No money on hand to start your business? No problem, you can build a million dollar business from scratch
That’s what Oleg Campbell did.
At a young age of 19 he started working as a programmer in his home country of Ukraine.
And when he turned 22, he moved from the Ukraine to Canada.
Somewhere along the way, he read the book The 4-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss, which had a big influence on his career.
It’s then he made the decision that he would start a business from scratch.
And just two years later by the time he turned 24, he introduced the business world to Tago, software that manages and stores data.
He was still working full time at his day job as a programmer.
But when he got home at night, he would work on his building business from scratch.
Since he didn’t have extra cash on hand, the money Oleg earned at his day job went toward hiring a developer.
Unfortunately Tago didn’t generate as much money as he hoped, topping at around $150,000 a year.
But Oleg wasn’t one to give up.
Nope … he was determined to build a business from scratch.
And this time he would make sure it worked.
Determined to Build a Business From Scratch
He took the money he made from his first business venture and put toward his second business, which is software that automates emails companies send out. He called it Reply.
But this time he did things differently.
He moved back to his home country of Ukraine because the cost of living was significantly lower. This allowed him to hire developers and programmers at a lower cost than what he paid in the U.S.
In fact he was able to hire 2 programmers, paying no more than $2,000 a month. And find those programmers on a Ukrainian jobs board website.
While they did the programming, he worked on marketing, sales and building up a base of clients.
Oleg’s second time around at building a business a business from scratch paid off. Just three years later, Reply had over 1,000 clients and was closing in on$100,000 a month in revenue. Do that math and that’s around $1.2 million annually.
And the business build from scratch is still growing to this day. Oleg has introduced more products and that’s helped him gain more customers and more recognition. In fact experts value his company at $20- $30 million.
3 Tips on Starting a Business
Want to start a business from scratch? Oleg shares three insights:
Insight #1: Validate your idea. Before working on your product or service, make sure there’s a market for it. Reach out to potential customers and ask, “Do you need this? If not, what do you need?” To be successful you need to have a deep understanding of what they need, and then provide it.
To validate his business idea, Oleg contact 100 sales people, asking if they could spare 10 minutes to tell him whether he was building something worthwhile or wasting time. People were honest and that helped him fine-tune the final product.
Insight #2: Start promotion early. Once you’re sure you have a viable idea, begin promoting it. Do this immediately. Set up a landing page explaining what you’re building and give people somewhere to sign up for beta (test) access. And use a blog to share mockups and details of your progress.
Insight #3: Keep learning. Preparing to launch his second product, Oleg learned everything about sales. He even spent six months working on sales for a friend’s business, learning everything. By doing this, Oleg says he learned more about what worked and what product he could build.
His story just goes to show that you can control your financial future. It’s just a matter of getting started, being realistic and fearless
The post 3 Tips: Build a business from scratch appeared first on The Women's Financial Alliance.