach the $100M revenue target.

This started from a bet, and zero capital. But it was INSANELY hard work, but it is totally doable.

I talk about my journey and feel free to ask me any questions you have on my YouTube channel.