How to finally start your first business in 2025

all right so I put out this poll on my YouTube Community tab yesterday saying if starting a business is something you'd like to do what is stopping you and we had 193 comments the highest voted comment was from Gonzalo who said honestly not having good ideas and fear of wasting time and money on a bad idea I think what this comment speaks to is that there are various myths that people believe about starting a business and in this video I would like to share my perspective on each of these different myths thank you so much

Adobe Express for sponsoring this video and by the way we haven't yet met my name is Ali and I've been doing this online business thing for over 10 years I built and sold my first sixf figure business while I was a medical student at Cambridge I built my next business to six figures while working full-time as a doctor and a few years ago I was able to quit the day job to focus on the business which now generates seven figures a year in profit and lets me live a life that I absolutely love the key

thing to remember with all of that stuff though is that this sort of Journey to having a sort of multi-million dollar lifestyle business did not happen overnight and there were loads and loads of failures along the way and so this is the video that I wish I would have had when I was early on in my entrepreneurial journey and let's start with myth number one and the first myth that I would like to debunk for your consideration is that you need a good idea to start a business this is actually a little bit of a

myth you don't really need a good idea to start a business you just need any idea to start a business one of my core beliefs as it relates to business is that for most people your first three businesses are very likely to fail and that is a good thing because those three failed businesses will teach you the skills of how to actually build a business you learn learn business by creating a business and by attempting to make it work rather than by watching loads of videos watching loads of courses attending business school having a corporate

job these things you know they work to some degree but they don't really teach you the nuts and bolts of how to actually build a business it's sort of like riding a bike you could read all the books you like about riding a bike you could watch all the videos you want about riding a bike but unless you actually sit on a bike and try and pedal and realize oh okay you fall off a bunch of times and then eventually you learn how to ride a bike that is the only real way of learning how

to ride a bike it's the same thing in business there is this misconception that you need to have a good idea to get started that the bar for an idea is here but there's a good quote that I really like from entrepreneur James alterer which is that if you can't come up with 10 business ideas forget about coming up with 10 and instead come up with 20 business ideas like for example you watching this right now I'm imagining if you're watching this video that you actually want to start a business and there are various obstacles

that are holding you back and so if I were to ask you hey you know what's your best business idea you might be like I don't know because like the bar is so high but if I were to say okay your job in the next 10 minutes is to come up with 50 business ideas suddenly the bar gets lower and lower you might think oh my goodness I can possibly come up with 50 business ideas in 5 minutes or whatever the thing might be but if we imagine a thought experiment if you had a gun

to your head had to come up with 50 business ideas they could be as bad as you wanted them to be you just had to come up with 50 of them in the next 10 minutes you'd probably find a way to come up with 50 business ideas all that matters is that we reduce the bar for Quality the bar for what is a good idea because in a world where we know that our first three businesses are probably going to fail we don't really need to start off with a good idea in fact it's probably

best to not start with a very good idea idea because you can save that for when you actually know the skill of starting a business now at the point where you have some business ideas to share then you might like to check out this completely free business planning template that I've created in partnership with the wonderful team at Adobe Express who are kindly sponsoring this video and you can check out this template completely free by clicking on the link in the video description and this template walks you through the kind of stuff that I would

personally recommend you think about as it relates to starting your own business so we've got this slide which is the basic business idea template and you can duplicate this multiple times for various different business ideas we're focusing on step one who is the Target customer for the business step two what problem is your business solving and step three where are you going to find 10 Target customers to potentially pay you for your business idea once you've come up with a few business ideas using this format you can then dive into the more detailed section of

the template so we've got this slide which is specifically about the problem statement we've got a few prompts around the solution we've got a few prompts around the target market and here I'm holding up Alex M's wonderful book $100 million leads which is also very very good that you should read if you haven't read it already we've got some prompts around your unfair Advantage like what is it that gives you personally an edge in the space and then when you're ready to take action we've got this now not house which is terminology from my friend

Noah haan's wonderful book million dooll weekend and that asks things like what is the fastest way to test if someone will pay for this and what is the simplest version of the solution that you can test for example it might be something as simple as sending a WhatsApp message to tell of my friends and asking if they'd be willing to pay $1 to try the service out there is really something magical about getting that first customer getting that first person to actually give you real money for the thing and a common mistake people make is

trying to make too much money right at the beginning again your first three business ideas are probably going to fail but they're probably going to fail because you haven't found a way to validate demand and so we are really trying to optimize for Speed here what is the fastest way to test if someone will pay for this there's also a very helpful slide here which is the crystal ball method that I also talk about in my book but the idea here is that you imagine it's 3 months from now what are the top three reasons

why this business that you're starting doesn't go to plan and what actions can you take to mitigate against each of these risks then we have a slide for your distribution strategy your annual goals as it relates to your business using my GPS method your quarterly quests so an action plan you can make over the next 90 days and then if you like you can also use the weekly project part of the template to take action week on week so let's start with the first business idea and again this is the the sort of stuff that

I would actually be thinking about if I were trying to start a new business in terms of coming up with a business idea we want to start with a problem statement so people struggle with problem my business idea is to help them buy dot dot dot and we want to try and figure out like okay that is the format of a business idea and what's interesting is you'll notice that people comes first step one is the who I think a big mistake that people make when it comes to business ideas is that they focus on

the what or the how rather than the who but a business is not a business unless you've got customers that are willing to pay for it and so that's why we start with who so for me business idea number one might be a freelance video editing service now my people are let's say YouTubers I'm going to say YouTubers struggle with editing taking too much time this is my problem my business idea is to help them by offering an affordable efficient video editing service so that they can focus on content creation and the SE that they

can B is also quite important here because it's not just about the feature but it's also about the benefit it provides your customer so fleshing this out a little bit who's the Target customer for this business idea and so that might be small YouTubers under 50K Subs who want to grow but don't have time to edit their own videos while the problem at solving is is the struggle of videos taking way too long to edit and eating up the time they could be spending making more content or just having life outside of YouTube and then

where where are we going to find 10 of these Target customers to talk to about our business idea and so that could be through reaching out to small YouTubers via DMS on Twitter or Instagram or email or posting in YouTube related Facebook groups or browsing r/ YouTubers on Reddit and offering free sample edits like whatever that thing might be and this would be for example business idea number one this example of a local dogwalking service could be business idea number two and this for example might be business idea number three which is an Airbnb cleaning

and Management Service this template is based on the colors and the vibe of Feelgood productivity which is my book but you can of course like customize this template to your heart's desire based on your own Vibe or your own branding or just your own creativity for example I could create a new brand kit which is a premium feature I can then select whatever fonts I want and then I can hit apply brand and it'll apply those brand guidelines to my template if that's what I want to do and if I wanted to I could even

use some of the generative AI features so in this case I could generate an image of happy dogs being walked by an enterprising young man and here we go we've got a nice cute image for a dog walking Serv and so if you're using a template like this just for your own personal brainstorming it's just kind of fun to have some images but you can see the value of using something like Adobe Express if you're creating slides shows or pitch decks or brochures or anything like that anyway if you want to use this Adobe Express

template for your own business ideas then check out the link below and you can use it completely for free so thank you so much Adobe Express for sponsoring this video and let's get back to it relatedly gonzalo's point was also the fear of wasting time and money on a bad idea and that relates to myth number two that I would love to offer for your consideration which is that time spent on a business that fails is is time wasted this is actually a myth because for example it would be like saying man it was such

a waste of time those first few times I rode a bicycle because I fell off what a waste of time oh my goodness I never want to do that again that's not how it works right the fact that you fell off the bike the first few times you tried it was an investment of time that you needed to invest in order to learn the skills of riding said bike and so really I can understand where the fear comes from of like oh my god I've got a job already I've got all these things to do

and I don't want to waste my time I don't want to waste money I don't want to waste effort but every single thing that's an investment looks like a waste of time and effort and money at the start especially if the outcome of that thing is particularly uncertain and that's the thing with business I think school teaches us to aim for certainty like hey these are the things that you have to follow in order to get an A grade or whatever whatever the thing might be if you get this number of requirements of a grades

then you're going to be able to get into a university if you follow that curriculum at the University and tick these boxes then dot dot dot will happen and we grow up in this mindset of like I will only do something if I have a certainty of the outcome on the other side this is why often parents will say things like don't do a degree in music because like your chances of Landing a job are a lot less why don't you do a degree in accounting and finance instead because your chances of Landing a job

and accounting and finance a greater and unless you have particularly entrepreneurial parents if your parents are entrepreneurs they wouldn't be saying that at all most parents are not entrepreneurs most of the people around us are not entrepreneurs and so the default water that we as fish swim in is the water of I must optimize for certainty now there's an important caveat here in that there are some people in the world who do need to optimize for financial certainty and Financial Security if for example you have bills to to pay you have a family to feed

you have a mortgage etc etc and you need the financial certainty and Financial Security in order to put bread on the table for your children in that world it makes a lot of rational sense to optimize for certainty and Financial Security and then maybe in that world starting your own business might not necessarily make sense even in that world to be honest I would argue that like unless for example you're a doctor where you can basically guarantee employment for your whole life a lot of jobs are being disrupted AI is sort of taking over a

lot of things you actually I would argue in a lot of instances would have more Financial Security if you start your own business and take your economic engine into your own hands rather than expecting it to be handed to you by an employer but all that said I understand that there is a world in which some people genuinely are optimizing for Financial Security but the reason I'm saying this is because the thing that I see in a lot of people I know a lot of people I speak to and talks a lot of my friends

who want to start businesses but who are afraid to start businesses is that they are overestimating the degree of Financial Security they actually need they're often not on the poverty line we're not making that next paycheck means that the kids are going to starve they're often in a far more privileged situation than that and yet they are operating from this place of like oh God I need certainty I need security and again it's usually not a money thing it's usually there is some sort of emotional fear and scarcity underneath that desire to be financially secure

all of that said it comes back to this myth that time spent on a business that fails is time wasted it's a myth if we know that our first three businesses are probably going to fail my first six businesses failed before I built a business that was successful but I needed those six failures to learn the ropes a little bit I needed to fall off the bike a handful of times before I could actually build something that worked and all of those failures were not in fact failures they were not wasted time they weren't even

wasted money even though I didn't spend that much money on them they were learning opportunities they were a chance for me to invest in boosting my own skills and that brings us on to the third part of gonzalo's comment which is the fear of wasting money on a bad idea and that brings us on to myth number three which is that you need to spend money to start your first business this is again a myth of Entrepreneurship in a myth of business that we've been taught if you watch TV shows like Dragon's Den or shock

tank or things like that you will get all these entrepreneurs who are rocking up asking for investment in their business and so when someone thinks entrepreneur or someone thinks business they think oh my goodness I need an investor I need cash I need capital in order to start the business and I think a big reason for this is that when when most people think of the word business they actually think of a product business rather than a service business so if you look on Dragon Den all these TV shows where people are coming coming to

entrepreneurs and pitching their idea it's almost never a service that they're pitching they're not saying hey I've got a web design studio or I'm a freelance accountant and I do the accounting for small businesses in my local area that is not sexy that's really boring it's not glamorous it's not going to do well on TV it's also the sort of business that doesn't need investment the entrepreneurs that go on these TV shows are the ones who are building some Innovative new product oh I've built this new massage gun oh I've built this new blanket oh

I've built this new hot sauce these are product businesses they are building a physical thing usually and yes those usually do require Capital they usually require investment and that's why they're on this TV show to try and Pitch to investors but for the most part business is this absolutely enormous thing and in my opinion and in the opinion of a lot of entrepreneurs that I speak to your first business should not be a product business instead your first business should be a service business it's when you are selling your time and your skills rather than

you trying to build a product and there are plenty of service businesses you can start without actually having to spend any money at all you are simply investing time and let's do a little thought experiment here let's say you are 14 years old and it is the summer holidays you know think back to when it was the summer holidays when you were 14 and you were like man I've got to find a way to make some money what might you as a 14-year-old think to do to make some money you probably wouldn't be thinking damn

I really need some Capital to hire some developers to build an app you probably wouldn't be thinking damn I really need some startup money to be able to invent this new product you'd probably be thinking hm can I go on on local houses and offer to mow their lawn that is a service business it doesn't cost me as a 14-year-old anything to knock on different people's doors and say hey I noticed that your grass is a little bit overgrown have you got a lawn mower yeah great fantastic you want to pay me $5 $10 to

mow your loan for you they probably like yeah sure 14-year-old kind of cute why not I don't want to mow the loan myself I'm therefore paying for someone else to do it for me this is a service business let's say that 14-year-old then gets a little bit older you know this is what I did when I was like 16 17 I started offering private tutoring services to parents in my local area it did not cost me any money to private tutor someone in their math through English or science GCSE exams I just advertised my services

on a website called UK tutors and I got a couple of clients that way and so again I wasn't investing any money to start that business it was a service-based business where I was going around people's houses and tutoring the kids in how to pass their gcsec Physics Exam that is a service-based business and if I look through this community post there are so many responses from people saying that the one thing that's stopping them from starting a business is capital and that would only be true if the first business you want to start requires

intensive startup Capital but there are plenty of businesses as we've just talked about that you can start that don't require any of that Capital the 14-year-old version of you might be mowing lawns the 17-year-old version of you might be doing private tutoring the university grad version of you who did a degree in finance might be able to I don't know become like a financial controller for small businesses again offering a service to small businesses who will pay you for the service and all you need is a computer with an internet connection you do not need

money to start your first business in fact I would recommend that for your first couple of businesses you start businesses that do not require startup Capital let's talk about myth number four for which comes up a lot in these comments as well which is the myth that you need to go all in to start your first business there is a comment from eath S1 who says the thing that's stopping me is money of course if I'd secured 2 years of my expenses I would start right now they're saying man the only thing that's stopping me

is I just don't have two years worth of living expenses in the bank if I just had those in the bank then of course I would start my business that is also fear it's fear disguised as a what looks like a practical concern about money because broadly for the most part for your first business I wouldn't recommend you quit your job to start your business I would recommend doing it on the side as a bit of a side hustle do it for 20 minutes a day half an hour a day do it in 20 you

know wake up 20 minutes early and work on that business for the first 20 minutes of the day if you have a corporate job you're probably not working flat out for all like 8 9 10 hours of the day you could probably take a shorter lunch break if you really wanted to work on that business you could probably wake up a little bit earlier on a Saturday morning you still got all all weekend to like hang out with the family but you could put in two hours in the morning on a Saturday and a Sunday

morning while no one else is awake because the point of your first business is to learn not to earn and with that law that like the first three businesses are probably going to fail you want to get the failures under your belt pretty quickly and you don't need to quit your job and go all in working 60 hours a week on your first business in order to rack up the failures and to rack up the skill points that you're gaining through trying out these different businesses in fact for many people doing their businesses in the

context of having a day job makes it way easier because now you don't need to make all the money from it straight away you're not dipping into your savings you're not like having to worry about not being able to pay the mortgage because you're you haven't got money coming in from this new Venture you're just starting it on the side you're learning the skills and slowly trying to make money a little bit at a time I think another big myth that relates to all of this stuff is the myth that your first business needs to

give you everything I think a misconception a lot of people have is that you know when I start that business that's the business that's going to make me financially free it's the is the business that's going to be fun because I'm going to be doing something I'm passionate about it's the business that's going to feel fulfilling because I'm making a difference in the world it's a business that's going to give me time freedom and location Freedom I'll be able to work with people I love wherever I love being being able to do whatever I want

there's all this list of things of course you know if you have a six or seven figure lifestyle business like I do you have a lot of those things taken care of but this business that I've got is not my first business there's almost no entrepreneur I have ever met who has succeeded with their first business usually the first business is something really boring it's something you're not particularly excited about it's something that you really really really struggle with but it's something that helps you learn the skills and helps you make a little bit of

money and eventually when you get to the point of like after a couple of businesses you get to the point where you're able to make money in a way that's decorrelated with your time that tends to be the first major unlock because now you've unlocked freedom from the 9 to-5 freedom from the corporate job and so once you've secured that economic engine at that point you can start thinking okay cool what business am I really passionate about what's a business that like will really make a difference in the world but if you're trying to have

all of these different expectations for your very first business that's like saying I don't know it's like in the dating world you're like you know what I'm not even going to go on a first date unless I can guarantee that that person is going to be the person I marry they're also going to end up being my business partner they're also going to end up being my therapist it's like you've got all of these unrealistic expectations that's stopping you from even going out on that first date as everyone knows that like you know you meet

a bunch of people you're going to dates you see what you like you see what you don't like you see who you Vibe with probably the first person you're in a relationship with is not the person you're going to end up marrying on average for most people in the same way most people don't end up doing the first business that they start for the rest of their lives and I think a lot of these people in the comments people who are afraid to start the first business are just putting way too much expectation on it

my very first business was doing freelance web design when I was like 13 years old my next business was trying to build a shitty website that was sort of a pyramid multi-level marketing scheme back when I was like 14 15 years old the business after that was this private fing stuff where I was making like $100 a week I tried building a business when I was in school that was helping teenagers learn like spy skills like lockpicking and like martial arts on some online Forum that completely flopped then when I got into med school I

built a business that was helping other people get into med school and that worked reasonably well I tried a bunch of other different business ideas some of them were even documented on my YouTube channel I tried building an app early on in back in 2017 completely flopped even within the context of my current business there are so many things that we've tried that haven't really worked and if me or any of my entrepreneur friends had had that idea at the start that like man this first business I start you know it's got to work it's

got to have certainty it's got to give me all the money the fund the freedom flexibility the Fulfillment it's got to be meaningful blah blah blah all of that kind of stuff we just never would have gotten started at all and we'd still be working in corporate jobs and being really scared that AI is going to be disrupting the whole thing so really if there is one message in this video then that message is if you've been wanting to start a business but you haven't yet I suspect your bar is too high you just got

to lower the bar man you just got to think that your first three businesses are probably going to fail in the same vein as when I started a YouTube channel it's helpful to have the rule that my first 50 videos are going to be terrible but that's okay because in the process of making those first 50 videos I will learn the art and the science and the skills of video making so that maybe video number 51 will finally be worth someone's time to watch in the same vein it's very useful to have the mental model

that my first three businesses are going to fail and the point of those businesses is to teach me the skills of Entrepreneurship so that when I actually have a good idea I'm able to actually execute on that idea because you can have the best idea in the world right now but unless you've started a business it's probably not going to work various people have the idea for Uber you know you probably thought 10 15 20 years ago they're like man it's kind of annoying that I have to call up a taxi and you know whatever

I I wish I could just order a taxi from my phone that's a pretty good idea but like loads and loads and loads and loads of people had that idea ideas are a dime a doesn't the idea is not the thing that stops your business from starting it's the execution and the thing that's stopping the execution is the fact that you just haven't done it before the more you do it the more you get on that bike and fall off the more you realize what it feels like to ride a bike the more you realize

what it feels like to start and grow your own business and eventually you might get to the point 15 years later into that Journey where people then ask asking you for advice and you'll see all of these different obstacles that are holding people up you'll see all these people around you saying oh man I don't have enough money to start oh there's too much competition in the market oh you know I'm just like uh like like all of these all of these different excuses and you'll you'll recognize where they're coming from because you'll see yourself

in those excuses and you'll be so glad that you took those first steps to start that first business despite not having certainty this whole thing this whole game of business is a game of being comfortable with uncertainty and being comfortable with discomfort we are so addicted to certainty we're so addicted to like making sure that like oh if I'm I'm only going to do that thing if it's getting me points on my CV further down the line we're so addicted to that that like we just don't take the interesting risks and do the interesting things

where there's some amount of uncertainty going on a date is always a little bit uncertain trying a new hobby is always a little bit uncertain starting a business is always a little bit uncertain but if you can get through that uncertainty if you can be comfortable with it if you can surf the wave of the uncertainty that is where the learning is happening and that's where you build up the skills that no one else is building up because they're too afraid of taking that first step and just as a reminder you've got the totally free

Adobe Express template that you can download that gives you all of the prompts that I would recommend when it comes to thinking about your first couple of business ideas if you've gotten value from this video then you might like to check out this video over here which is my honest advice to someone who wants Financial Freedom and that is a conversation I had with a friend of mine that sort of touches on similar themes um but you might find that interesting and there's a bunch of different like book and podcast recommendations on that video as

well so thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time