How to start a business with no money

Let me clarify something up front. Actually, you can’t start a business with zero money. I just need to reach the people for whom it seems like the only option.

A better title might be: You no longer need an inheritance to start a legitimate, high-growth business. Because too many people start the wrong business and fail because they don’t know it.

I walked that path in my youth before I realized what the startup concept was really about. I thought getting started was about raising seed capital from venture capitalists to hire tech-savvy people to build the machine of a business I wanted to build.

And that is true. It is the path that most people imagine when they hear the word start up. And when people new to the business world are faced with the realities of that roadThey see the barriers to entry as insurmountable. They don’t know anything about a pitch deck, and they wouldn’t have the connections to the people to pitch to in the first place.

So they give up. Or, what is worse, they resort to a multi-level scheme, dropshipping, painting by numbers. And it exploits them, because it’s not meant to be a business for them. Their sole purpose is to earn money for the scheme.

But the pitch-deck-to-VC-to-IPO path is just one way to start a business, and it’s far from the only way. In fact, simply splitting the “start” definition along a single axis allows you to put the “machine” start on one side and the “mission” start on the other.

I don’t mean “mission” as in charity and good works. I mean “mission” as solving a problem using whatever means are at your disposal. Commissioning a mission requires a lot of learning and a lot of hard work, but for the record, so does commissioning a machine. The difference is that instead of learning how to pitch, hire, and hold a board meeting, the learning and hard work goes into building, selling, and scaling.

That’s why every legitimate entrepreneur starts a business in the first place: to build, sell, and scale. Unless you’re only in it for the money, but I have a feeling people who are only interested in money stopped reading this post when I said it takes more than zero money to get started.

I have been living simultaneously in both the machine world and the mission start-up world for my entire business career, which spans nearly three decades, sometimes doing both at the same time. This is what I’ve learned about trying to build something from nothing.

I don’t want to preach, but if you’re going to go down the mission route, you have to decide what you’re going to start your business for. Reducing it to a concept is a difficult exercise. With that said, it’s imperative that you don’t skip it.

The mission of my first startup, Intrepid Media, was to expose great writing for the quality of the writing alone. The mission of my newest startup, Teaching Startup, is make more and better entrepreneurs by providing affordable startup advice.

Everything I do adheres to that mission, and my expectations for the growth of those missions, one based on writing and the other based on entrepreneurship, should be reasonable, even moderate.

With the commissioning of a machine, the product is the most important thing. If you can develop a great product that serves many customers, the usefulness of that product can be refined once it has traction.

We did this at Automated Insights. We first figured out how to make machines write content from data, and then we built a product around it. We raised over $1 million before selling our first product.

With a mission-driven startup, you need to prove that your unique solution to the customer’s problem will work before you build a product around it, and this is a chicken-and-egg perspective where most mission-critical startups mission fail.

Fortunately, there are concepts such as minimum viable product. In an MVP state, you can test the viability of your solution in a real market, with real customers and real revenue, without all the expensive automation.

That’s going to take time, and you don’t have much time to lose.

No matter what you’re building, you’ll need to lean on technology and innovation to get an edge. In areas like marketing, sales, e-commerce, and customer service, there are plenty of third-party providers (HubSpot, Salesforce, Shopify, Zendesk) that can put your business on equal footing with larger companies. But those providers will only get you part of the way.

No code and low code solutions will help you centralize your information in a single point, such as a website or even a database.

Plus, no-code and low-code will allow you to build in-house applications to help you innovate, whether that innovation is built into the product itself or simply the way it’s accessed and delivered.

Here is the most important question for starting a mission: What can you build into your business model to keep it alive indefinitely until you discover one or more catalysts that can act as growth accelerators?

Example: I can run Teaching Startup “forever”, or as long as I can get entrepreneurs to ask me questions that I or others can answer. It’s low cost to run, it’s not my main source of income, and all the “stuff” needed to sell and deliver the “product” is almost fully automated with no code and low code.

It took me a while to get to this point, but that allows me to spend most of my time figuring out how to make the product more valuable, more broadly, to more people. I do this by looking for catalysts (new features, bigger clients, strategic partnerships, better marketing tools, you name it) that can take the business to another level.

Commissioning a machine is easy on paper. Raise money, allocate that money, go raise more money, repeat until you exit. In practice, it is much more difficult.

A mission start-up is just the opposite. There is no set way to scale growth, but once you put it in writing, it is much easier to implement and maintain.

It just takes forever.

You will have to find catalyst after catalyst in the same way that startups have to raise funds round after round of funding. And just as machine startup founders must constantly be wary of poor funding conditions and investor demands, mission startups must be vigilant to avoid shady partners and clients who promise the world but never deliver.

Two ways to get to the same place. Both are full of risk and reward potential. One is much more affordable for most people. And indeed, a mission start-up can always turn into a machine start-up, but it doesn’t have to be.