Starting a business doesn’t have to cost a fortune and I’m here to tell you some of the top ways I know that you can start a business of your own with no money – because I’ve done it!
Can I share a secret with you? Before writing this article, I Googled this specific topic. A lot. I searched on Pinterest. A lot.
Granted, there were a lot of articles that came up, but as I got into them, they just had no meat. They were either not practical or they were trying to sell me something on how to start a business with no money.
Listen. If I’m Googling how to start a business with no money, I’m probably not going to BUY anything! Lest you forget, I have no money! *face palm*
What you won’t find here is any get rich quick ideas. I’m not going to tell you 50 ways to start a business selling steak knives out of a briefcase. You also won’t find me trying to sell you anything. In fact, I offer so many resources and things for free because I get it and I’ve been there. I used a lot of free resources before I could afford to start buying them for myself.
My goal here is to help put you in the right headspace and let you know some incredible ways to begin before you begin, if you get what I’m saying.
How To Start A Business With No Money
Starting a business is hard and it takes preparation and lots o’ work. So you’ve gotta be in it to win it.
Focus on what you have, not what you don’t have.
This may seem obvious, but it’s true. I mean, just look at how I titled the name of this post. “How to start a business when you don’t have any money.” But can you tell me what you do have?
It’s likely, or at least I would hope, that if you’re starting a business it’s because you have a skill that can add value to someone else. Awesome! You don’t have money, but you do have skills! The good news is that skill is a gift and it can be honed with more and more practice which many times is free!
So, you may not have money, but you have time.
You may not have money, but you have technology.
You may not have money, but you have friends. (This isn’t my way of saying to ask your friends of money. This is my way of saying let your friends help you be creative!)
Speaking of money…..
Morale over money.
Money is important for your business to be successful. It just has to be. It’s basic economics. But if your character is garbage, you’re not only not going to attract any clients, but you’re likely to push them away. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been teetering over the edge of buying something, both online and in store, but there was just something too fishy about the person or situation and so I backed off.
Morale is super important to me and should be to you – especially if your entire business is based on serving other people. If people don’t like you, they’re going to not work about you and they’re likely to tell their friends not to work with you either. You can’t buy good character, but having a good character is free!
To sum up, just don’t don’t be an A hole.
Align your business with you, not the other way around.
Start a business with what you know, what you can do. If you start a business focusing on a task you’re either not good at or you have very little experience with, you are starting your business with a very low ceiling that will be hard to break through.
Start a business with what you know first so that at least the work itself will seem comfortable and natural. You may get frustrated with other parts of the business, but you offer services or a product in an area you know to keep your costs low or minimal.
Prioritize and organize
In case you’re wondering, the list of completely free tools to organize and prioritize things for your business is light years long.
Not only that, but if you for some reason can’t find the right online tool, there are tons of free printables that you can download that will help you plan, dream, track, and more!
I have a ton on here and am constantly working on more, taking advice from you guys when you reach out and ask if I can make something! If you’d like access to our printables, just drop your email below and tell me where I can send them!
Learn, learn, learn!
Even if you’ve been doing something “since the day you were born,” learn more. Learn from a different perspective. Service based businesses are living, breathing organisms because you’re working with people who are living and breathing and their needs constantly change.
Take a course. Sign up for a webinar. Attend a conference. Yes, those things can cost money and if you’re trying to figure out how to start a business you may not have the extra funds to just up and attend a $600 conference, but there are so many webinars and YouTube videos and blogs out there that offer incredible and valuable free information!
Don’t fake it until you make it.
Okay, this may be super unpopular of an opinion, but the idea of faking it until you make it can actually create a roadblock for you in your thinking. Why?
Imposter syndrome. If you don’t know what imposter syndrome is, it’s the way of thinking in which you feel less than. You constantly feel worried that people will “find out you’re a fraud,” even if you’re quite successful in your business.
To me, I find the longer you “fake it,” when you actually do make it, it’s going to be hard for your brain to flip that switch of being successful. Here again, this is a way of thinking that is completely free.
Be prepared to cry over stuff
Like stuff you don’t expect. This work is hard. People won’t believe in you. When you tell people you’re starting a business, people will look at you like you’re crazy or expect you to fail, even if they don’t say it out loud. It’s okay for that to hurt your feelings.
But keep going. Stay confident. Prove them wrong.
How on earth will this help me start a business with no money?
Businesses don’t just appear. They start as an idea in the mind. Or if you’re like me, you realized that a series of Google searches couldn’t show you exactly what you were trying to find so you began to craft ways to make it yourself! Which means thinking through some of these things as you’re planning to start your own business can really help you in the early stages.
I can also speak from experience here because starting up my home renovation site was a very different experience than starting up my VA site here. I felt like I had a lot more knowledge under my belt and knew how to start things the right way, where as with my first site I was going in so blind. I did some research, but you don’t know what you don’t know so a lot of it was not asking the right questions to begin with.
To be fair, I did not start this business with no money. I plan on going in depth later about what it cost to actually start this one, but I can say that I started my first site with NOTHING and it wasn’t until I actually bit the bullet and bought my own domain name/hosted site that things started to turn around for me.
Do you have any secrets about starting a business with no money that you feel are earth shattering? I’d love to hear them below!
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