Creating Businesses That Print Money With Billy Murphy

If you’re like most people, starting a successful business seems daunting, and overly complex. You try and figure out all the things that could possibly go wrong, and stare at your overly long list of all the things you could potentially be working on, having no idea what to try and check off first.

Well? stop doing that.

There’s a reason 95% of businesses fail. They focus on all of the wrong things.

What if I told you there’s a much simpler way that will make starting a profitable business much easier?

There is, and I’m going to walk you through the process.

There are two things that you need to get right before moving forward with a business. More importantly, two simple questions you need to ask yourself:

1. Is what you’re offering better than what already exists in the market?
2. Can you reach your audience?

Focusing on anything else in the beginning is a distraction, and a huge waste of time. It’s entrepreneur comedy to watch people focus all their energy on copywriting, funnels, website designs and all sorts of nonsense that are completely irrelevant if you don’t get those two things right first. If you get them wrong, you’ll become another statistic of failed entrepreneurs, and warn everyone about the dangers of the risky business of entrepreneurship.

It’s not “risky”, you just did it wrong.

Most people do business backwards. They think of all the ways they can try and “sell” people on stuff. Funnels, Facebook ads, slick sales pages. Look, those things are all fine, but they?re not where you start. You start by solving step #1.

Is what you’re offering better than what already exists in the market?

Now, let’s talk about this for a minute.

You may read this and think, “I have no idea, there’s a lot of competitors and they’ve been around a while”, etc? If you’re thinking about it like that(and most people do), all it means is you’re not answering the question. It’s a natural response, but it doesn’t matter how many competitors, or who’s been doing what how long.

Is what you’re offering better?

I don’t mean you have to be better than everyone in the market for a broad offering. What I mean is, for the specific gap in the market you’re trying to fill, or improve on, will you be the best at that?

Now, if the answer is “no”, why are you wanting to launch that business? Usually it means you should take a step back and solve a real need(and there’s sooo many out there).

If you’re just trying to launch a business because “you want to make money”, it’s a recipe for disaster.

Solve problems first, and money comes as a byproduct.

I’ll give you a simple example. One little niche business I had was a french macaron business. Tons of people sell french macarons, some of who’d done it their entire lives and it was their passion, so it would be hard to think I was going to be better than everyone in the french macaroon market.

I wasn’t.

But, that wasn’t the gap I was trying to fill. The gap I found was being able to serve customers who often had trouble finding good options.

See, when I started it most french macaron companies didn’t ship throughout the country because they broke very easily, and it’s not a niche a bunch of entrepreneurs are in. It’s mostly bakers.

I realized that most people in areas without a good french bakery literally couldn’t buy french macarons, or even if they could find someone to ship, they weren’t necessarily high quality.

So, what did I do?

I did what I had to do to solve the shipping problem(which turned out to be really easy), and made a deal with a top rated french pasty chef to distribute for them online. Just like that, I could confidently verify step #1, that I had a better offering than my competitors for what I was doing. In many cities I had zero competitors, or again, people who would ship but weren’t the greatest quality macaroons.

Keep in mind, my goal wasn’t to beat every other company on the planet, it was to find the gap(people who had trouble finding good french macarons where they lived- which was the majority of people not in big cities), and give them a better product than anything else they could get.

So, once I was confident I’d done that, I moved on to step 2.

How can I reach my audience?

Well, it turned out not to be overly difficult. There were a lot of people searching for french macarons on google every month:

So, I just had to make sure they saw my macaroons when they were looking, and wanted to buy them over other options. We put together a paid and organic marketing plan, and launched the business. I won’t get into the nitty gritty of “how to market” in this post, but when people already want what you’re selling, it’s pretty easy to have a marketing strategy.

That’s the thing- most people never solve step 1, and spend all their time trying to sell whatever they’re selling. That makes marketing really hard.

Wanna know what makes marketing really easy’ Solve step 1 in a big enough way.

If you do, then you just need to get it in front of your potential customers, you don’t need in depth marketing plans and complicated funnels.

Think about it like this:

If I had $100 and I offered to sell it to you for $50, would you do it?

Even if I didn’t have amazing copywriting, and tricky funnels and whatever other “marketing hacks” there are? That’s a silly question right? Of course you would.

Why?

Because I’m offering you something you would clearly want.

That’s how you should go about business, even though rarely anyone does.

I spend all my time on the front end trying to figure out how to create a better product or service than already exists on the market. That means when I get to the marketing step, I usually have to spend way less time trying to figure out how to sell it. I don’t have to try and jam it down people’s throats because it’s actually good.

Other people spend all their time trying to trick people into buying stuff they don’t want that badly. They barely spend any time at all verifying that they have a better product or service than what’s on the market, so they make their marketing job significantly more difficult.

I’m not saying you won’t still have to put together marketing for your business(you will), but you’ll be way less likely to spend months or years banging your head against the wall like so many other people do because they didn’t solve step 1 like they should have.

If you didn’t solve step 1, why the heck would you be trying to market it?

“My product isn’t very good but my funnels are amazing!”.

Ya, that business isn’t going to turn out very well. It doesn’t take a business wizard to figure that out, but for some reason that’s the approach almost everyone takes.

I know that sounds funny, but most people don’t dedicate any serious time to making sure they’re offering a better product or service than already exists.

If you don’t, why would you expect people to buy from you over better offerings?

If you’re a professional marketer, you can sometimes get away with it, but it’s often more short term than long term. How many marketers do you see that every few months they’re pitching something new? It’s because they never solved step 1, they just tried to “market stuff”.

Don’t make launching a successful business harder than it has to be. And don’t move forward with a business until you know you’ve got an edge on potential competition, and you know how to reach your audience.

This usually means not doing what everyone else is doing. I see that mistake all the time. People see someone succeeding at something, so they decide, “I’ll do that too!”.

Why?

If you’re doing the same thing as them it means you’re likely failing to check off step 1. You must find a way to better serve the market, not do the same thing as is already being done, or you’ll have short term results at best. More often, just failure.

It’s like everyone who hears of people like Jaime having success and making money with a podcast, and they think, “ohhh, great idea I will start a podcast too!”.

Another funny thought, but that’s what almost everyone does.

They fail to realize it is not the “what” someone does that makes it successful. It is the why and the how that they do it.

And again, if someone has already filled the gap, just doing the same thing as them in the same way to the same audience is obviously not going to work.

Copycat entrepreneurs don’t seem to understand that.

“What” someone sells is somewhat irrelevant. Why do they sell it?

If you’re looking at a successful entrepreneur, why have they succeeded? What were their competitors doing when they came into the market? Likely not the same exact thing in the same exact way they did it.

How did they get market share? What did they do different? How did they get it in front of their audience?

Why does one competitor get so much more business than the others?

These are questions struggling entrepreneurs forget to ask. They just see someone making a lot of money at something and attempt to replicate it. They assume they’ll just magically replicate their success as well.

That’s not how it works.

Once you start digging in, you’ll find that a successful entrepreneur usually solved a need in a better way for what they were offering, and often times they did a great job getting that offering in front of their potential customers.

Solving step 1 usually leads to a much easier step 2 because then your marketing is a lot more straightforward. You don’t have to trick people into buying your product or service if you’re reaching your ideal customer and offering something better than they can get elsewhere.

You save so much more time too. Spend a little extra time on the front end figuring out whether or not you can solve your first two steps. That’s a lot better than the alternative of spending a crazy amount of time launching something and realizing that you didn’t have what the market needed.

You’d be murdering your most precious asset.

So remember, just following the first two steps will help simplify your entrepreneurial life.

If you can answer “yes” to both steps, then you can proceed with everything else. Until then, “everything else” doesn’t matter.

Once you get used to just solving for those two things first, you’ll find you have a lot more time on your hands and can run a lot of business ideas through to find the most ideal choice. If you end up with several you could launch successfully, then it’s just a matter of choosing the one that’s most interesting to you, or that has the most profit potential.

Don’t let people overcomplicate it on you in an attempt to sell you all sorts of random marketing services and upsells.

Look at a failed entrepreneur, and I can pretty much guarantee most failed to solve for those two steps.
Keep it simple, and you will achieve success.

If you end up with too many ideas that pass the first two steps, and are having trouble knowing which to choose, I wrote up something simple I use to help calculate the potential profits of your business idea, you can get that here: foreverjobless.com/profitcalculation

Categories: All, Business, Business Model, Starting A Business

---