Your Move: The Underdog’s Guide to Building Your Business

by Ramit Sethi

But it’s critical that you first narrow it down to the people who could potent...

Dig Into Their Hopes, Fears,...

I already gave you the 4 simplest words you can use to get people to talk: “Tell me about that.” Here are some other simple but effective questions to dig into their problems: What’s going on? Ho...

In other words, you’re looking for people to explain their hopes, fears and dreams to you. For example, you might hear someone say: “I’m so frustrated in my career. I just feel stuck, I feel like every year I get passed over for a promotion and the guy that they just hired, he’s five yea...

use his exact words for a variety of things: sales copy, blog posts, ...

your job is to dig deeper: Tell me more. Who is this guy? What’s it feel like to be passed over again and again? And if he trusts you — if you are truly asking these questions because you authentically believe you can help him solve ...

You want to get to know their hopes, fears and dreams. You want to get at the very evocative things people are feeling inside.

The best part is, THEY WANT TO TELL YOU. They want to get this off their chest, IF you’re willing to listen.

Chris is an engineer who wrote about different problems he solved in a blog. Occasionally, he’d email these findings out to his list. He didn’t have anything to sell, in fact, he only linked back to his website in one spot — in the footer, below his signature. “I just put a link to my site there, and I kind of forgot about it.” He started getting email replies back from people, who said they read his blog and thought it was amazing. Then they started offering him consulting work. “It was totally insane. It happened 4 or 5 times where people would say, ‘Hey, I clicked on the link in your footer. Like, I was totally geeking out on your blog. I have this problem with my business. Can you help me out?’” Chris was offered a total of $35,000 in consulting fees… from a tiny email list of 16 people, because he knew the exact hopes, fears and dreams of his audience.

Be Selective of Who You Serve

You choose who you serve.

That attitude inspires me — to be able to run my business the way I want, and to be able to choose the customers I want to work with. To sacrifice short-term revenue to create a business I am proud of.

By being selective, we can narrowly target the wants and needs of our market with pinpoint accuracy, and create products they WANT to buy.

Marshall Goldsmith, one of the world’s top executive coaches, put it to me this way: “Your biggest challenge [is] customer selection. You pick the right customer, you win. You pick the wrong customer, you lose. Focus on helping great people get better.”

In our experience, business is the most fun (and most profitable) when you focus on helping great people get better.

4. Field Report: Nobody’s a “Natural Entrepreneur” by Danny Margulies

My website, FreelancetoWin.com, has generated over $230,000 in the past 12 months. It wasn’t magic. It didn’t happen overnight. I didn’t meditate for hours hoping to “get in touch with myself.”

Mindset shift #1: There’s no such thing as a “natural” entrepreneur

It’s not a superpower. It’s a skill. Figuring that out is the first step every true entrepreneur needs to take.

start reading as much as you can about successful entrepreneurs’ histories, paying particular attention to where they started, what they were doing before they “made it,” and any failures they encountered along the way.

Steve Jobs once said, “Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you.”

Mindset shift #2: Mistakes are good

But successful entrepreneurs love making mistakes, because it teaches them what to avoid in the future.

Some ways that have helped me overcome my fear of making mistakes: Focus more on being decisive and less on trying to make the “right” decision. You’ll never know until you try, and if you’re wrong, you can always try again.

For irreversible decisions, try to protect yourself from losses. For example, imagine spending $5,000 on advertising, or giving away 50% of your equity to an investor. Unlike the previous example, you can’t just change your mind if these decisions don’t work out in your favor. So you need to be more conservative with these types of “bets.” For this reason, guest blogging is my favorite way to build an online business — it’s free, and anyone can do it.

And if you do make a mistake, go over it carefully to make sure you don’t repeat it. The key is to figure out exactly what went wrong. Was your plan built on flawed assumptions? Did you execute poorly? Was it a failure of the last mile? Once you figure out the answers, you always win, regardless of the immediate outcome.

Mindset shift #3: Focus on giving...

Successful entrepreneurs don’t focus on themselves — they focus on helping others.

It doesn’t have to be hard. Think about problems you’ve overcome in your career or personal life. Did you train your dog to walk without a leash? Are you ridiculously productive at work? Do you have 20 awesome hacks for overcoming anxiety?

Once you verify that others also have these problems, teach them how to solve them.

Make sure to follow up with the people you’ve helped, too. Once they’ve achieved measurable success, you know you have a proven system that you can confidently charge people to learn.

To become an entrepreneur, think like one.

Part 2: Focusing on the Right Things

The answer is that most of us — and most beginners — focus on the wrong things. We worry about minutiae that won’t change a thing and mentally exhausts us.

In this section, I want you to focus on internalizing the idea of focusing on the right things.

5. Being Different: The Art of Standing Out from the Crowd

The world wants you to be vanilla. They will always push you to look and act the same as everyone else.

In a world full of websites and e-books and apps, the moment you look and sound like everyone else, you’re dead.

Avoid The Commodity Economy

When we let ourselves and our businesses become vanilla, when we try to appeal to everyone, we instantly become a commodity.

It’s scary to say “No.” It’s scary to pass when everyone else is doing it, and potentially close the door on lucrative opportunities. Most of our lives, we’ve been taught to stick with the herd and not to stand out.

Michael said, “It's not great advice if you want to be excellent, because by definition, excellence is sticking out from the herd. It's excelling ahead of everyone else.”

That’s the way your business wins in a world of vanilla. By standing out.

Whatever your business, chances are you’re facing tons of competitors. And standing out is the only way you can compete.

Focus on Your Customers, Not Your Competition

How can she stand out in such a crowded market?

First, think deeply and differently: What are all the other issues when it comes to yoga that she could talk about? Of course, you have to cover the basic poses and stretching. That’s the cost of admission. But what else?

How about… getting your boyfriend or girlfriend to join you in your practice? What about nutrition? What ...

There are a million different ways to approach any topic. The key is: Instead of focusing on the competition, focus on your audience. Who is your audience, and what do they want that they are not being served right now?

What you can do is take your special insight and your perspective on the world, and serve their needs. That’s how you build a business that stands out from all the rest.