What Should My First Business Be? – How To Choose A Product/Service To Sell

In this article, I want to talk about a major decision you’ll have to make when you decide to take the leap towards starting your own business. It’s a question everyone asks and it needs answering. That question, quite simply, is this: “What is the first product or service that I should start with when I’m new to entrepreneurship and starting from scratch?”

My First Business: Where The Motivation Comes From

Now what usually happens when someone chooses to take the jump into the business world is that they discover something, or more often someone, who motivated them to become an entrepreneur.

Due to the influence of the internet, this motivating person is increasingly embodied by a business coach – someone like myself or another YouTube personality.

Similarly, these days when someone decides they want to become a self-development coach, if you dig deep enough, you’ll often find they were first inspired by a well-known person in the self-development world. Naturally, once you’ve felt the spark of motivation from watching a coach you’d like to emulate… you want to do it as well.

Immediately after this realization, the next thing that commonly happens is you want to emulate that business or self-development coach in every way. I know from personal experience – it happened to me seven years ago. I told myself, “I want to become a business coach just like my mentors”.

Was I qualified to be a business coach? Probably not. But I wanted to become one because that’s the success I saw constantly through the media platforms I was following. That’s the success I wanted to emulate.

Hold Your Horses: A Reality Check

A similar phenomenon occurs in the self-development world. You see these coaches traveling the world, helping people every day, inspiring possibly millions of people of all walks of life and you want to do it as well. They seem to hit all of the emotional hot buttons that influence you to start your own self-development company.

Instantly you tell yourself, “I want to be like that. I’m passionate about the same things. I want to start my own self-development empire”. The passion and desire is transferred to you from the person on camera, and you’re off to the races.

What I want you to realize from this article is that you do NOT need to emulate them. You do NOT need to become that business or self-development coach the first year you’re starting off, even if the passion is there. The fact is you may not have built up enough qualifications at this present time. If you want to be a self-development coach, you may not have lived quite the extraordinary life you think you have to build that multi-million dollar motivation company just yet.

Keep in mind – I’m not telling you this to discourage from getting into business or living a life of your dreams. Quite the opposite. What I want you to do is initially take a look at other successful you actually have daily access to and do what they do. Most new business owners tell themselves, “I follow this coach online because I don’t know anyone successful in my area, I have no access to successful business owners, and I don’t know what to sell”. 

You Have Local Access To The Success You Want

Ironically, the fact of the matter is that you do have access to successful people everywhere you go. Let’s look at some examples.

If you go to your local grocery store, someone owns that grocery store. Someone has sweated day in and day out to build their business skills up to a point that they can own that company.

If you go to a McDonald’s, guess who owns and operates that McDonald’s? A franchise owner. A franchise owner who may even own more than one location. Wealthy people and successful business owners work and own many of these local companies in your area and you can meet them, learn from them, and emulate their success.

I’m not saying you have to start a McDonald’s franchise or grocery store to get ahead, of course not, but just about everything you see around is a business. Anything you buy from – anyone you buy from – is a business.

The main point is that if you want to emulate someone, you don’t need to emulate an inaccessible online personality in order to achieve your goals. Just because that’s the person you see over and over again on your smartphone doesn’t mean you have to “wait” to meet them or buy their online video course. You can start now.

With that limiting belief out of the way, you’re probably wondering as a beginner, “What should I do EXACTLY then? What should I offer in SPECIFIC terms if I’m not following the online guru?”

My First Business: Researching The RIGHT Way

The first practical step you can take is doing your proper research about quickly accessible avenues into the business world. There are many products and services that companies pay a lot of money for that are in high demand if you can offer them in an effective manner.

If you catch the right person at the right time and you’re even just decent at sales… you can get results. It’s really that simple.

As a complete beginner, the best thing you can likely do is freelancing. There are many websites such as upwork.com, which I’ve worked with, that can get you started.

I’ve done other videos about this which you can check on this website and begin your journey with a competitive edge. The best part of these solutions is that you don’t need have 10 years of experience under your belt to get your foot in the door.

So, consider checking out my videos, getting an UpWork account, and get to work. Another thing you can do is check out what other freelancers are currently performing for companies (and the subsequent salaries they receive) and do your own product or service based on that.

In other words, not performing freelance work like everyone else but creating contracts, building a business with people who work for you and charging a premium on your product or service. Think more like a $5,000 upfront payment as opposed to a per hour freelance gig.

Examples of Successful First Businesses

Let’s use some examples. The most common ones that comes to mind are websites and explainer videos.

A lot of people start out this way, even in highly-developed markets. In my mastermind right now there are people, even with an over-supply of website salespeople, that still get good results. It’s not a big deal to get your business up and running.

Once you have a few sales, you know how to do sales, you know how to do contracts, you know how to handle a client, and so on, then you can upgrade your product or service, offer an upsell, create a funnel for someone, and move forward in a big way.

At the end of the day, it depends on the demand of the niche you’re going for. You must do your research, talk to business owners around you on a regular basis, and become aware of the opportunities available to you. This is the path to success that has been proven time and again, and if you follow these steps, you’ll likely add to that proof in no time.