Okay, let's talk about how you can start your first business in just a day. That's what my book "Millionaire Business in a Day" teaches. It's a really great book for anyone who dreams of starting their own business. If you've ever wanted to start a business but haven't yet, you should read this book. It gives you a step-by-step guide on exactly how to do it. The book is split into three parts: starting, building, and growing your business. Right now, I'll focus on starting and building it. Let's go!

If you're reading this and you haven't started your business yet, it seems like many people I know have been thinking about starting one for a while, but they haven't done anything about it. Some folks believe they need the perfect idea before they can start, but that's not true. What I'm saying in this book is that you start a business first and then figure out the idea. The main idea I'm sharing in this chapter is to start even if you don't feel totally prepared. Nobody ever feels completely ready to start a business or have kids. It's never the perfect time to start, so you just have to begin before you're completely ready.

And just to explain this point a bit more, there's a nice saying here: "Many people think too much and only act later. Successful business owners act first, then figure things out. Thinking too much before doing anything is just guessing. You only really understand something when you've done it. Instead of trying to plan everything perfectly before acting, just start doing something." Also, there's a saying I mention, "now not how." When we want to do something, we often wonder, "How do I do it?" This focus on the "how" can stop us from starting. Instead, think about what small step you can take right now. Even if you're not sure what to do, there's probably a small action you can take. Once you've done that, you can start working on the main task. So basically, the first chapter is all about giving emotional support.

Now that we've talked about feelings, let's think about what comes next. This is where we talk about putting customers first when starting a business. I asked successful business owners about this, and they all say the same thing: focus on the customers first. Instead of coming up with an idea for a business, think about who you want to help first. Businesses solve problems for people who are willing to pay for solutions. Many new business owners make the mistake of creating something without knowing if anyone will pay for it. Students often do this too. They have great ideas but forget to check if people want to pay for them. So, when you're thinking of business ideas, think about the customers before anything else. You need to know who you're selling to. For example, as a nursing student, I might focus on people I know from university or hospitals. It's also important that your customers have money. It's easier to start a business when your customers can afford your product or service. Students sometimes struggle with this because their friends might not have much money. But their parents or other groups might. Once you've thought about who your customers are, think about their problems. You can ask them directly what bothers them or what they spend money on. This will give you lots of ideas. Many successful businesses started because they solved a problem. For example, Uber started because someone was tired of waiting for taxis. Now, let's look at two different approaches to starting a business. First, there's the founder-first approach, where you focus on your idea before knowing if anyone wants it. Then, there's the customer-first approach, where you start by understanding what your customers need. For example, if you want to create a dog-walking app, you could start by asking dog owners if they need help finding someone to look after their pets when they're away. This way, you're more likely to create something people want and will pay for.

You come up with a cool idea, and then you talk to people to see if the idea has legs, if they would be willing to pay for it. You realize they don't, and now you do something else because you realize they are willing to pay for this other thing. Crucially, you ask for that first sale, you make that first dollar. The first dollar is always the hardest; the first three customers are always the hardest. If you aim to try to get your first three paying customers as soon as possible before you even try to build anything, then at least you have some kind of validation that the idea has legs.

For example, here is an email that one of my friends, Boris, sent:

Subject: Helping You Help Me With Food

Hey friends,

One thing I realized is that I'm busy all the time and I don't have time to cook a quality meal. I wanted to invite a few close friends to test a business idea with me. Consider yourself one of the lucky chosen few. Convenient and home-cooked meals on February 9th for 20,00 naira. There will be a personal chef making us food and delivering it to you conveniently and deliciously. If this is something you're seriously interested in, please transfer 20,000 naira. Open to all and any feedback.

Cheers,
Boris

P.S. Please let me know if you have any dietary requirements, etc. I promise the dinner will be delish!!!

This is how you validate the idea for a business. You might have a business idea, and you're at a party, you say to someone, "Oh, I'm thinking of starting a business around bloody blah. Would you be interested?" Social etiquette dictates they basically have to say yes. You are very unlikely to meet someone who will actually say no. But here's the crucial bit: if you ask them for money, be like, "Okay, cool. Well, you know, I'm taking pre-orders now. Would you be willing to pay me 20,000 naira for it now?" You see how good your idea actually is because no one is going to part with their money unless they actually believe in the idea. Words are cheap; money is not. So if someone says, "Yeah, I like your business idea," that means nothing. What matters is, are they actually paying for it? Have they pre-ordered the thing? Would they be willing to be your first customer for a 50% discount with a money-back guarantee, anything like that?

Now, the other way to get business ideas is to also look to your own problems. If you find something is a problem for you, chances are it'll be a problem for other people as well. And there are four prompts that I give that I fully agree with that help us figure out what our own problems are. So firstly, what is one thing this morning that irritated me? Secondly, what is one thing on my to-do list that's been there for over a week? Thirdly, what is one thing that I regularly fail to do well? And fourthly, what is one thing I wanted to buy recently only to find out that no one made it? These prompts help you think about the problems in your own life. You should sort of become a magnet for problems. As you go through life, anytime you find something annoying, what an aspiring entrepreneur or an actual entrepreneur does is they recognize, "Oh, I'm finding this thing annoying. I have just identified a problem." And a problem with a solution is a business, assuming people are willing to pay for that solution. Whereas what most people do is...

They will just come across a problem, and they'll be like, "Oh, it's just a thing, yeah, it's really annoying that we have to fill out these feedback forms in our lectures," and that's where the audio will stop. What I used to do in nursing school was, "Oh man, it's really annoying that we've got to fill out those feedback forms in lectures. I wonder if there would be a more efficient way of doing that. If we found the right person, we could build a solution to this." When I was in med school, I was unsophisticated with this. I was like, "Oh, how might I build this? I knew how to code, I knew how to make websites and apps and stuff, so I would default to just trying to build the thing. I've wasted years of my life chasing business ideas where I found an idea, I'm going to build the thing, and I didn't find any customers to pay for the bloody thing. If someone had told me this when I was 18, I would have literally saved seven years of my life chasing down random rabbit holes because I was afraid or didn't realize I could speak to people and actually just ask them for money. The main thing is that honestly, the way you start a business these days is that you try and get people to pay for the thing before you make the thing. People come up to me and they're like, "Hey, Favour, I've got a bit of an audience, I want to make an online course," and I'm always like, "Okay, cool." I know that the temptation is there to build the course and then sell it in that order, but you should flip that around. You should sell the course and then build it. So, for example, if you're thinking, you know, maybe your audience wants a course on how to build the perfect productive desk setup, you could go out and spend like a month or two or three trying to create the course. That would be a terrible idea. Instead, what you should do is pre-sell it. You can whip up a landing page in like a Google doc in maybe half a day, you can send it out to people in your audience and be like, "Hey, potentially working on this course about how to have a productive desk setup. If this sounds interesting, you can pre-order the course here. It'll be released in the next month, and I'll give you your money back if you don't like it, 50% off, something to that effect." Because based on how the pre-sale goes, if enough people want to buy it, then it gives you an idea, it lets you validate the market. So it's about finding a problem, finding someone who's willing to pay for the solution to that problem, talking to those people quite a lot, getting money from them, and only once you have done that do you know that, "Okay, this is a business idea worth pursuing," and now you can start to build the thing because you already have paying customers. This is the thing that I wish I had known when I started my entrepreneurship journey. This is the thing I wish is a message that could be hammered into the heads of every single aspiring entrepreneur out there. I give so many talks these days around the world; it's super fun, and there's always like half of the audience are aspiring entrepreneurs, and they're all stuck in this thing of like, "Ah, I need to have a good business idea," or "Oh, I've just been building this thing, but like, I haven't built it yet, and I need to make my MVP first," and then all of it is a total waste of time. If you speak to people who are second-time founders, people who have started multiple companies, you'll find this: they spend the majority of their time just talking to customers. The more you talk to your customers, the more you validate the idea actually has a market, the more you understand what problems they have, the more you can start to see, "Huh, maybe I thought this thing should be red, but actually this thing is blue." The more you try and ask them for money to pre-sell the thing that you haven't even built yet, the more likely you are to succeed in the business. Honestly, you should totally read my book; it's absolutely amazing. I have done a smashing job of it. Bye-bye.

"The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now." - Chinese Proverb

"Success is not final, failure is not fatal: It is the courage to continue that counts." - Winston Churchill

"The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today." - Franklin D. Roosevelt

"Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do." - Steve Jobs