Over the past few years, i've created several online businesses that generated multiple six figures in profit each and today i'll be spilling all my secrets.
I'll be sharing how to start a profitable online business from scratch, from choosing a product, to branding, to advertising, to put it to the test.
I'll be creating a brand new business alongside you, step by step, and I'll even share with you some AI tools to make things easier.
Step one, product.
What product should I sell?
This is often the first question new entrepreneurs focus on.
The problem is, that's what causes most of them to fail.
All that you've been told is wrong.
Your first question shouldn't be, what product should I sell?
Your first question should be, what problem can I solve?
It doesn't matter how cool or fancy your product is.
If it doesn't solve a real problem that people care about, it's not going to sell well.
There are four ways to find a problem to start a business around.
The first way is through yourself.
Start by examining your own life and interests.
What problems have you faced?
What skills do you have that you could help others with?
The second way is through chat GPT.
You can ask it for a list of problems to start a business around, and it'll actually generate some good ideas.
You can then keep asking it to dive deeper and deeper into specific categories to find problems that you're interested in tackling.
The third way is through target markets, AKA a specific group of people out there that you could sell to.
For example, people who go to the gym.
Think about what they're struggling with and what you could solve for them.
You can use ChatGPT to come up with target markets and list out their problems.
If you feel your target market is too broad and diverse, keep niching down on their demographics and interests.
Instead of all gym goers, what about women aged 18 to 24?
Or people who practice yoga?
Or people who work out at the playground?
Get specific and specific problems will come up.
The fourth way is through existing businesses and products.
You can gain inspiration from the problems they're trying to solve.
You can find ideas on Google, YouTube and TikTok, where a good hashtag you could search is hashtag.
TikTok made me buy.
If you're thinking of drop shipping or working with a manufacturer, you can browse Alibaba and AliExpress and find products there.
You can also explore services and digital products.
Remember, focus on the problem, not the product.
It's the easiest way to tell if something will sell or not.
Once you land on a real problem, you can then decide on a product you can sell to solve it.
Before the business we're creating together.
I was browsing Alibaba and saw this electric pot and it sparked a real problem that I had in university.
Back in first year, I always wanted to eat late in the evening after a long day of studying.
The problem was my small dorm had no kitchen appliances and my residence dining hall always closed early.
The food there wasn't that great either and it was expensive.
So I always wish there was a way to cook in my dorm.
This electric pot would have solved all my problems.
I could cook at any time.
I could cook noodles, eggs, lobster.
I like this.
This has potential.
With a problem and a product, we can now go to step two, target market.
It's now time to figure out who has your problem that's willing to purchase your product.
You may already have an idea, but sometimes a problem and product can be shared by a lot of different people in which you're going to want to niche down on a smaller target market so you can stand out.
In the case of our electric pot, this product could be handy for a range of people.
Travelers, campers, office workers.
But instead of selling to all of them, I'm gonna niche down to that target market related to my original problem.
University students who live in dorms without kitchen appliances.
Now, how do you determine if a target market is a good one to sell to or not?
It comes down to three factors.
One, market size.
How big is this group of people?
It shouldn't be too big where it includes everyone, but it shouldn't be too small either.
There are a lot of university students out there living in dorms.
So for our electric pot, I think we have a pretty good market size.
Typically the bigger the market, the more money there is on the table.
However, it usually brings along more competition, which is the second factor.
How many competitors are out there selling your product to the same target market?
Are they established and professional?
If there's a lot, it's going to be harder for you to stand out and sell.
While there are a lot of electric pot brands out there, I don't find many of them specifically marketing towards the university students.
The third factor is profitability.
Is this target market actually willing to spend their hard-earned dough on your product?
And if so, how much profit is there to be earned?
Note that a small market size or high competition doesn't always mean it's not profitable.
Maybe each person has a lot of money to spend, or there's so much demand that it doesn't even matter if there are a lot of competitors.
It really depends.
Profitability-wise for the electric pot, it's decent.
University students are typically broke but, being that this product is genuinely useful and can save them money, it could sell well if the pricing is right.
Parents may also see the benefit of this product and buy it for their children.
For help, you can ask ChatGPT to weigh the pros and cons of a certain target market.
Most new entrepreneurs, and really all entrepreneurs, will likely keep going back and forth between step one and step two for a while, deciding on a product and a target market.
While it is important, don't get stuck here for too long.
Most of the time, you actually have to start the business first to get the answers.
It's always better to start with an imperfect product and target market and change things later on versus never starting at all.
Let's now move on to step three, platform.
You're building an online business, so of course you'll be selling your product online.
But where online?
Will it be through a marketplace like Amazon, eBay, or Etsy?
These platforms come with an existing customer base that can help bring traffic to your product, but they come with fees, competition next to your listing and limited customization for your branding.
The other type of platform would be your own website.
It gives you complete control over your branding, has fewer fees and can really make your business look legit.
However, you need to build the website and you have to drive traffic to it through marketing.
The best type of platform to choose will really depend on your product and the way you're going to advertise it, which we'll get into later.
What I will say is that you can never go wrong with having your own website.
Let's begin by grabbing a domain name.
I was thinking we name our product Dorm Pot.
You know, a pot for dorms, simple, straightforward, catchy.
Let's try for dormpot.com.
And nope, it's taken.
Who even has it?
This website is literally a blank page.
Come on, finding a good .com domain name these days has just gone hard.
Instead, I think I'm gonna go with a domain that's been trending on the online streets, .store.
.store is a domain meant exclusively for online stores.
It tells people your website is a store and instantly associates it with selling.
It has over 1 million businesses, celebrities, and influencers using it, including Rihanna, Maroon 5, Discord, Faber-Castell, Dude Perfect, Zach King, and Cristiano Ronaldo.
It's been found that almost 70% of domain name availability checks on .com fail.
But with store, there is a huge pool of good and short domain names available, which means you don't need to compromise.
Let's check if dormpot.store is available.
And it is.
Ooh, it's got a ring to it.
You can buy a dot store domain at any registrar like GoDaddy or Namecheap, or a website builder like Shopify or Wix, or being.
That dot store is today's video sponsor.
You can grab one from their official website wwwgetstore, for an exclusive discount price of 99 cents.
Here's how after finding your domain name, you can add it to your cart and press proceed.
You can then consider adding a professional email from Google or SSL certificates to your order.
I'll skip these for now and press proceed again.
And here we are at the checkout.
The domain is 29 annually, but if you use my discount code JensenStore, you'll get your first year for 899 with the optional privacy protection and 99 cents without it.
Now that's a heck of a good deal.
Dot Store is for selling, so consider it for your online store.
Link is in the description.
With a domain name, we can now begin on our website.
There are plenty of e-commerce website builders out there like Shopify, Wix, and Squarespace.
They all have their pros and cons, so feel free to choose one that fits your needs the best.
For Dornpot, I'll be using Wix.
Now, I won't be diving too much into the details of creating an e-commerce website in this video.
If you want to learn more, you can check out my detailed video tutorial here.
The gist is to make sure the website looks good and professional.
Don't have it looking like a scam, okay?
Take inspiration from other websites and keep things minimal and streamlined.
You don't need too much on there, just words and media that help you sell your product and showcase.
Step four, branding.
Having a strong brand is essential to connecting with customers.
A brand is what separates a business from some dude selling random things online.
A blank website is a great canvas to start building your brand off of because it's very visual.
When designing your website, you can build your brand along with it.
There are four branding elements you need to determine before launching your business, starting with your name.
My recommendation is to keep it simple, something that isn't confusing and can be searched easily.
Especially as an online business, people are going to type your name.
With Dorm Pot, it's kind of basic, but it instantly gets the product across and works great online.
If someone searches for an electric pot for dorms, they'll likely come across Dorm Pot.
Next, your logo.
Your logo should give off the personality of your company.
Again, keep it simple.
It can be an image, but it can also just be text.
If you want a quick way to create a logo, you can use AI art generators like Midjourney or Leonardo to generate one for you and boom, that looks good.
Next up, visual identity.
This refers to everything else that's visual your brand's color palette, font imagery, the look and packaging of your product.
All this is going to influence how people will perceive your business.
Everything should be catered towards your target market.
For dorm pot, we definitely want to have a young casual, university feel to it, since we're targeting university students, so i'm going to use a range of colors, modern fonts and fun imagery And lastly, messaging.
This is probably the most critical and most overlooked part of a brand what it says to its target market.
People resonate with businesses that solve their problems, so you're going to want to craft all of your brand's messaging to revolve around that.
For instance, Dorm Pot's key message is going to be real simple.
It's a convenient and affordable way to cook in your dorm.
All of my messaging, from the homepage to the product page, is all going to focus on this aspect, as it touches on the problems that this target market has.
If you need help with any of these branding elements, ask ChatGPT.
It can basically write a whole branding strategy for you.
Okay, the website and branding are all done.
It's now time to go to the battlefield.
Let's begin.
Step five, promotion.
This step will decide whether your business will live or die.
If you can stick through and figure out a way to successfully market your business, you win.
There are many different marketing channels to choose from to promote your online business.
Paid ads, search engine optimization, email marketing, affiliate marketing, the list goes on.
While your business should eventually grow to utilize several channels, the one I recommend you go all in on at the start is social media marketing.
Right now, the best way to promote your business is through short form content.
TikToks, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts.
The algorithm is boosting those right now and it's just so much easier to grab eyeballs through them versus traditional YouTube videos or Instagram posts.
For example, with Dorm Pot, what I'd do to promote it would be to make videos like this guy.
This guy just cooks all kinds of food with his electric pot on his college bed, and it's genius.
It's weird and engaging.
It's very authentic and it demonstrates the product perfectly where people are begging to buy the electric pot.
And that's the thing, this guy is selling the electric pot through his website in his bio.
That was his plan all along, that's how you do it!
Some products are naturally visual, like the dorm pot, but some aren't, so you'll have to get creative.
Once you get the hang of social media marketing, you can then consider other marketing channels like paid ads.
Most of the time, people just jump straight into paid ads when they don't even know how to craft a good social media post.
You're basically throwing money away at that point.
After going to market and hopefully getting some sales, it's finally time for step six adjust and iterate.
You're likely not gonna get everything right on your first try.
Maybe the problem you chose wasn't actually that big of a problem.
Maybe you're focusing on the wrong target market.
Maybe TikTok isn't actually the best way to promote your product.
Expect to fail and expect to change things.
If you keep working on the steps I mentioned, I can almost promise you that you will eventually land on a profitable online business.
And there you have it.
I wish you the best of luck with your business.
If you want to see me start a real business from scratch using these exact same steps, be sure to like this video.
Subscribe, if you haven't already, and peace out.
