To start a digital business with low or no cash, look for a business opportunity within a microniche. Before going all-in, you want to validate your idea cheaply. After validation, you can push on growth and as you grow, you create options to scale your digital business.
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1. Find Your Business Opportunity By Starting With A Microniche
In the era of large digital platforms, it’s important to start adding value from a small audience, which can become the backbone for your next digital business. Indeed, that isn’t a single way to start.
However, if you have limited capital or no capital at all, it’s important to start from a narrow space, where you can add a lot of value. As a small player, you’ll be able to break the trade-off between cost and value, which is at the base of a blue ocean strategy.
In the microniche space, you’ll be able to find the community that will help you build your next digital venture!
2. Validate Your Idea Before Going All-In
The digital world creates two illusions:
- As you can talk to the whole world you end up wanting to talk to everyone
- As you can start with little or no money, you’re willing to test anything
These two are indeed facts, but only for those established businesses that have powerful distribution networks, marketing, and R&D budget.
If you’re starting from scratch trying to talk to everyone, or trying to test all the possible options you have might not work.
Thus, you want to look at the key components of the business model you might want to build:
At this stage, it’s important to validate your idea, to see if there is a niche market opportunity before going all-in!
If you already have an audience, you can test your idea by, for instance, proposing a product or service.
Let’s say you already have a blog that generates some traffic, and a newsletter, you can organize a workshop and see if people in your newsletter are willing to pay for it.
If so, that opens up the space for producing a digital product out of the workshop, which can help you get started.
Once you got the audience you can to start testing potential revenue streams:
3. Growth and traction
You can use the growth hacking framework to accelerate growth once your idea has been validated.
Related: Growth Hacking Complete Guide
4. Create Options To Scale
Once you start from a microniche, you can look at it as the foundation of your business, which will give you options to scale as you dominate that microniche.
Therefore, as you grow you can create options for your digital business! This is at the core of bootstrapping.
As you grow, you tune your business with its key customers, and as you do, your key customers will become the most important stakeholders:
Some Ideas To Start Generating Cash
Not all entrepreneurs can initially afford to build the business of their dream (at least not in the short-term). Therefore, it might make sense to look at existing opportunities out there that can help you bootstrap:
Top 12 Business Ideas with Low Investment and High Profit
- Become a blogger
- Become an online instructor
- Become a professional photographer
- Become a ghostwriter
- Become a Chatbots maker
- Become an affiliate marketer
- Become a career coach, resume writer or LinkedIn profile writer
- Become a business development contractor
- Become an infopreneur
- Become a websites flipper
- Become an SEO consultant
- Become a contractor headhunter
Other resources:
The Digital Entrepreneur’s Guide On How To Start A Business
Other business resources:
- What Is Business Model Innovation And Why It Matters
- What Is a Business Model? 30 Successful Types of Business Models You Need to Know
- The Complete Guide To Business Development
- Business Strategy: Definition, Examples, And Case Studies
- Blitzscaling Business Model Innovation Canvas In A Nutshell
- What Is a Value Proposition? Value Proposition Canvas Explained
- What Is a Lean Startup Canvas? Lean Startup Canvas Explained
- What Is Market Segmentation? the Ultimate Guide to Market Segmentation
- Marketing Strategy: Definition, Types, And Examples
- Marketing vs. Sales: How to Use Sales Processes to Grow Your Business
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