This is the Best Online Business for a Beginner | Starting a Solopreneur Business

Some sort of degree of certification, a ton of ad spend, some mind-blowing product. These are the things that people think you need in order to be able to run an online business nowadays. But in reality, you need none of these in order to be able to make money online. Instead of what you need is what I call the solopreneur triad. And no, not one of those kind of triads. And in today's video, I'm going to be showing you what that triad is, which just means three pieces. I'm going to show you what those three pieces are and how you can apply them to your online business, whether that's digital products, courses, coaching, eBooks, or whatever it might be. So how do I know this works? Well, my wife and I actually use these three things in our seven figure digital products business. So people think an online business is something that's like a new fancy product. They think that it's something that takes years or decades to be able to make. They think that it takes experience and degrees and a huge team and a huge audience. But really today, running an online business is different than it was years ago. Running a business online nowadays is solving a unique problem for a unique person. It could still be some sort of product that you make that takes years and years to make, or it could be something that takes hours and hours a day to be able to maintain, but it doesn't have to be that way. Instead, it can be something that is digital, which is probably why you guys are here. You know, you want zero overhead. You want something that's easy to maintain, something that's easy to update and something that you don't need to spend a ton of money creating, and you don't need certifications to be able to get approved or to be able to have some title attached to them. And usually at this point, people start thinking, oh no, here comes some type of like scam business. And then they expect me to be able to jump in front of my Lambo or show myself being in Fiji or something like that. But it's nothing like that. Running an online business is not what you see when you see the ad that shows up before this video. Don't let what you see online dictate what your true belief is, okay? Don't let pessimism fill your head. And also don't let any past experiences hinder you from taking a chance on something new as well. Regardless of what you thought online business was now up until this point, forget it. Okay, now you have a new starting point to be able to form some type of a new thought process around what a successful business looks like. So where do we start? Well, my wife and I started probably where you are right now watching a video just like this. Okay, we had kids. We wanted to be able to spend more time with our kids than we were spending time working behind a desk. We didn't want a boss to be able to tell us what we were doing. We wanted to be able to make our own decisions. We wanted to spend our time doing what we wanted with our own time. We wanted to make as much money as we wanted and not be dictated by a salary. And we for sure didn't want to run a huge team. We wanted to run a type of solopreneur lifestyle before solopreneur has been slapped on every YouTube video that shows up for the past three months. Basically what we did was we just solved our own problems, realized other people need those problems solved too, and we put it into a digital format so people can purchase it and so that people can implement it. You see, people overcomplicate what it really takes to run a solo business, okay? They overcomplicate even what it takes to run just like a basic one- or two-person business. People think you need an invention and an LLC and you need to have all these business things set up and you need to have all this tax code prepared. They think you need the degree and the following and yada yada. I've already said that stuff. I'm just trying to tell you, you don't need those things. At its core, there's a streamlined path to be able to run a successful business like this for people like us. People that want our time, people that want our money, people that want the freedom to make choices to be able to do whatever we want to do, scale as big as we want, travel where we want, spend the time with the family that we want, go race cars if you want to, okay? People like you and people like me. There's a streamlined path to make this happen. And again, this is a triad, which means there's three things and there's three basic things, three basic core components to the strategy. You need a brand, you need content, and you need a product. Now, you might think, well, I have none of those right now, Doug. So, what am I supposed to do? Well, you actually do have all three of those things. You see, the brand is you. It's really easy. The brand is you. You're a brand of one. You're the niche of one. You're on your own category. You are you. You are a specific type of brand. You just don't perceive yourself that way yet. The content that you're going to put out is the content of your journey up until this point. Your challenges, your problems, the roadblocks that you face, the stories that you have to tell. People love to be able to hear that kind of stuff. Today's media, today's business is a very person and attention oriented industry. So, you already have all the content that you have. You just haven't turned it into content yet. And the last part is the product. And this is going to be one of the things that really gets people stuck, okay? But a product is just your solutions packaged in a certain way that appeals to people, that makes them think that they can do what you did. And so, these are all three things that you already have that is the solopreneur triad, as I mentioned before. Again, not that triad, but the solopreneur pieces. And so, let me walk you through this framework, why it works, why it's important, how you can apply it to your business. So, the first thing, again, is the brand. It's you, your likeness, your story, you. You are the brand. You're the factor in all of this. At this point, people will probably get imposter syndrome, okay? They're going to think, I'm not worthy of this. I'm not worth anything that's on here. I am not a brand. But don't let social media fool you. You're probably seeing people in their private jets, people on their big boats, people with all the brands. And you think, that is a brand, that is a person that's worthy on social media. But at the end of the day, there's 5.3 millionaires in the United States alone, okay? But you don't see 5.3 millionaire influencers posting on Instagram, although sometimes it might feel like it. But the thing is, is that millionaires and people with wealth aren't all fancy influencers. They're not out there showing everything. I mean, your next door neighbor could literally be a millionaire and you'd never know it. So, don't let social media bull you into thinking that, I'm not a millionaire. I don't have a flashy lifestyle. So, I'm not a brand. Therefore, I can't run an online business. That's not the process that you want to be thinking. Now, that doesn't mean you can be boring. You still need to play the game. You still need to appeal to people's emotions. You still need to be able to storytell. And you still need to make people say, I like that person and I want to learn from them. But that doesn't mean that you need to go rent out a jet or be fake with it and act like you're something that you're not. People like people that are similar to them. Like for better or worse, they like people's backgrounds. They like people's values. They like the way they look, the way they talk, their accents. Basically, anything that they can sit there and pinpoint, if they can resonate with you, if they can have a common ground and understanding with you, that is leaps and bounds stronger than any kind of fake bravado or things that people show online. So, how do you come up with this? Well, honestly, it takes a lot of self-reflection. You're going to need to get a paper and a pencil or computer. If you like computer, I personally like to be able to do things on a computer. And you're going to need to self-reflect. You need to just start writing things down. Who are you? What do you like? What do you represent? What are your values? What are your expertises? What are your experiences? What are the things that you've done, your accomplishments in life? Try to write from an outsider's perspective. Okay? We fall into this trap all the time thinking that what we know, other people already know. But in reality, a lot of people don't know the stuff that you know. You assume that it is normal common knowledge because it's normal and common to you. So, take yourself out of the equation. Imagine you're on the outside looking in saying, what does this person know? I mean, this can be anything from like running a 5K to running a 5K a month business. You see what I did there? After you've done that, you've started to formulate the skeleton of your brand. So, now let's move to content. Content, again, are the challenges, obstacles, the stories that you've gone through to be able to get to the point where you are now. People don't want to just hear random facts about an industry. Okay? People don't want to just hear, I think Russell Brunson coined the term, but he calls it techno babble. Okay? They don't want to just hear random stuff. They want to resonate with people. They want to connect with people. They want to know that they're not alone. And they have specific problems and challenges that they're facing and they want to know that they're not alone in that. So, what do they do? They go to the internet, they go to YouTube, they Google, they go to Instagram to go find answers to their problems. And so, you want to be found by those people. But again, you have to be able to talk about those challenges and problems that you face, the same ones that they are facing, because that's how you leverage something like Google or YouTube's algorithm to be discovered by potential customers. There's no secret content hack. Okay? You can't use chat GPT to write up 50 viral, amazing video topics that you're going to actually use. And every single one of them is going to be a hit. The thing that's going to get you to stand out and to actually create a sustainable, successful business is just being open with the things that you have learned. So, in order to be able to implement this, again, you're going to need to do some self-reflection. You're going to need to sit down and you're going to have to talk about all the problems and challenges that you faced. But in order to make that process a little bit easier, relate it back to the accomplishments and the experiences that you've encountered in that first step of figuring out the brand of you. As you do that, try to formulate them into pain points, into struggles, because pain points, common pain points, bring people together. So, the last point here is the product. The product is your solutions. The solution to all the challenges, all the obstacles that you have, generally put into some type of a blueprint or a format. Now, at this point, selling and having a product, a lot of you guys are going to think, shouldn't I have been doing this for years, helping people for years? Shouldn't I already have a big, giant clientele list of people that I've helped solve these problems for? In reality, no, you don't need to do that. Okay? Because you've been solving that problem for yourself already for years. You already have a system in place. So, I was just talking to a prospective student about this. We were having a discussion about our program, ICA, which is our coaching program, teaching people how to be able to do this stuff. She does social media for small businesses. And now, what she wanted to do and what we talked about was her teaching others how to do social media for small businesses as well, like local businesses, things that a college kid can start doing for themselves while they're still in college. And she said, because she hasn't taught any of her friends or classmates or people at her level how to do social media or how to be able to find those clients, she felt unqualified. And so, I asked her, I said, do you currently have clients? And she said, yeah, I currently have social media clients. I said, did you find those yourself? She says, yes. I say, did you sell them yourself? She said, yes. Do you make money from them? Yes. So then, why is it that she feels unqualified when she's already providing that result for herself? And that's the mind block that people have to be able to get around is they think that because they've done it, it's nothing special, but it is in fact special. So, you have to have that frame of mind as well, okay? You yourself are proof that your process works. You just have to translate that process onto paper. So, how do you do that? How do you apply that thought process to be able to create that product? Well, what you need to do is you need to think about that end result that you have achieved, okay? Let's say it is that you have run a 5K and you've ran 5Ks for the past 10 years for yourself. You never taught anybody else how to run a 5K, but you're still qualified because you ran it, okay? And so, what do you do? You have to pick apart the regimen or the training that you've taken or that you've endured to be able to run that 5K, okay? Maybe it's diet, maybe it's sleep, weight exercises, weighted running, maybe it's the amount of distance that you run and how many times you do that in a week. Breaking all those things down, no matter what the outcome is or whatever that transformation is, that's what you turn into the product. It doesn't have to be anything else. It doesn't have to be anything crazy or anything special. It is just what you do because the brand is you, the content is your struggles, and the product is your solution to fixing those struggles. And the harsh reality here is that that's honestly all it takes to be able to start a solopreneur digital products business. You need you, the problems that you faced, and then you need the solutions to those problems. And the hardest part of this all is sitting outside of your own head and looking at yourself from a third-person objective standpoint. And the thing is that once you do that, it's no longer a website that's stopping you. It's not learning Canva. It's not uploading to Kajabi. It's not starting to record your YouTube videos. The thing that stops you is just the fear in the reality that you have what it takes, but it is now up to you to make it happen. So let me leave you with this. If you are already working 40 to 50 hours a week for someone else, or if your spouse is already working 40 to 50 hours a week for someone else, why can't you dedicate just 5 to 10 hours a week for yourself to be able to learn about your brand, your content, and your product? So I'd love to be able to hear your thoughts on my solopreneur triad and how lame that is or anything like that. So if you have any comments or questions, leave them down in the comments below. Be sure to like, subscribe, do all the usual stuff, and I will see you guys next time.