The best business model isn't a business model.
It's a way of life, but most beginners don't care about that or even think about it.
They want to learn the best skills.
They want to make more money to leave their job.
They want to have full control over how they spend their time.
They silently want to prove themselves to their friends and family.
But what about your life's work, or your purpose, or just general enjoyment?
Those things seem to come last. They're the last things people think about, Because when you don't have money, the only thing you want to do is make money.
That's logical. It shouldn't be any other way that's actually how it's supposed to happen.
You're supposed to learn how to make money first and fulfill your basic needs until you can transcend to your actualization needs.
So that's the problem is beginners blindness.
Most people who start a business don't know how to start a business, obviously.
So they start searching blindly for businesses to start, rather than deeply considering how they want to live and engineering a path to get there.
They start their business journey with the same mind that was useful for going to school and getting a job, so they start looking for a new job while learning, like they were in school.
They study how to freelance.
They study how to start a social media marketing agency.
They study how to build an ecommerce store and run paid ads.
They build themselves into a new nine -to -five, and once again feel like they are strapped for cash and out of control of their day.
But this time it's worse.
Because if they lose a client or stop working 12 hours a day, their income drops significantly.
They have no leverage.
They feel trapped. So in this video, I'm not going to give you a static business model that you can go and watch any other YouTube channel to learn.
Instead I'm going to give you a flexible roadmap that allows you to both discover and create your life's work.
Business at that point just becomes a vessel for doing what you enjoyed doing and finding the people that want to support that thing by paying you.
So let's talk about this new way to start a business.
The good. With the Internet and social media, business has drastically changed for the better.
There's more power to solopreneurs and small teams that will only get more powerful beyond the Internet and social media.
The bad. Almost any beginner business information you find is still plagued with the old business paradigm.
The old way of doing things is to choose a niche, choose a customer avatar, choose a skill, choose a business model.
95 % of the time people choose the thing that someone else tells them is the most profitable.
As a by -product, they choose a niche they have zero experience with, work with people they don't care about, learn a skill that doesn't align with their interests, and pick a business model that sounds the flashiest or easiest. Now, there's nothing wrong with wanting to make money, but it's completely idiotic to think that you can't make money without Sacrificing everything that's good in life.
What makes life good?
Investing attention in what you deem important and meaningful The thing here is is what you deem important and meaningful evolves as you develop yourself So if you pick a business model that always stays the same and when you change in that business model Can't change with you you set yourself up for a life of misery in the old way of doing business Where money is placed as the first and only reason you invest attention in people projects and skills that other people Persuade you to believe are important.
In other words, you're not making any of your own choices You're just doing what people tell you to do like you have been at school and in your job the new way of doing business is to put your ideal life as the first reason, but not the only reason.
In this new way, you don't choose a niche or skill or model.
You become the niche.
You help your past self.
You solve your own problems and you follow the highest leverage path, which involves changing business models as you progress.
You don't need this work -life balance thing because work and life collapse into one.
You get paid for being yourself and developing yourself, and that's how it should have been in the first place, Getting paid for the value that only you can cultivate now when you realize that this has Always been an option and that you were drawn to schools and jobs based on how your mind was Conditioned to adopt the values based on your past life conditions.
You can't unsee it.
So you're welcome for that Enjoy the ride now with all of that this path this new way of doing things is only for those that actually value Improving themselves developing themselves.
I'm not talking about the the shallow version of self -help or self -improvement That's all over the Internet.
I'm just talking about getting better improving yourself Because if you're not doing that You're doing the opposite and if you don't like the term self -improvement or self -help and that causes you to just be a degenerate You're even stupider than the self -help people you have to value your mind your body your skill set your finances your relationships the domains of life that you need to develop in order to live a good life and if your way of life that you want to Live is filled with laziness and mediocrity you're not gonna make it in this business model and you probably weren't gonna make it
in any business model that you chose to go into.
Your habits have to be there first. So with that, we have this new way of going about things but there are different ways of doing that thing.
There's the high leverage route and the low leverage route and of course, we want to go the high leverage route.
So if you want to turn yourself into the business or get paid for doing what you want, you need a few things.
First is a developmental progression from beginner to advanced, that's what you need for learning anything.
The second is a way to attract people to the value you are acquiring, or cultivating.
And the third is products or services that evolve as you do.
With older and outdated business models, or even things like E -Commerce, that comes with a lot of prerequisites that beginners can't deal with.
You don't have money to invest in inventory.
You don't have money to invest in a brick -and -mortar location.
You probably don't want to go into debt and take out loans to do those things.
So that's the low -leverage route.
This is the high -leverage route, where we can do things for free, thanks to technology, and build something like an audience so that you can sell whatever you want under that audience.
And even further, you don't have money to invest in paid ads.
The first time you run paid ads, they probably won't do that well.
Paid ads don't work by just creating one ad and then sending it out.
You create multiple ads, and you test them or find them over time.
It's a full -time job to actually do it right, and you're spending a lot of money to do that.
So if you don't have that money to test those marketing angles or other things based on whatever it is You're selling or the business that you're trying to get into then yeah The smartest way is building an audience writing content on social media Everyone including Alex or mosey all of the business gurus today You're just not listening to them when they say this is the way to do things social media content and building an audience is how the layman the Normal individual who has some value to offer who's?
develop their mind who has gotten into health has gotten into nutrition has learned a skill like programming is good at social dynamics or relationships or can solve a problem that other people have on social media that's that's just what you do as a first step starting point in this new way of doing things the other thing with the paid ads and the e -commerce and the other businesses that are very viable but as starting points probably not the best is that you Start spending before you start earning unless you already have an audience or have built one Then you're probably not going to start earning
from that thing immediately.
Now in the new way of doing business It's the complete opposite You need zero experience because the business is how you gain experience in the first place You decrease the chances of failure by lack of money or experience to zero The only reason you would fail doing this is because you quit early can't persist can't iterate or refuse to learn or you just decide that the current life you wanted to escape in the first place isn't that bad because your mind starts playing tricks on you so with Those limitations being you're a beginner you have a lack of money and you have zero experience that gives
us a few starting points the first is again build an Audience because if you don't have money, you can't throw money at ads You can't invest in physical product inventory.
And either way, I would even recommend any beginner, whatever business model you want to get into, even if it's e -commerce or an agency or whatever, just build an audience as your traffic source.
That's how you land clients.
That's how you make product sales as you have an actual audience.
Even if you're a self -published author or you're making music, you build an audience to fuel the thing that you need to get people to in order to survive and sustain that thing.
Now, why? Why build an audience?
Because it teaches you the skills you need for free through experience to do well in any form of business.
You learn marketing, you learn persuasion, you learn media, you learn writing, design, psychology, human nature.
And even further, that's the modern path to talking about and teaching your interests.
Not only do you learn the necessary parts of skills, like marketing, but you learn about your interests faster because of the Feynman Technique.
With each piece of content you post, you expose gaps in your knowledge that allows you to learn the topic faster.
This is what I mean by this new path is a way of life because you're bridging your learning and your self -development And your business that's what you talk about you share your interests and your opinions and you refine your mind You have to learn the skills and interests in order to articulate them Well, and you have to be good at the skills or interests in order to sell a good product So it's a forcing function So if you're stuck only building your portfolio page or building websites or doing the LLC or doing the logo It's probably because you aren't that good in the first place And the only
way to change that is to build an audience so that you're forced to get good at that thing So you don't look like an idiot even though you will look like an idiot at first everyone does when you're starting something new It's embarrassing you're scared because what you do sucks until you get it out in front of people Jack Butcher recently said the best way to get feedback is a buy button and there's so much more to that than like Oh, yeah, if someone buys my product then that's good feedback No business, is this vessel for personal growth that we're going after and on that topic I have my new
book Purpose and Profit that recently went live The PDF version is free.
The paperback is half the price of my last book on Amazon So if you want to check that out, it's a short little book should only take a few Reading sessions to actually read but that goes over my full philosophy on how to transform your relationship with money and discover your life's work Now the last thing here with building an audience is that when you do that, you keep the audience.
You can write SEO articles, you can post to Reddit, to launch your startup or your product, you can do paid ads, but do you keep the audience?
Do you actually have them there so you can remarket to them, or nurture them, or share your value with them?
It always feels weird to say like, oh, when you market to your audience because you guys are my audience, right?
What's happening here is that I hope I'm giving valuable information that makes you want to follow me.
And if I have a product or service that actually benefits you, the specific individual, it may not be for all of you, but one, two, three, however many of you, and you don't have a bad relationship with money and you don't think that spending money on anything is bad and you actually have the choice of what you want to spend money on, then that's a good thing.
I always think the metaphor or the analogy is always relevant, where people are like, oh, you'll spend $100 on a night out with drinks that ruins your health, but then when it comes to investing in something like self -education that actually benefits you, you call it a scam.
And it's like, what's the real scam there?
It's kind of stupid.
And with something like paid ads, you have to be good.
You have to test, refine, get the ad very optimized and you're optimizing for conversion rates, for people to capture their attention, click through, buy the product.
When you have an audience and you've given so much content to them over time, they trust you, they like you, they want to buy from you.
You don't have to worry about getting super good at marketing or copywriting or other things because your content that you're sharing every day makes up for that.
Now if you need a starting point with, like, practical examples and templates, you can grab the one person business launchpad with the link in the description.
You don't need it, but I know some people will like the templates and just having everything in one place.
Now the second thing after building an audience is evolving products and services.
So when your audience is small, when you're just starting out, you need to be mindful of that.
You need to do some math.
If you try to sell a $19 physical book or planner, you will need a lot of customers in order to replace your current income.
The same goes for building an app or software as an independent programmer and slapping a $10 to $20 a month price tag on it.
That doesn't mean this path doesn't work because I actually recommend it for people who are fast learners.
With the right social media strategy, your posts can do very well from the start so you can pull off a low -ticket product, or app, or software.
But for most people, that's not gonna happen.
It's better to start with a freelance coaching or consulting service.
And now many people are averse to that, because there are so many freelancers and consultants and coaches, they're kind of flooding the social media space, but for those that understand business, that's not because oh, it's saturated, it's because that's what's validated.
That's what works, and if you join in on that, Sure, you're gonna get some criticism, but if it's something where you can actually turn your passions into a business and help other people in some kind of way, then I don't see why you wouldn't do it.
Simply because some people think that, oh there's too many coaches, or there's too many freelancers, really?
If you start this kind of business, you're gonna have to learn how to deal with dumb people.
Now with those kinds of services, like a freelance business, coaching, et cetera, you only need to land two to three clients at one to three thousand dollars, And then that replaces most people's salary.
So unlike a product, where you're selling a ten to twenty dollar product, you need a lot more people to buy that.
With a coaching or freelancing service, you don't need that many people at all.
You need two to three to four people a month.
Now with that, there are various ways to make this work, but when you're building an audience, you can message people who engage with your content about your service.
And this is better than cold outreach because people already know who you are.
You can link a questionnaire in your bio and high -performing content for people to fill out to work with you, and then message them to follow up and close the deal.
Now, remember our two starter options.
You have a digital product, like a template, guide, or book and then a service, like freelance, coaching, or consulting.
So for the first, you need to be very good at generating traffic.
And for the second, you will need to understand sales and client acquisition and outreach because your content will pull in some leads potentially, but it's more of a trust and nurturing mechanism.
You're gonna have to do outreach, you're gonna have to DM people, and talk to them, and have a different kind of landing page and funnel for a service versus an actual product.
Because when you're selling a service, that's pretty high ticket, right?
You need to overcome a lot of objections, you need to stretch it out, there's different ways of doing it.
Look that up. But for a product, sometimes it's as simple as opening a store on Stan, S -T -A -N, which is like a digital product platform, and writing the landing page copy, and then you're good to go.
And you just need to send people to that page and test and refine over time.
Now the thing here is as your audience grows, that's when you evolve this product or service, because you're trying to do something that's higher leverage when you have more leverage, which is an audience.
So a freelance service can evolve into a digital product that teaches your skill or system.
A digital product can evolve into a software or physical product.
And now that you have an audience and knowledge to make the e -commerce business work on the first go rather than trying to make it work the other way around.
Now do you see why this is powerful?
You can still build any type of business you want with this model.
You just start in a way that allows you to do that as a beginner.
And with each evolution, you decrease the amount of time you spend fulfilling the work, and increase the amount of money you can make, and have an audience large enough to fuel that entire process.
Client work, like freelancing or coaching, means you only have so much time and can only take on so many clients.
meaning your income is capped at some point unless you hire a team.
Now, products in general can sell while you sleep, and if you have an audience to fuel them, you can do quite well for yourself and gain more control over your day.
And by that point, you should have more than enough money to enjoy your life or take it further and invest in starting a bigger company like a software startup or a more intensive business.
So we're building an audience, we have evolving products or services, and now we need t -shaped content.
So how do we write content?
What kind of content do we And if you cringe when you hear the word content or content creator, don't worry because I do too What I want you to realize is that there are three main ways to attract customers to your work There's media word -of -mouth and direct outreach direct outreach is useful when starting out with something like a service But it's low leverage and slow.
You also probably won't get word -of -mouth without media first So we are obviously focused on that paid ads are media SEO is media billboards into radio are outdated Media anything you produce as marketing material to attract customers is media But of course, we're building it in audience So if it helps think of content as synonymous with media because it is You don't need to identify as a content creator to execute on a singular part of your business that will determine most of its success Which is creating content and if you need help with any of this We actually pushed out an update to cortex
AI and it now has a personal brand strategy section where you can go to the chats you can click on personal brand strategy it will ask you 10 interview questions and then it will spit out an entire document that goes over everything you should do what type of content you should write what your content pillars are sources of inspiration that you can pull content ideas from potential products you can sell potential services you can sell etc and then as well with this update it's actually kind of crazy you can go to the Market section, so marketing, you can create your customer avatar, you can replicate any
person's voice or have a voice analysis of your own.
You can run through the offer creation blueprint where it interviews you and then spits out another document with your offer.
So now you have this personal brand strategy document mapped out for you, you have a customer avatar, you have your offer blueprint, you have your voice analysis.
You can plug all of those into the persuasive sales or emails.
You can plug those into the persuasive emails or the persuasive landing page generator by stringing all of the documents together, and then it spits out a full landing page for your product or service that you can start selling.
Then if you go to the create tab, you can have it give you social media content ideas.
You can have it recreate any YouTube video in your own voice, there's so much, just go try it out.
You can try it for free, and we have new AI models in, we have Claude, Chat GPT, Deepsea, hosted on U .S. servers, so you can have all of those in one place and don't need to pay for multiple subscriptions.
But how do you start writing content as a beginner?
80 % of it should be based on the topic you plan to create a product or service around.
20 % should be based on other interests or opinions to experiment with what your audience likes.
T -shaped, which is a term that Valve uses to describe their employees who are great at one thing but good at many things.
So deep in your main expertise, complemented with your other interests.
But remember on social media, you're being spread to random people who have no idea who you are and are probably a beginner in the topic you are talking about.
Yes, even if you're selling a freelance service the person you were doing the work for is a beginner Otherwise they wouldn't hire you so you avoid getting too technical or clever with your content If you go on social media and wonder why is there no deep stuff here?
Why is there no advanced stuff here?
that's because that's reserved for The products and services because people don't go on social media to learn the advanced stuff and the people you're trying to attract Aren't advanced people they're beginners.
That's why they hire you So, the majority of your content, if not all of your content, should be beginner to intermediate level.
Your newsletters, products, services, free downloads should be intermediate to advanced level.
Why content? How product?
Think about that. So, you're building an audience, you have evolving products or services, you have traffic via T -shaped content.
Now, how do we start?
We understand, like, the big picture, but how do you actually start doing this?
aside from going through the Cortex AI flows to actually get the blueprints for these things.
So, let's start there.
Nobody can tell you how to build a business.
They can only tell you how they built theirs.
Nobody can teach you branding, content creation, writing, marketing, product, or any of those things.
They can only share the processes that worked for them in the situation they were in with the mind they have. Now the thing is, you aren't in their situation.
You don't have access to their mind.
This holds true for anything in your life.
You can study others' invaluable processes, but you will never escape the need for experimentation, persistence, and iteration to the point where you turn that process into your own.
So you can treat these as a starting point, but that's all they are.
These guidelines are for clarity, they are not law.
Learn the rules, then break them so you don't become both a clone and a failure.
Now the first and most important place that you start is with intelligent imitation.
We've talked about this before and the OGs know what this is.
Because you don't need a book of information to set up your profile, write viral content, and make millions selling a product.
You simply need two eyes connected to a half -functioning brain.
Observation and experimentation are the best teachers and you are literally drowning in education.
You look at social media bios, brands, content, and marketing every day, but you view it as a consumer.
Once you flip to the lens of a creator, everything on your feed becomes inspiration that you can steal like an artist. So in a nutshell, if you want to learn how to do anything beyond this business model, save three to five sources of inspiration for brands, content and products, break down the structure and characteristics of each of those things so when you're looking at content how does the hook look, what is the body look like, okay there's two different kinds of content here, this one is just a paragraph, this one has bullet points, what's the purpose behind that, how are they structuring
their argument, okay look at a landing page, why did they write the headline this way, can I try to emulate that for my own product?
That's what you do to learn anything.
So you take one little piece of what they do and try it out, then you take another, then another, then another, and you can supplement with courses, videos or education as you go, so you understand why you are doing what you're doing.
As an example, if you want to write a newsletter or article or YouTube video script and use mine as inspiration, you start by breaking down the structure.
So for this video, I start with an introduction with how I view a topic.
I expose how most people think about it and dig deep into why that's a problem.
Then I have a section that illustrates the old way and new way of doing something.
Then I have a section with a big -picture overview of the entire process.
And finally, where we are now, which is a final section with actionable steps for beginners.
So you can take that, outline a newsletter or article or YouTube video script with the same exact structure but with a different topic and with your own voice.
Now, what about building a brand?
You look at three to five sources of inspiration or brands that you admire and you take different pieces from them.
You can take parts of their color scheme, or their bio, or how they write content, or whatever it is, and that's the same with content.
You find a validated idea that has great engagement and break it down into what makes it do well, then you rewrite it.
Learning anything can be as simple, not easy, as that.
Do exactly that as you set up your profile, write your first piece of content, and build your first product.
Study content that does well, study brands that do well, study products that do well, take a piece from each every time you write, design, build, or sell, and you will turn out fine.
So that's intelligent imitation.
That's how you learn and do anything.
Really, that's how people...
what do you think people did before they had books and courses, they just did it, and they kind of copied other people and combined things together.
So the second thing is to learn direct response marketing, then forget it.
Because direct response marketing is kind of like the poster child for scammers and sleazy salesmen, what direct response marketing is, is it birthed the era of things like click funnels and countdown timers and fake scarcity and everything else that sets off alarms in people's heads when they go to a landing page and you can just tell, like, something is trying to push me too hard to buy here.
It's still around today and you can spot it and some people do it more tasteful than others, but with things like Tik Tok shop, or just reels that are quick to the conversion, or drop shipping, or consumer app downloads, and other things, that's great.
But what people are missing here is pairing direct response marketing with longterm brand marketing and brand trust. Because most apps and products in general are just a flash in the pan.
They're like Flappy Bird, just less successful.
They do okay for a bit, and then they get taken down.
Now maybe not like Flappy Bird, but you get what I mean.
They get their spike of popularity and then they crash.
So in short, direct response marketing, or advertising in general, is learning how to capture attention, guide attention, and get the reader to take action or convert.
Most people just call it copywriting nowadays and flex it as the greatest skill to learn to make money, and they're not completely wrong because this is how Alex Hormozee built all of his first businesses.
Now while this skill can seem sleazy or unethical, that's usually a reflection of the development of the individual.
In my eyes, it's the best way to find the principles of psychology, human nature, and attention all in one practical place that you can learn how to actually apply in the real world.
So, if I were to learn the fundamentals today, I would read Cachevertising by Drew Eric Whitman, read Influenced by Robert Cialdini, and you can find others, like Great Leads.
And I haven't read these ones, but I've heard great things about Traffic Secrets and Expert Secrets by Russell Brunson, who is the founder of ClickFunnels, and that's even though he's not looking too hot in the public eye anymore.
The books, I'm assuming, have all of the information in them, so read those, I didn't recommend them, I haven't read them, they're an option.
Then you can listen to 5 -10 YouTube videos and podcasts on that topic, so direct response, marketing or copyrighting, and then you write newsletters, landing pages and social posts, practicing what you learn along the way.
Now with those recommendations like cash -vertising, many copywriters disagree with me and they say there's better books, great leads, but that's just what I personally read.
I read cash Mangaizing and Influence and those helped me and it taught me a good amount as an absolute beginner and kind of opened my mind to, oh, okay, now I understand how these people are doing things.
So just read multiple books on the topic and you'll be fine.
So after intelligent invitation and learning direct response marketing, you now can learn anything.
You can start doing these things now, you understand how to make it so your social posts and landing pages and products actually, are actually good.
and you can drive traffic to them.
The third thing you need to do is establish who you are, what you do, and why you're here.
Because the single biggest mistake is that most people think that social media is just some kind of lottery.
They don't understand that social media is a skill that can be learned, like anything, so they go in thinking they can just write any old post and pray that Our Lord and Savior the Algorithm will make them rich and famous overnight.
Stop it. The reality is that when you start, But, absolutely nobody knows about you or cares about you.
The first six to twelve months of your journey should be to prove that you have value to offer.
Now how do you do that?
The first option is a free download, so you create a comprehensive free download that teaches the fundamentals of your main topic or interest. Unlike social content that disappears after a day, a free download can be linked in your bio and promoted over and over again.
So you create this free download and then you promote it under your social post. Just go look at how other people are doing this.
You promote it in your stories, you promote it in the comments of a LinkedIn post of your own.
You put it in your bio.
You get as many people to read that thing as possible because it establishes your authority in a specific interest. If you need a place to host this, again, sign up for Stan, because it allows you to build your own creator store and it gives you your own link in bio like a link tree but you can also host products or services.
Now the next thing you do is you extend that into a product or service.
People think that digital products make them a sellout when it does the complete opposite.
Most creators fail because they don't have a product people can buy that changes their life to the point of becoming loyal fans.
Your content can only do so much so you can link your product in your free download and let that bring in your first few dollars.
The next thing is to write cornerstone content.
So 80 % of your content should be about your story, the basics of your main topic, actionable and authoritative tips, what you do during your day, and why you feel like all of those are important.
Remember, why, content, how, product.
Talk about the why, the importance in your content, and the how exactly how you do it in the product.
The next and arguably most important thing is to inject yourself into a tribe.
So when I want to join a new space or niche on social media, like, I started out in the web design space, and then I broke into more of the creator space, and then I broke into the marketing space, and now I'm not really trying to but I could break into the tech or startup space if I wanted to.
And the way I do that is I make a list of 5 to 10 people that I think represent that space the most and are the most active in that space and I start making myself known to them.
I comment on their posts, I join their communities, I share their content and DM them to start conversations.
Just yesterday I saw someone that I follow on Instagram who's pretty big and I saw him starting to post on Twitter too, and I noticed him there, Just he commented on someone else's post and I'm like, oh crap.
That's that one guy So I immediately went to his DMS and I just said hey man, love your content on Instagram.
It's cool to see you here That's it.
He responded we started a conversation now I have that connection.
We didn't ask anything of anything of each other I offered to share stuff for free for him But now I have someone I can go to who's in that space and I can I have a connection there And that's what you need to kind of root yourself in and you have a connection They're good people as they do this more and more replying to people D aiming people then the people within that space Not just the creators or influencers get to see my face More and start to attribute me to that tribe and they follow me because they see me so often now The last thing here is to just write good comments and excuse my language,
but holy shit Do people not understand what this means no matter how much it's repeated in any piece of social media advice you get opening the comment Section of any post is a complete trash heap It's the simplest thing in the world to stand out.
If you say, great insight, That's not a good comment, and you won't get people to care about you.
AI generated responses are obvious and get you blocked.
Just start your comment on someone's post with, I remember when, and talk about a time in your life where the topic of their post was relevant to your life.
This gets way more people to become curious in you.
And yes, all of this takes work, because this is a business.
It's not quick. It takes time.
All of those things should be obvious.
You clearly have to establish a baseline level of information people can sink their teeth into before they trust you.
A few social posts isn't going to cut it.
That's it for this video.
Thank you for watching, links in the description for everything I discussed.
Like, subscribe, check out my new book, Purpose and Profit, free PDF.
See you in the next video.
Bye.
