Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the channel.
So in this video we're gonna be talking about what is the best, easiest business to start as a complete beginner if your goal is financial freedom.
And the video is broadly split up into three parts.
We're gonna talk about the price and people equation.
We're gonna talk about the service to product spectrum.
And we're gonna talk about exactly how to find a niche and an offer that's playing business on easy mode rather than on hard mode.
And if you're new here, hello, my name is Ali.
I'm a doctor turned entrepreneur.
And since 2017, I've been making videos on this channel documenting my journey from broke medical student to then working full time as a doctor, to ultimately building my own lifestyle business that's allowed me to reach financial freedom, time freedom and creative freedom.
And this is Freedom Fridays, the somewhat regular series on the channel where we talk about books ideas, strategies and tools that can help you ultimately achieve the goal of financial freedom, so that you can live life on your own terms as well.
Okay, so if you are watching this video, then you will probably like to be financially free.
Maybe you want financial freedom.
You would love to have time freedom as well, where you can spend your time broadly however you want.
And you would also love to have creative freedom where you can work on stuff that fulfills and energizes you.
That begs the question, okay, well, how do you do that?
And maybe you've realized, through watching maybe my content, maybe other people's contents that like, start a business is a much nicer way for most people to get to financial freedom, compared to follow a normal traditional career and get a job, for example.
But then that begs the question of, okay, bro, like which business do I start?
I want to introduce you to a simple equation for basically how to make money.
And that simple equation basically has two variables.
It's basically your number of customers, ie how many people are buying your stuff, and then the price point of your stuff.
That is literally it.
And so when you're coming up with a business idea, you want to figure out how many people do you need for your business idea to be viable.
And what kind of price do you need to sell things at in order for your business to be viable?
And there is a graph that I would like to show you that helps us figure this out.
This is a graph of people versus price.
So let's say you wanna make $100,000.
Let's say that's your goal.
If you wanted to, the way you could make 100K is you could sell something for 100K to a single person, right?
So we've got one person over here, and this is kind of like our price over here, right?
That would be one way of making 100K.
Alternatively, you could sell something for $10,000 to 10 different people.
Alternatively, you could sell something for $1,000 to 100 people.
Alternatively, you could sell something for 100 to 1000 people, or you could sell something for 10 to 10000 people, or you could sell something for one dollar to a hundred thousand people.
Now, these are all theoretically different ways of making a hundred thousand dollars following this equation of it's basically number of customers, ie people, multiplied by price.
Now, back when i was a noob to the world of business and i was a beginner, i was under, i was laboring under the delusion that It should be easier right to sell things for 1 10, 100 rather than to sell something for 10000 or 100000.
Because as a normal person, I've bought stuff for a dollar.
You know, I bought this Coke Zero for $1.
I bought stuff for $10.
This doner kebab with chips was about $10.
Actually, more like $5, but whatevs.
And I've also bought things for $100.
But when you start getting into the $1,000 range, that's like a MacBook or something like that.
And $10,000, that's like a really expensive car or 100K.
The only thing that you can spend 100K on is a house, right?
This was my conception of the world.
And so I thought that if I were to start a business, I should sell cheap things for 1 10, 100 and just sell loads of them, right?
Because that is easier.
And that could not have been further from the truth.
And this is very counterintuitive.
But actually if you want to make 100000, it is way easier to do it selling, for example, 10 copies of something for 10000 compared to selling 10000 copies of something for 10.
The volume is way harder than the price.
Yes, of course, on an individual level, it's easier to sell something for $10 than to $10,000.
Like I probably couldn't sell you a $10,000 thing.
I could probably sell you a $10 thing.
Like maybe you want to buy my book for about $10.
But if I were trying to make a hundred grand, it's so much harder for me to find 10000 of you to sell my 10 book to, compared to just finding 10 people to sell a 10000 service or package or product to.
Oh and, by the way, if you want to speed up the learning process from this video, we have actually trained a custom GPT, a custom AI tool that can literally help you do all of this stuff.
And it's completely free.
There's a link down below.
You can check it out.
You need an open AI account like a chat GPT account, which you have already.
You don't need to be paying for it.
Don't worry.
And you basically talk to it.
And it's trained on, like my materials that we have in our Lifestyle Business Academy on how to figure out your niche and your offer, so that hopefully this can give you some clearer ideas and it'll sort of talk you through the process and i'll help you figure out what business you want to start.
That will be playing on easy mode rather than on hard mode, so that'll be linked down below and there's a qr code on screen somewhere.
If you would like to check that out again, it's completely free, And so what this means is that when we're trying to figure out what business to start, if we are a beginner, is you want to be avoiding this zone?
This is the red zone.
Trying to start a business in the red zone where you're selling cheap things that are like high volume.
That is playing business on hard mode.
That's not to say you can't do it.
It's not to say it can't be done.
It's just playing business on hard mode and your chances of success are a lot lower, especially if you're a beginner.
Similarly, as a beginner, you probably don't want to be in this kind of range, because this is called having a job.
When you sell one thing for $100,000, that might be your reasonably well-paid job.
But the zone we want to be in is in this zone, right?
This zone of we're selling stuff.
Ideally, that's between the $2,000 to the $20,000 price point.
I think this is a very good place to be when it comes to trying to build a business.
Because, like I said, the hard part is getting the customers.
The hard part is a lot less, charging them lots of money.
And so, when it comes to figuring out what business idea to start, as a beginner, you really wanna be thinking what is the thing that I could sell for at least 2000 US dollars?
And that is gonna seem scary.
You might be thinking, but I don't have skills worth $2,000.
Like 10K, 5K, 20K, what the hell?
Like this is completely impossible.
And this is exactly what students in our Lifestyle Business Academy, which is like my online kind of business school, go through.
That I coach them through all the time, as does everyone on my team.
And we really try and get them to figure out something that they can sell for at least $2,000.
Because, trust me, when you're selling expensive things, it becomes so much easier to build a business that hits six figures in revenue, compared to when you're trying to sell large volumes of a cheap thing.
Now, once you start and grow your business and you make all this extra cash, you're gonna need a place to invest that money, for it to compound passively over time.
And that is where the sponsor of this video comes in, Trading 212.
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That'll be linked down below as well.
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So thank you very much Trading 212 for sponsoring the video and let's get back to it.
All right, so now I'm gonna go one level slightly more complicated, but I know you can keep up because you're very smart and very good looking.
This was how to make $100,000.
But if we wanna make 100000 a year you know a six figure business we need the per year to come from somewhere.
It can either come from the price or it can come from the volume.
So, for example, if you were to charge 10000 per year for something, let's say I don't know, you're selling expensive health insurance.
People are paying 10000 per year.
So now you only need 10 customers, 10 customers period to be able to make 100000 per year.
But let's say you're not charging a subscription.
Let's say you're, in my case, selling a course on how to do YouTube for $1,000, but it's a one-off product.
Like it's not a recurring subscription, it's not a membership, it's not anything like that.
In that context, the per year would need to come from the number of customers.
So I would need to get 100 new customers per year in order to build 100K a year business selling 1000 things.
Mostly for beginners, this is like overly complicated.
You don't need to worry too much about are you selling subscription?
Are you selling 2K per year?
Are you selling 2K one-off?
I would say, start off trying to figure out what is the one-off package or something that you could sell for two to 20000.
And then you can always worry about the how do we turn it into a subscription further down the line?
Okay, so at this point, hopefully we have established that the goal is to sell stuff for between two and 20K.
This is really, really helpful, because this massively narrows down the list of potential business ideas that we could feasibly start.
And the reason I'm making this video is because I've done a couple of events here in Hong Kong over the last couple of weeks and I've stayed behind for hours and hours to speak to people after the events.
And people come up to me always asking for advice about their business ideas.
And they'll either say they don't have any ideas at all or they'll say more likely these days actually that they've got so many business ideas.
And I'm making this video because this is the video I would want to show all of these people who are coming to me with all these different business ideas.
Because for the most part, the ideas that I hear are playing business on hard mode.
I was speaking to a girl the other day and she had a few different business ideas.
One of those business ideas was she wanted to start a fashion brand that was excessively priced, that helped a sort of modest fashion wear for women who are into running in Hong Kong.
Cause apparently there's loads of women into running in Hong Kong.
And she was like, you know, there's not that much like modest fashion available for them.
That is a business that's operating on hard mode primarily because she's trying to sell cheap stuff.
Like she's probably not selling 1000 packages and probably being like I don't know, somewhere between the 10 and 100 range for like a modest sports bra or like leggings or whatever.
That tends to be the price point for those things, which means in order to build a viable business, you need a ton of volume, and volume is really hard unless you're already famous.
Similarly, we've got one of our students in our Lifestyle Business Academy who came in and initially what she wanted to sell was some kind of digital membership for people who want to improve their lives.
I was like, okay, interesting.
Like what kind of price point are we thinking about?
She was like, I was thinking maybe like $20 a month or something like that.
That is again playing business on hard mode, because when you are trying to sell anything for 20 a month again, in order to build a viable business off it, you need a ton of volume.
And now if she had loads of followers on YouTube or Instagram or LinkedIn or email lists or whatever, it becomes a viable business model.
But if you're a beginner, you probably are not famous on the internet.
And so it will be really, really hard for you to get customers and really hard for you to find that kind of volume.
But now let me give you some examples of businesses that are operating on easy mode.
So we have this married couple in our program, Elias and Haya.
And what they're doing is they're selling a service that helps accountancy practices in London speed up their onboarding time for new clients, so that they save lots of time and lots of money to onboard new clients.
And they're charging like $8,000 for this.
This is amazing.
They are playing business on easy mode.
It sounds boring AF, right?
To sell an onboarding improvement service for a new accountants and their practices.
But they know accountants.
They've got a background in like accountancy.
So they know the problems that accountants face.
Accountants are a business that are willing to pay a lot of money for that particular offer because it will save them a lot of money.
And so that particular boring ass business is an example of playing business on easy mode.
And so this is a video about what kind of business to start as a beginner.
Principle number one is that you want to be aiming for things in the 2k to 20k price point range.
Principle number two is the general idea that service businesses are much much, much easier to start than product businesses.
This is another massive thing that trips up beginners in the market, because if you think of what is a business right, when you imagine starting your own business, you probably imagine creating some kind of cool product.
I'd like to sell products.
I'd like to sell hoodies.
I'd like to sell tote bags.
I'd like to start a fashion brand.
I'd like to build apps.
That's selling a product.
For example, i'd like to sell donna kebabs.
You know this selling a product you probably don't imagine.
Selling a service man, i'd really love to be a boutique web design agency.
Man, i'd really love to help accountant accountancy firms improve their onboarding processes.
Man, I'd really love to be a sales training service facilitation for businesses doing B2B sales that are selling through conferences.
Those are service businesses.
And if you think of all the businesses you know of, probably 99% of them are product businesses.
This is one of these like cognitive biases that we have, where if you imagine business, you probably think of Apple.
They sell stuff.
You think of Starbucks, they sell stuff.
Think of Sony, they sell cameras.
You think of the Doner Kebab down the road, they sell stuff.
Most of the businesses that you come into contact with on a day to day basis are selling products.
But what you don't realize is that product businesses are really really really hard to start because generally the products are cheap and you have to go for big volumes and it's really hard to do volume.
What you probably don't come across is the enormous list of businesses that are selling services.
I think most of the economy, most of the GDP generated by the economy in most like developed countries, especially in places like the UK, certainly in places like Hong Kong are based on services like financial services, legal services, accounting services like all sorts of.
There are all sorts of services businesses out there that are making way more money in the grand scheme of things compared to product businesses.
But the product businesses are the ones that are cool and sexy and that you see marketing for everywhere.
Whereas you very rarely see as an individual, as an individual consumer, you very rarely see marketing for service-based businesses.
Now, the difference between a service-based business is that, you know, basically these are really the only two types of businesses.
A service business is where you do something for your client or your customer.
And a product business is you make something which does something, right?
Ultimately, the only reason people buy stuff is because they want a problem to be solved.
They want a job to be done.
This doner kebab that I'm currently eating.
That's getting a little bit cold right now.
This is currently doing the thing of alleviating my hunger and helping me have a good time.
It is a product business.
But unfortunately the guy running the doner kebab shop is very unlikely to become financially free from running a doner kebab shop unless they sort of expand to like multiple locations and build out a team and all of that sort of stuff.
Because he's trying to play the volume game.
And it's very hard to play the volume game.
See my point around how that's business on hard mode.
So what you want to do is you want to start some kind of service business.
Now, When it comes to services, there's a little bit of a spectrum.
Now, if we imagine something like web design, let's say you want to build a business that helps people get websites.
Let's say that helps e-commerce brands have better conversion rates on their website.
Now, the easiest way to do that as a beginner is to do it done for you.
You are doing the work for them.
You are a full service provider where you are doing the work for them.
They are not having to do the work themselves.
You are doing the work for them.
So you're going into their Shopify and twiddling their whatever and dealing with their analytics.
You're doing the work.
This is the stuff that you can generally, as a beginner, charge the most money for, because you are literally doing the work.
One level down from that, one level more scalable, is done with you where you can imagine for the same thing, you're selling a coaching program with one-on-one support and implementation.
So you are supporting them to do the work of increasing the conversion rates on their website.
And one level more scalable than that is do it yourself where you're selling.
Let's say a course or whatever.
Yeah, a course or an app that they have to use it themselves.
Like they have to do the work, but your product just sort of helps them along the way.
Here you are selling information and here you are selling implementation.
You are actually doing the work.
And if you are a beginner looking to start a business to get you to financial freedom, I would 100 recommend the place to start should be some kind of done for you service.
Maybe at a stretch you go to done with you, or maybe it's a coaching or consulting program, but you probably do not want to be trying to sell an online course because generally just selling an online course puts you in this kind of territory and we do not want to be in this kind of territory as it relates to price, because it's sort of hard mode.
Also the way the world is going.
I don't think online courses are going to be around very much longer, because AI slop is a thing.
If you want to learn something, you just ask ChatGPT.
If you wanted to just learn how to do it yourself and people are realizing this.
The bar for what is free just keeps going up.
People are putting all sorts of like really good free content on YouTube completely for free.
And so I think the way the world is moving especially if you're looking to start a business right now is that more and more towards high end, high touch services where you are doing a lot of the work for your clients.
And, by the way, as a reminder, if you would like to get the completely free custom GPT that we've trained literally on the content of this video so that you can figure out exactly what your service, done for you business idea is going to be, there'll be a link down below or you can like scan the QR code that's currently on screen.
So why are our students in like our Lifestyle Business Academy at Ace & Hyatt, why are they able to charge $8,000 to accounting practices to help them speed up their onboardings?
Well, because they're doing the work for them.
If they were like hey we'll, we'll sell you an online course that teaches you how to do the onboarding for your clients, the accountant practice is going to be like bro, i don't need an online course, i've got i'm too busy, i've got other things going on.
Maybe they might buy it for like, i don't know, 80 or something like that, just because.
And then they would never log in and never actually use it, because these, these are businesses and businesses are busy and they don't have much time.
But if you can do the work for them, if you can promise them the outcome, the transformation, without them having to do any work, you are able to charge way higher prices.
And generally the way you do that is through a service business with a done for you business model, where you are trying to do something for someone, where they value the outcome.
Now all of this begs the question like okay then, so i'm gonna start a service business which is a done for you, where i'm charging somewhere between two thousand and twenty thousand dollars.
So then you're probably thinking okay well, what sort of service business do i start?
And this is where i cannot give you the answer, but i can give you some ways of thinking about it.
Now, when we're figuring out our niche, there's kind of two things we need to figure out.
It's like who is the person and what is the problem that they have?
Because people pay money to solve problems and then your business is sort of like the bridge that helps take that person and helps them solve their particular problem.
Now, if you want to play business on easy mode, you want to find someone who is rich.
If the person is rich, or if they are a business with lots of money, it is so much easier to charge them two to twenty thousand dollars for something, Whereas if you're trying to start a business selling stuff to people who don't have money, it is very, very difficult to do that.
So you want to be finding a problem to solve for people who are rich.
And ideally, this is a very painful problem for them because the more painful the problem is, the more motivated they are to solve the problem.
Therefore, when your business positions itself as the solution to that problem, for example hey, you know how every time you onboard a new client for your accounting practice, it takes you weeks and weeks of onboarding time and you say and you waste all this time and waste all this money.
That's really painful, right?
It's a painful problem that accountancy firms have.
And so when you position your solution as the solution to the problem, then it becomes much easier to sell something like that.
In a dream world.
The problem that you have identified is a problem that, if solved either, helps that person make money, helps them save money.
For example, if you can start a service-based business that charges between 2000 and 20000 and the problem that you solve is that you help a business that is struggling with their sales get more sales, that means they are literally making more money and therefore you are able to charge some kind of percentage of how much money you've added to them.
Those are the easiest things to sell because they lead to a direct, very tangible return on investment for your client.
Then, along the same vein if, for example, you are a service-based business and you are saving the customer a lot of money like save 100000 on X you can probably charge 10000 20000 30000, 40000 for that kind of thing, because you're saving them a lot more money than you are costing.
Again, there is a very tangible return on investment.
This again is playing business on easy mode when you are building a service done for you, business between two and 20K that solves a painful problem for a rich person that ideally helps them make money or save money.
Now the problem is you might be thinking that you might not have the kind of skills that can help a business make money or save money.
We have people in our program that wanna be life coaches, mindset coaches.
I wanna help working professionals overcome imposter syndrome.
Those are harder businesses to start.
I'm not saying it can't be done.
We can certainly mentor people and help them out as best as we can in that process, but they're harder businesses to start because what you are solving imposter syndrome is not a tangible problem.
It is not a.
For some people it might be a painful problem, but a way to improve that particular offer would be like okay, I help working professionals cure their imposter syndrome so that they can get a raise, so that they can get a promotion.
When you tie the intangible to something tangible that they want, that they can see the return on investment in, for example, getting a raise, getting a promotion, therefore making money we are tying our outcome to a make money outcome.
It becomes much easier to charge two thousand to twenty thousand dollars for the specific thing, whereas when you have something that is intangible, like i'll improve your mindset, i'll help you find your purpose, i'll help you even be more productive.
That's actually quite intangible.
I'll help you overcome imposter syndrome.
I'll help you get over anxiety.
Like these things the more intangible they are, the harder it is for people to see the value that you're offering, especially when you're trying to price between two and 20K.
And so the sort of process that we take our students through is basically like a lot of back and forth around.
How can we tie this intangible transformation that you're offering to something tangible so that people can see the value of it?
And then people generally don't tend to want to buy internal transformations.
They tend to want to buy external results, external transformations.
They want their life to improve in measurable ways that are obvious to other people.
And of course, along the way you have an internal transformation.
But it's hard to sell an internal transformation for a large amount of money.
And if you want way more information on exactly how to do this, then I have a video over here, which is the four books you absolutely need to read if you want to become financially free.
If you read those four books, I guarantee they will again teach you the principles that I've just taught you in this video.
And they will also help you figure out what is the business that you're going to start that's going to get you to financial freedom.
So check that out over there.
Thank you very much for watching.
Have a lovely day and I'll see you in the next video.
Bye-bye.
