The Only 3 Things You Need to Start A Business
Here are the 3 most important things you need to start a business.
2 are tech related, 1 is an inside job.
In the lesson, find out:
* Why you need to be confident you could make $19
* Starting a business isn't free, but it's still pretty cheap
* The biggest thing that got me to $110,000 in my first year in business
This is lesson 2 in the Free Sample Series of Weird Lil' Business School
If you already learned more in 25 minutes than you have in 90 days of Google searches, sign up for the full Weird Lil' Business School Course. A audio-only course that gets you making and selling a creative product (not your soul) in 3 months.
You'll have bonus (or full-time) income, so you can say no to idiotic non-union commercial auditions or clients that haggle over $5.
Sign up before May 1st and save $50 - go to AmberPetty.com/WLBS
TRANSCRIPT
Welcome to the Weird Little Business School podcast. This is Episode 2 of the Sneak Preview series of the Weird Little Business School. What does that mean? Well, this is what Weird Little Business School, the paid 3-month program to help you run a business and start making money as a creative, to keep all of your brilliant ideas for yourself and get money from them as you grow your audience and all that delightful stuff. That's what the course teaches you how to do. How would you know if you want such a course? Well, that's where this free preview comes in. So these are the first five lessons that you get to enjoy gratis. I'm Amber Petty. I've built a six-figure business that I've run for the past five years.
I used to be in improv and musical theater and a freelance writer, so I've got all kinds of weird crap in my background that actually makes me an exceptional marketer and business owner. And you have all those skills too. So instead of listening to some boring-ass corporate nothing, you can listen to me, somebody who's been in your shoes and knows how to cut away all the unnecessary crap and get you into making money and sharing your creativity, the most fun parts of business. Last episode, we talked about the things you don't need to start a business. Today, I'm talking about the things you do need. Granted, this might be slightly different for different businesses, but overall, this is the minimum stuff. This is what's going to make your life easier.
As a business owner, make people trust you to give their money, but you're not wasting your money on any software and stuff that you don't actually need. So, number one is you need an email system. So, not just your email, you need to be able to send emails en masse to your email list. I recommend Kit. It used to be called ConvertKit; it's the same thing now They just wanted to change their name to something harder to Google. I recommend that. I've used that my entire business. It works really well. They also haven't upped their prices that much over the course of working with them, where I've seen other places double their prices during this time, so it's very reliable. Now, you could also use something like Substack, but I'll get to why that's a little harder in a second.
I think it's better to just get an email system that is independent, so that could be Kit, that could be MailerLite, that could be Flowdesk. Those are ones I also know that people enjoy. Don't get MailChimp; that one sucks. I've never known a person happy to have MailChimp, so skip that one. Now, if you're thinking, oh yeah, but ConvertKit, it's like $19 a month. Here's one thing to keep in mind for your business: it's not going to be free. This is a business. To start a business in ye olden times before the internet, you had to have a brick-and-mortar store. You had to have inventory; money was required to start any kind of business. Nowadays, we're lucky as hell, and we need very, very little.
So I'm not saying to spend a ton of your money, but certain things you're going to have to pay for, and one of them is an email system. So if you're not confident that you could make $19 a month, you probably shouldn't start a business. And again, maybe your first month you don't make $19. That does happen, and that's totally okay. But if you can't make back $19, if you think that's impossible, don't start a business. Because that's what it comes down to. You can make your money back from anything that I'm suggesting you use here. And I'm suggesting the minimum because I don't think it's fair when people are told to get Kajabi, for example, which is over $100 a month. I think that's an absolute fucking waste of money.
So I'm giving you the minimum, but I want you to remember this is not free. So having a little money to spend on this minimum software, on some ads potentially, on working with people or taking courses that are going to make you build your business faster, that stuff is helpful. And listen, I'm not just saying that because I sell a course on how to build a business. You don't have to take mine. But when you see stuff that legitimately shows you, hey, this is going to save me hours of Googling or getting myself confused, that's a worthwhile investment. So an email system is worth it. Now, why am I lukewarm on Substack? Well, Substack, first of all, Substack is an email platform. It's not social media, although it has some social media elements to it.
But it's not a social media platform like Instagram and TikTok and things like that. There aren't algorithms to deal with and the key part is the reason why email is so important is because you keep the emails no matter what. So once somebody has opted into your email list, even if you switch from Substack to something else, or I switch from Kit to something else, I get to download those contacts and keep them. If Instagram decides to sell itself to some bigger overlord somehow and disappear, you're screwed. Those followers are gone forever You may have heard of a little something called Twitter and how that platform is now worth a flaming pile of garbage approximately right now.
All those followers are gone for many people and even people that didn't leave Twitter, most of those followers don't participate anymore and the that's just poof gone, your work up in billionaire-coated flames. With email, that doesn't happen. So even if Substack collapsed, you still would be able to download those emails and keep them, so that is the primary difference. Now the reason I'm falling out of love with Substack is because, one, it's prioritizing using Substack over email, meaning they give people options to sign up to follow a Substack but not share their email address. They're pushing people to use their app over using email. That doesn't help you as the business owner because, again, you want those emails,
and because Substack is free, they only make money when you make money, so they make money off subscriptions, which means all their business is to get more people on the app and to get more people to have paid subscriptions Now none of this is dire; it's still a usable platform, but it's limiting, so you're kind of playing in somebody else's sandbox a little bit, and they could decide to change their rules at any time and make it worse for you. It's limiting because you have fewer options. So one of the best options you have in any kind of email service like it is you can tag people, you can segment people. So if people sign up for a class, you can send emails just to them.
If people want to opt out of a certain sales email sequence, you can take them out of it but still email the rest of people. That tagging option makes your life much better as a business owner. Also, you have the ability just to email people more often, which you'll probably need to do as you sell stuff. So you just have a lot more options when you go with an independent email service than when you have it with Substack. Now if you have a Substack right now and you love it and it works as a way to build up your audience, hooray! You don't need to change it; stick with it for now, and then if you're starting to feel limited by it, know you could always switch over.
But for everybody else, just get an email system, and I'm not sponsored by Kit. I'll probably, frankly, get an affiliate link in the future and use it because I legitimately like them; but I've just used them, they work well. The other bonus with an email system, and this one I only know Kit for sure, is it has a lot of other features. So you can also make landing pages for opt-ins, meaning when you give out a freebie, when you give something away for free to get people on your email list, you can make that sign-up page right through Kit. You don't have to have another website or another piece of software. You can even make a product on Kit, so if you have an ebook or meditations you want to sell or something like that, you can make the page that sells the product with a secure checkout option, all just through that same place.
So that's another reason why I like it. I think you get a lot of bang for your buck, and it's more trustworthy to me because I'm paying them directly. Right? So their job is they want to keep their customers happy so the customers continue to pay. Keeping the product good is profitable for them, whereas Substack just wants more people on the app and more people running paid products. Making the free email part good, that is not profitable for them. But an email system is number one. Why? Because getting people's emails is key. It is key, even for huge influencers. They are told to have an email list. Massive businesses have email lists and email you. You'll see in the past few years, most publications and newspapers have newsletters now.
It's because getting attention via email is a way. To really get and capture attention, 2. to let your audience get to know you better, and 3. it drives sales. It's still the biggest sales driver in almost every single business around, from tiny one-person businesses to Old Navy, See's Candy, all the big ones. So all the massive ones too. Email is huge. People buy through email. Quick kind of sidebar: If any part of you is like, but people are sick of getting emails, yeah, well, people are sick of everything. People are sick of ads, yet people keep placing ads. Do you know why? Because they work. Because people buy from ads, and emails, it's the same thing. Yep, you'll have tons of emails that you'll unsubscribe to, but that just means you weren't the right audience for that email.
Yet I know there are plenty of others in your inbox that are still there that you still occasionally buy from. And that's true for everyone. If you have, you know, your aunt, and she's like, I don't even open my emails anymore. We don't need to take her opinion because she's not your target audience. Email still works, and even though people get tons of emails, people get tons of everything. And the inbox still has a lot of quality attention there. It's also the oldest form of digital marketing, and it's one that has stayed around. That's another reason I love it. It's as old school as we can get on the internet. It's simple, and it still works, and there are no algorithms.
And there are just fewer ways companies can screw around with it, so it gets to be a sense of steadiness in an ever-changing landscape, and that I always appreciate. So that's why email matters. And I'm telling you, there are very few rules in business. You can do things any way you want to do them, but for almost every business on earth, it is better to have an email list. So trust me on just this one thing, if nothing else: then you need a way to take people's money securely. If you've started and sold some stuff before and you're like, just Venmo me or email me and I'll send you PayPal. That's cute for right now, but that needs to be upgraded. That is a pain in the ass for you and for the customer.
Also, that is the type of thing that doesn't look as safe and secure. I'm all for not looking professional in quotes. I think there's a lot of stuff around what's professional that is complete bullshit. But one thing that makes something much more trustworthy is being able to securely take payments. Because if you are just Venmoing somebody, or Cash Apping somebody, or sending it to their email, that's just a little not secure. It looks less safe for the customer, and it puts more barriers between them getting to buy. Because now they've got to email you, and they've got to get their WhatsApp, or they have to remember what your name was. And then on Venmo, they can't find the name. So they're emailing you, 'Wait, are you this one?
Can you double check that this is you? Do you have a QR code, actually?' And then you send that, and then they do, and they're like, 'Oh my god, I sent it.' There's just more steps in the way to make people not pay you. So you need a way for people to pay. That can look like a few different things. If you're selling something like coaching or even or services or bespoke digital products, you can just use Stripe or PayPal. In PayPal, you do have to have a business account, but Stripe works just fine and Stripe is used by many major businesses. It's free; you can sign up very easily and connect it to your bank account. And then from there, you can create invoices or you can create payment links.
So that's where you can have a link where they click on the Stripe link. They go to an official secure page where they can add in their credit card information and buy from there. So that means you don't have to necessarily have a whole checkout cart, a whole website, a whole everything, but where they are putting their money, where they're putting their credit card looks official. It is official, it's secure, and it's simple. They're also just clicking a button, entering their payment information, and buying. And whenever you can have the process look like that where they just click, they do not have to talk to you if they don't want, you're going to get twice as many sales. So I had a client do this.
She put together a bespoke poetry offer, and she just set it up with a PayPal page like that where they could put in their information. They had a box where they could specify what they wanted for their poem, and then they hit buy, and it went through PayPal; it was no problem. So you don't have to have both; you could have one or the other, and that is the simplest thing. So the simplest thing to do, you can write about your product, you can write your sales page on just a plain old Google Doc and then have a link for sign up now, or get it now, or buy now, or whatever your call to action is that links to Stripe or PayPal, and somebody pays there. That's the bare minimum.
If you're selling a product, so a digital product, a book, a course, a workshop, a meditation, anything like that, you can set that up very quickly and easily either through Payhip or Standstore. Payhip is free to use, but they take a little bit of percentage of the sales of every sale. Standstore is about $27 a month, but they don't take any percentages. Now also, if you have Kit already and you have a product like this, you can just use Kit; you're already done. You've already got this part sorted. You'll just need to connect it to Stripe, which is easy and again free to set up. So if you don't have Kit, you just have a Substack or you don't have anything else, then go ahead and get Standstore or Payhip.
Payhip is totally free to get started with, and it's pretty easy to use. I've had many students use this, even students who hate tech terribly, and it's just a way to make a simple online store. And I find this is much better than setting up an entire Squarespace website. It's much easier than setting up Shopify or WooCommerce or something like that. This is much, much simpler, and it works great for the customer because they can see clearly what you offer. They buy securely. It's just a thousand times easier. Last thing, if you're doing coaching where it's hourly, I recommend setting up a Calendly link or an Acuity link. So if you already have Squarespace, I had Squarespace when I started, so I had that. Then Acuity is included for free.
Otherwise, Calendly seems to be one of the better options. It is a monthly fee, but then you can just send somebody your calendar. You set your availability, you set all the types of coaching, and then people can select a time and pay without even talking to you. And again, that is going to increase your sales because going back and forth about a time sucks. So this way they can just see it, they have to buy in order to secure it, and that's totally normal by the way. You do not need to be doing coaching sessions where they pay you afterwards. In fact, don't. They need to pay first. And lastly, if you are a physical product business, it can be good to start with something like Etsy.
I know that Etsy does take out a lot of fees and stuff like that, but I've seen a lot of people have success starting with Etsy where the platform's a little easier to get started and there's a little bit of organic traffic or some cheaper ads you can buy, and then they move to their own website. So something like where you make some money first on Etsy and then use that money to put it on your own site. I've seen that path work for a lot of people. A quick note, when you have Stripe or PayPal, you are charged about a 3% fee. This is unavoidable. Every company pays this on earth. So I've seen people get really cheap about these fees and go, well, why can't I do Venmo instead?
Or because it doesn't look as good. It doesn't look as good. You're not going to get as many customers and trust me, when you have a thing where people can just click, put their info in and purchase it, you are going to make so many more sales that way than when you have to hunt somebody down for a Venmo. You'll make that 3% back. So don't be cheap about that. If you need to, make your prices a little bit higher to compensate for the Stripe fee. And the last part is really a mindset of experimenting because businesses are just experiments. It's a series of experiments to see what works and this is true even for huge companies. So believe me, I'm as shocked as anybody that I'm going to use Twitter as an example of something good.
But when Twitter was originally founded, they were a company designed to send audio clips and then what happened was Apple Podcasts came out and they went, oh fuck, that's exactly what we're doing except they did it better and it's Apple so we're screwed. So instead of just abandoning the whole project, they said well what do we have? And one of the messaging systems that they simply used for internal messaging across the workers was basically what Twitter was. So they said, what if we just package that, and that became Twitter. Even in a huge and they had money behind them, millions of dollars, even they had to go, oops, let's see how we can make this work, and they did. And frankly, anything you put out will do greater good to the world than Twitter.
So that idea of having an experimental mindset saves you a lot of heartache because when you get married to this one thing's gonna work this way at this time, ooh, just get ready for a lot of heartbreak and sadness But when you think, hey, I like this idea, I'm excited about it, I have enough in it now, let me put it out there and see how it goes, and if it goes well, you can do more. If it doesn't go well, you just learn. Okay, the messaging of that was off. People had a question about something because I didn't say a major part of the product. Cool, you know what? I did this and I didn't even like doing it. I want to try something else, and you move from there.
That's a big thing that separated me from a number of other people who started businesses at the same time. It's not that I'm such a business genius, although I'd love to think that I'm not. But I move quickly, and I do it fast, not to hustle and stress myself out, but to outrun my perfectionism because I know if I don't give a timeline for myself or don't give an end date, then it will be rewritten and retooled to death, and I know that will get me nowhere. So instead, I purposely give myself slightly shorter timelines so that they get out there because I know that my version of just barely good enough is much better than I think, and you actually learn so much more by putting something out there than trying to perfect it in the lab.
My first workshop, I thought I was like, this is probably just enough. It was like a two-hour workshop on freelancing. I sent it name drop coming, I sent it to my friend Jeff Hiller just because he was helping me look over things. He said this is basically handing somebody a new career. Saying this has some good information is like saying the NXIVM cult had a couple of problems, but at the time I was like this is probably just enough. But by doing it live, I found oh yeah, I have shoved weeks of material into two hours. I need to spread this out, and I only would have known that by doing it. The client will still be served even if you are putting out something that doesn't feel a hundred percent done yet because again, anybody listening to this cares.
You don't want to put out a shitty product; you don't want to put out something that's disappointing or a scam, and that's different than how most business people think. So you're not gonna let people down; you're not geared that way. For you, you probably want to think the opposite direction. If you're geared to make it so good and so detailed that it never comes to life or it takes a year for the first edition to come out, and then if that doesn't fly right away, you don't have the energy to try again. So just think of it as a series of experiments, and when you can let that be, when you can think of let's put out the experiment even if it feels 80%, even if it feels 50% as long as you can say why this is helpful, as long as you can say what it gives to somebody.
Put it out there and see if it works. I've spent thousands of fucking dollars on coaching and shit, and quite frankly, the most important thing— and it's not to say that coaching was bad, I learned many good things— but the most important thing was the thing I did from day one, which was let it be experiments, let it be imperfect, move a little faster than you want to just to outrun doubt and outrun perfectionism. So those are the big things you need. Those three things, and they're so doable for you. So now, knowing what you don't need and knowing what You do need, you could get started. You could start thinking about your idea for business, absolutely. But in the next episode, I'm going to back up why you are so suited to start this in the first place.
If you're having any doubts right now, next episode we're going to talk about why you already have so much of what it takes to have a successful business. And if you're already interested in getting to the nitty-gritty of this and having something where you are selling a product even by month two, beginning of month three max, then go ahead and sign up for Weird Little Business School. You'll get the entire three-month program; it releases. May 1st, you get at least four lessons a week, and you get monthly Q&A, so you do get a chance to ask questions and get some feedback. They're delivered audio, just like this, so you can listen to it whenever you're doing stuff. Maximum episodes might be 30 minutes, maybe longer for a Q&A. Other stuff will sometimes be five minutes and be dedicated to an action you can take to keep this stuff moving forward. So if you're already ready to go, sign up for Weird Little Business School below at amberpetty. com/ WLBS or hit the next episode to know why you are so, so, so set up to be successful in business. Thanks for listening.
