photo credit: pfala
Adam McFarland, is the 26 year old founder of Pure Adapt, a company that designs, develops, markets, and operates e-commerce stores and other websites in an array of industries. Here’s his advice for funding your first business:
- Get a non-career job where you can work 30 – 40 hours/week and make enough money to live off of. It might not impress your parents, but that job bartending or waiting tables or being a barista or bank teller is going to afford you the opportunity to do what you truly want.
- Pick a potential business idea…then start a related service for under $100. Let’s say you’re like me and want to run lots of successful web apps. Starting a web app from scratch and building it to a point where it brings in solid revenue is very difficult and many times doesn’t work out. Instead, start a web design business first. $100 gets you some business cards, a simple website, and a Skype phone number. Throw and ad on Craigslist, work Twitter and Facebook, go to a few local networking events, and whatever else it takes to get your first clients for free. For more ideas, check out my post How To Do Client Work Right that I wrote just after we got rid of the service side of our business.
- Use the remaining time to work on your “ideal” business. If you still want to build that web app, take advantage of all of the free time that you have to slowly-but-surely build it without the stress of needing it. Build something that has true value to people, even if it takes a year or two to do it. The more stress, the more you need a web app to succeed, the more likely you are to press and make drastic changes instead of being patient. Great websites take years and years to build.
- Pump profits from your service into growing your “ideal” business. Since you are living off of your job, you can “reward” yourself by spending some or all of your service profit on growing the web app.