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Sagi Shrieber interviews mega-successful creative entrepreneurs about the strategies, tactics, and mindset needed in order to flourish in all areas in life.
The deep and diverse interviews here offer practical tips and strategies, from entrepreneurship to health and wellness, personal development, and spirituality.
2 Ways To Start A Business When You Don’t Have Any Funds
Hey, what's up everybody? So we just started opening our doors for mentoring. So if you're in Israel and you want to jump by our office and come, accompany us for lunch. So my partner and I got, and we are now accompanying people that can come and ask us questions about business or life or just how to start your career and whatever you wanna ask us about.
We're here and we are open to help. And one person came to us today and he was like an artist and he wants to develop his business as an artist, but he is like a very talented artist, but at the moment, his art is not selling. So I just wanted to share some of the insights that we gave, and again, we're not giving advice that people should actually go for. We're just one voice that you're gonna listen to along your journey, right?
And so what we told them is, okay, so first of all, you have your art and you wanna make it work, that's great. But at the moment, you also need to focus on “how are you gonna fund the artwork?” and everything that you're doing. Because if you don't do that, it's not gonna work or it's gonna be very stressful.
And so, I was in a situation in my life a couple of times in recent years where I wanted to do one thing and pursue this new business direction and explore if that's actually a valid thing. But I couldn't really commit to it because it's not bringing in income and so I had to make sure that I can fund it. Now that I can say that I self-funded Affirmations & Co. and I've been self-funding my podcast for a long while and the business around Commit First.
I've been doing that through my business as a design agency and if I wouldn't have had this design agency, which use my superpowers to serve other people, I wouldn't be able to self-fund an app and self-fund a podcast, which by the way, it's a lot of budget to self-fund this whole like social media thing, alright and I wouldn't be able to grow it in the direction that I want to.
And again, it comes to the long-term vision cuz when you have that long-term vision, you can actually do it. If you don't have that long-term vision, then you're stuck. You can chase your own tail. So one direction is to self-fund it, bootstrap it, work your way, build a business around your superpowers.
Take gigs and Upwork if you can, on Fiverr, go for referrals, right? Like for our agency, by the way, if someone refers a client to us, we give them a lifetime referral fee. Every single month as long as this client is working with us, we give them referral fees. So if one person brings us side clients, we are actually going to get them a lot of passive income with them not needing to work for us.
All they do is now, they keep working on what they want to work on. So there's probably a lot of businesses that supply the same kind of referral fee, and therefore you can go for them, or you can build a business and say, I'm going to work on my business skills. I'm actually going to build a business, and those skills that I'm acquiring while building my business are going to serve art or whatever it is I wanna pursue, like to build a business in the future.
Because if you have that long-term vision, then you know what you need to do now, if you don't have the long-term vision and all you want to do now is your gut feeling, which is I'm going to work on my art or on this new direction, which is not going to bring me money, probably around like the upcoming months or even years, then you're not doing the right thing.
Play the long game. This is a marathon and not a sprint, and always remember that and take extreme ownership of the oxygen, which is the cash flow in order to bootstrap whatever it is you want to bootstrap, right? So I hope this makes sense. Take it wherever you want. Oh, and the other thing we just told him is there's another route you can get investment, right?
But that means you're putting all your focus right now, finding an investor on meeting and pitching investors and getting some funds in to fund your operation, right? Like a startup like a lot of companies do, which is okay. You can do that, but just know your focus is going to go on finding investors and basically getting them to commit to your idea and to actually put money down and support you, and they're gonna own a part of your company, like a huge chunk of your company.
Probably if you're at the beginning phase and you haven't made a dime out of your company and you haven't really validated even your product or whatever it is, it's gonna be really hard to bring investors into something which is not validated. Those are the two ways you can go, you can bootstrap, or you can get investment.
I'm a bootstrapper. Most of the time I've been bootstrapping my businesses. I haven't brought any investments in ever, maybe for the first startup, but it wasn't actually me, it was my partners. But this is where you can choose to go.
I am a bootstrapper by heart. If I bring money in, it would be out of the pure necessity of bringing an investor in because it's a strategic move, or I have figured out the product market fit and now you know I can grow. This is why you bring investment in, mostly.
Yeah, hope that makes sense. And if you have any questions, feel free to add any comment to write to me and if you're in Israel and you want to jump by for lunch, hey, send me a DM and we'll coordinate that. Alright, cheers!
Hey guys, what's up? Sagi here. I hope you enjoyed this episode, and if you did, please rate us on Apple Podcast and on Spotify. It only takes a second. And remember, this podcast is brought to you by Affirmations & Co, the app for affirmations.
If you want to change your life, if you wanna crush the meeting beliefs, if you wanna change your inner chatter, you need affirmations. I use affirmations on a daily basis, and that's why I created this app. In the app, you can set reminders to have your affirmations sent to you via push notifications. In the app you can set widgets on your iPhone or on your device. In the app, you can follow me and other creators and entrepreneurs, and basically you can see my affirmations and with one tap, you make them your own. Let's build with each other. Let's build on top of each other and help each other grow together. So get Affirmations & Co.
You go to affirmations.co. You'll have the download links, or just go to your favorite app store and search Affirmations & Co. All right guys, thank you so much and see you next.