Making Money Online | 3 Step Progression for New Entrepreneurs
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As my boy Ronnie Coleman once said, “Everybody want to be an entrepreneur but don’t nobody want to do no heavy ass work.” True story. Ain’t nothing but a peanut. What’s going on guys, Dr. Jubbal, MedSchoolInsiders.com. Let’s talk about entrepreneurship and more specifically how you can get started as an entrepreneur. Figure out if it’s the right thing for you and hopefully be very successful.
First of all, let me start by saying that entrepreneurship is very much over-glorified. It’s not all about these crazy houses and beautiful women and fancy cars. It’s just a lot of hard work. In fact, if you’re used to working a nine-to-five, maybe forty or fifty hours a week, you’re gonna be working a lot harder as an entrepreneur just that’s just the nature of the game. And it’s not for everyone. I’m definitely by no means saying that everyone should be an entrepreneur. It takes a lot of risk, so if you’re risk-averse, maybe not for you. It also really requires a lot of self-directed learning and motivation. You need to have that internal locus of motivation because no one’s forcing you to go do work, right? You need to be working on it on your own accord and oftentimes there’s things that you just don’t want to do. Because entrepreneurship isn’t all fun and games, there’s a lot of things in business that just aren’t fun.
Dealing with legal stuff, dealing with unhappy customers, all that jazz. Now, I’m no expert. I’ve been doing this for a couple years and I’ve had my share of successes, but also definitely my share of failures. And in the podcast, which I swear we’re gonna be releasing soon – I just – we haven’t really edited and packaged the podcast nicely, but we’ve been recording, you know, 10 plus episodes. I talked about one of these previous mistakes and how I lost close to a thousand dollars last year from a business mistake which taught me lessons, right.
In the moment, I was furious. I was like “Oh my God, this is so dumb, why is this happening”, and then, you know reflected on it and learned about leadership and learned about management styles and learned about different lessons I could learn to reduce the likelihood of this happening again in the future. And I’m grateful because I’ve learned these things now for the price of you know, eight hundred and fifty dollars or whatever it was, rather than me learning that mistake, maybe a few years later with a million dollars or just a larger – larger stakes. That being said I like to think that I have been doing some things right. Med School Insiders has grown insanely quickly.
We’ve had over a thousand customers in just over a year, and the business is doing quite well. Now, if you want to get involved with entrepreneurship, I recommend you take this linear progression – which we’re going to be talking about and outlining in this video. And I say that for two reasons number one is you’re going to learn several important skills that are gonna set you up for later success not only in entrepreneurship but even in the workforce just understanding the ins and outs of how businesses work, the dynamics between people things like that. And then number two is building confidence. So they say you can fake it till you make it which isn’t necessarily the worst way of doing things, but I don’t think it’s always the best.
Because you open up the possibility of imposter syndrome and things like that. Whereas if you build confidence from taking small risks and overcoming small obstacles and then taking slightly larger risks with slightly larger obstacles, you keep building from there. You’re gonna have a much more sustainable way of building your confidence. You’re gonna have a much more accurate assessment of where your confidence level should be, rather than being way overconfident or way underconfident because you’re just faking it until you make it in which case that’s kind of hard to calibrate. So those are the two reasons I think this is the best approach. So first off we’re gonna start with the side hustle. Now, this is just where you’re getting your feet wet. You don’t want to go all in immediately. You’re not gonna quit your nine-to-five, you’re not gonna quit school just to start working on your – your dropshipping business, but you’re gonna be learning skills.
One of the beautiful things about living in this modern-day and age in 2019 is you can just start a business like that. It’s really that easy. So whether it’s starting on Instagram or YouTube or you want to create a website for just a few dollars or do dropshipping e-commerce or whatever it is, the upfront cost and investment is very very low. We’re just – you deciding what it is that you want to do.
In the medical space whether you’re pre-med, med student, resident, attending, the whole like social media aspect is very popular so usually, Instagram is the platform of choice and people create a following there and then they can monetize that later. You can also do that on YouTube. Outside of the medical space, a lot of people like e-commerce. Because e-commerce is your – your selling physical goods and you know, Alibaba dropshipping, you get these goods from China you sell them in the US for a markup, you make a profit. That being said, I think it’s also important to understand what is your unique gift. So for me, I was obsessed with optimizing my study strategies and my time efficiency during college, during medical school, during residency, to the point that I felt that I was an expert that could teach other people and then I started the YouTube channel at the end of Medical School and it grew from there. I’m passionate about a lot of things. I love racing cars. I’m getting into cycling, I have my bike right here inside on my indoor trainer, I have been lifting weights, but you don’t see me giving advice about like how to be a bodybuilder or how to be a pro cyclist because that’s not my area of expertise.
The other thing is note that this phase is really just about learning. Many people that get involved with e-commerce they think that “oh, I’m gonna make so much money”. Here’s the thing man, because it’s low barrier to entry which is fantastic for people who want to learn about entrepreneurship, the downside of that is that competition is way high. So as a result, It’s like a race to the bottom. And you’re not really gonna be innovating and – and having this really comfortable and go “Oh yeah, I started this business, we’re selling stuff things are going great.”, It’s – other people are constantly gonna be coming in pushing your margins lower and lower. It’s not really a business model that is – I think optimized for long term growth and success.
However, if you’re optimizing for learning, it’s fantastic because you’re learning the basics of business, you’re learning the basics of selling goods offering value things like that. So if you have this focus of learning the skills and proper principles rather than just like, “oh I got to make money”, then you’re gonna come out on top. No matter what happens whether or not your business is successful by the traditional means you’re going to be learning things and coming out ahead. So the supplement I recommend you read a couple books. Number one would be Zero to One by Peter Thiel, one of the biggest names in the startup game. And he’s really focusing on the big picture principles that make startups successful. He actually contradicts a lot of the traditional advice you hear about startups and it’s very insightful. He’s a brilliant guy. He knows what he’s talking about. The other book is The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. Now these two books they actually offer contradicting advice but it’s good to know the different schools of thought to understand the pros and cons of each approach.
So that book is more about like the tactical advice, the nitty-gritty about creating a proper startup. And we’ll talk about the differences between startups and small businesses shortly, but that book I found very instrumental in my second business that I’m working on, which is a learning tool and if you want to get involved then sign up for the Med School Insiders newsletter. We will be sending details there on how you can apply if you want to give it a little test drive. Now secondly, there are other resources beyond just books. Number one is Y Combinator’s Youtube Series. Y Combinator is essentially the world’s like number one incubator. So an incubator is an organization that helps to create startups, and Y Combinator is like the biggest name in the game. And they have this amazing series of YouTube lectures which is free. I think they were initially – the first series was at Stanford now they have a second series as well. All 100% free, all very very high quality and I’ve been using these YouTube videos myself as I’m building this second learning tool business. Another one I like is indie hackers, which is a website, also a podcast.
It’s essentially a group, a community of startup founders, small business owners that want to learn from one another and it’s just a very collaborative and helpful environment that I appreciate and the podcast also have some good actionable advice. All right, so let’s move on to number two. You’ve been working on your side hustle a little bit. It’s now time to consider your different options. So first of all, do you enjoy working on your side hustle? If not, then probably not a good fit for you. But if you are enjoying it like the big picture, there’s always gonna be a few things that you don’t like, If you are enjoying it, then maybe you wanna take it to the next level. Number one, you can start outsourcing to do things you don’t want to do.
So for me video editing is not something I love doing. So I’ve outsourced that. Maybe there’s some administrative tasks that you’d rather not be doing, you can hire a virtual assistant for that as well. And this is maybe also the time when you wanna start thinking about monetizing. Don’t make the mistake a lot of people make which is monetizing too soon and cheapening your brand and just taking money from -from anyone. Like “Oh, you’ll give me money, you’ll give me money. Sure I’ll work with you. Like I don’t care like if you’re – you know killing children or doing anything shady like yeah, sure I’ll just take your money.” Don’t do that be very deliberate in who you work with who you associate with, because otherwise, you’re just gonna cheapen your own brand you’re gonna water things down. Be selective, otherwise, it reflects poorly on you and your business. If the side hustle is working out, by all means, push full steam ahead.
And if not consider the other business options. This is also the time when you want to start thinking about the direction you want to take your business. There are two main business categories that people are trying to optimize for. These aren’t the only two options but these are the main options that most people are considering. Number one is a lifestyle business. Lifestyle business, think of Tim Ferriss the 4-hour workweek so you want to build a business that essentially kicks off passive income every single month and you don’t have to really work on it that much. You’re no longer trading your time for money. The main benefit is you’re not working and you’re still making money. The main drawback is that you aren’t able to on average make as much money, but that ceiling can still be very high.
I know some friends who are making seven figures working only a few hours per month. So it’s definitely possible. The second option is the startup the often over-glorified of the two. And the startup is when you are really optimizing for rapid growth. You’re usually going to seek out funding from venture capitalists, angel investors things like that. You’re looking to use that money to grow rapidly and then gonna exit. Either an IPO or you’re gonna get acquired or you gonna liquidate, whatever it is. This is usually going to result, assuming that you’re successful, in a bigger payoff at the end. But it’s a lot more work in terms of your grinding really really really hard, and it’s gonna be really stressful because you got these investors breathing down your neck who are really pushing, you know a certain direction of the company. It’s just gonna be way more stressful. One of the things that I like about this path though is that you can work on one business, then exit, and then work on the next one and for me and I think for a lot of entrepreneurs, that art of the start, you know building something new is one of the most exciting parts of entrepreneurship.
Now, we’re onto part number three which is to commit. You have three main options. So option number one, you don’t really like entrepreneurship kind of given up on the side hustle, It was fun-ish while it lasted but not really for me. I’m gonna go back to my nine-to-five. Totally fine. Option number two is, I’m gonna keep working on my side hustle as just a side hustle, It’s not really something I want to do full-time and I don’t think entrepreneurship for me, full-time is a good fit. This is totally fine but know that you are making a trade-off and I trade-off is that, you could grow the business faster if you quit and work on it full-time. That’s just – just the nature of time. Because everyone has 24 hours in a day, and if you put more time and effort into your business you can grow it faster. However, you can still grow your business and be successful even though you are holding on to your full-time job. Just know that the growth of your business will be slower.
And the third and final option, the option that I took is to quit and put it all on the line. Very scary and I was there not too long ago. Just last year. But the way I see it is life is too short and I am in no way saying that I didn’t like plastic surgery, I’ve loved it. It is the coolest like by far the coolest specialty in all of Medicine.
Obviously, I’m biased and I loved it and I worked so so hard to get there. I don’t think I really got that across in previous videos. How hard I work to get there. There were dark moments, there were like a lot of blood sweat and tears to get into pause security residency. And then I quit, I “threw it away” as people like to say.
But the way I see it life is too short to have these big what-ifs. And if I was to be a plastic surgeon, which is a noble career and you’re helping a lot of people whether you’re doing reconstructive or even cosmetic, It’s not really something that I saw changing the world, you know at the end of the day you are a surgeon and you can sure you can invent like a new surgical procedure but that’s very – that’s like increasingly rare as new things are already being innovated. And I’m talking about surgical procedures, right? I’m still very interested in the medical devices which I don’t think you have to be necessarily a surgeon to innovate in and nothing wrong with being a physician or a surgeon or anything like that.
It’s a fantastic field but based on my interest and what I thought was best for me and for the world, I thought that pursuing entrepreneurship is more aligned with my long-term vision. Now, a second thing that helped me make this really difficult decision, and the reason I push this linear progression is because I’ve built the confidence to- to say, “Okay I can do this, I can do entrepreneurship even though it is risky.” You know, I started Blue LINC and that grew very quickly. And then I started Med School Insiders and that grew very quickly and I believe that I could think of other ideas and work on other projects and hopefully take those to fruition as well.
Now the third thing is confronting fear. And if you are to do something like this, it’s just natural. It’s human nature to be very fearful, it’s high-risk. And one of the exercises that I did that was very helpful for me was doing the fear setting exercise which Tim Ferriss talks about in one of his TED talks. And one fear that comes up for most people is what are people going to think, right? And that’s only natural because if you look back at hunter-gatherer times, we’ve evolved to really care what other people think of us, because in a small hunter-gatherer society if you’re ostracized and people hate you, your reproductive fitness just declines very rapidly. You’re not really passing on your genes. But in this day and age in modern society doesn’t really matter and we over prioritize what other people think of us because of our evolutionary circuitry.
But when you write it down when you put that fear on paper, whether it’s what other people think or whatever your fear may be you are able to kind of look at it more objectively and not have it consume you and not color your vision. And then you can say, “Oh wait, you know what? that’s kind of a silly fear.” Because at the end of the day the people that mean a lot to me are still gonna be there for me and If, you know, some acquaintances or some friends or some co-workers don’t like my decision and judge me and are negative about it, then they’re just weren’t meant to be in my life.
And that’s totally fine. Anyways, guys. I hope you found that video useful. Let me know with a thumbs up. It really helps keep the YouTube gods happy. Let me know with a comment down below what other topics you want me to cover within entrepreneurship. Thank you all so much for watching and I will see you guys in the next one..
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