Hello, I hope all is well. I am an 18 year old that is looking to start a business. I have dipped into the service providing area in July where I was supposed to make websites for people but I ended up doing a free trial creating videos for a possible client. I ended up stopping that. Wasn’t leading me to earning income.

My main question here is, what would you tell your 18 year old self to start? I truly like the idea of having an online business. I am in Computer Science at the moment for school and I was thinking of getting into saas. But I also see tons of different videos on different businesses to start. I just want to mention, I do not have shiny object syndrome. I am just interested in starting & getting advice from anyone.

Also, one thing I see often is, dropshipping, smma(which I tried to go in on), trading and Amazon fba. I see this everywhere. I don’t know if truly you can make a large sum of income from it or it’s just the courses that help them.

I started learning about business at 15 where I started a YouTube automation channel and later stopped that. Then got into cutting hair for others. And ever since I have turned 18 I have been learning a lot more on stocks, credit, as well as retirement plans. But truly retirement isn’t my end goal. I just like idea of working towards something.

So if anyone that is in the business areas I have mentioned I’d be open to hear your perspective from it and any perspective from others as well.

  • willslater99@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    Wouldn’t have mattered, 18 year old me wouldn’t have listened.

    Don’t bother with the Amazon FBA, dropshipping, etc type thing, truth is yes you can make money with all of them, but no more so than any other business.

    The simple fact of things is that the best business you can do is the one someone will pay YOU for.

    I run a marketing agency that works exclusively with SaaS Startups, (not a highlevel based SMMA, a proper one), but I don’t do that because Youtube told me to, it’s because I worked in marketing exclusively at multiple different startups before that, all of which either exited or received funding while I was there. I got good at knowing what SaaS will do well, what won’t and what type of marketing works in the most cost effective way. Doesn’t mean I know everything about SaaS marketing, but because of my experience I have a disproportionate unfair advantage compared to the majority of marketers or agency owners. As a result, I now a little over a year later have 4 members of staff, regular clients and pay myself a decent income. I’m not crazy rich, but we’re growing exponentially.

    People focus way too hard on the type of business, when actually it usually works the other way round. The type of business shouldn’t decide what you learn, what you know should decide the type of business.

    Think about your experience, and try and picture this. What Business would make people who know you go ‘well of course they’re doing well, compendiousbeing is running it no one can compete with that’. Might be something related to automation, or hairdressing, or computer science, or maybe if you can’t think of anything you need to spend more time learning, but basically dig deep, what is your ‘Unfair advantage’, the thing that most other people would need to study for months or years just to get to the knowledge level you possess today?

    Fastest way to get a leg up, so the fastest way to get towards profits.

      • willslater99@alien.topBEnglish
        1·
        10 months ago

        Early on, sold to my previous employers, then a few that I did freelance work for, then I started working consistently on social media talking about the topic and interacted with people who interacted with my posts, and then with a bit of budget to play with started with Paid Search, then with a bit more budget setup retargeting ads on various platforms.

        When I’ve got the budget, I’ll choose to do it through marketing, when I don’t it goes back to the old school method of pulling up your black book and seeing who’s buying. If you ain’t got a black book, go make one.