While you might think it’s not a great idea to start a business in the middle of a global pandemic, the extra time we have while sheltering at home for at least a few more months is a great time to turn your daydream into a real business. If you’re like the 26% of people who are motivated to start their own business so they can be their own boss, 2021 is going to be your year.
If you’ve ever had anybody tell you not to quit your day job in favor of your daydream, we’re here to tell you that you can merge them both. In 2021, you can keep your daydream. Here’s how to turn it into an enriching, exciting, lucrative business.
Assess the market need
According to the study above, the number one reason most startups fail is that there’s no market need. Before deciding to turn your personal and professional lives upside down, make sure you understand how marketable your daydream is. Or, if it’s not something that you can sell directly, get creative about how you can turn your passion into a career.
For example, if your dream is to open a restaurant but you feel that now isn’t a good time for that, try starting with a cooking show on YouTube, a food delivery service, or virtual 1-on-1 classes about how to create your recipes. There are a million and one ways to turn whatever you love into something marketable; you just have to know how to spin it the right way.
Decide if it’s right for you
This is a big one that’s best if you tackle straight from the start. Are you ready to keep your daydream and live it 24/7? You might love taking photos on the weekends and editing them in your spare time, but are you prepared to live and breathe photography as your sole source of income?
Often, when something becomes a “job,” it takes the fun out of it just a little bit. Like anything important in life, it’s going to take some hard work and perseverance if you want to make it work. So, make sure you feel okay with the idea of turning a daydream into a job and consider how that’ll affect your level of passion and drive.
Create a presence online
If you’ve decided that you’d like to go ahead and keep your daydream, turn it into a business, and become wildly successful, you’ll have to start somewhere. Regardless of what your daydream is, you absolutely need to have an online presence. Whether you’re creating a small marketing agency, want to create a taco truck, or are interested in selling artwork, you’ll need, at the very minimum, a website for your business and a professional phone number.
Depending on the business and the nice that it’s in, you might also need social media. But, a website is a crucial component of any successful business in today’s digital age. If you’re unsure how to optimize your website, here are some helpful SEO tips for new entrepreneurs.
Set yourself up with the right tools
Aside from a website and a professional phone number for your brand new business, you’ll need quite a few other tools as well. From productivity software to design tools, bringing your daydream to life will require that you get organized. Here are just a few that we recommend.
Organizational tools
If you’ve been working a 9 to 5 up until now, you probably already know of a few useful business tools you’d like to use. We suggest creating a separate Google Drive for your new business venture and using Asana, Trello, or Airtable as a way to organize your projects and tasks. Organize video calls and schedules via Google Meet or Zoom and open a Slack account once you start to hire third-party services or bring on other people full-time.
Productivity tools
Learning to be your own boss is fun until you realize that you’re responsible for staying on top of literally everything. Productivity tools can help, including Shift for organizing your workspace, RescueTime for time tracking, Calendly for scheduling, and Zapier to manage and automate specific online processes.
We also suggest getting a Burner phone number as a way to help you separate your new work life from your personal life. With Burner, you’re able to create an entirely separate number to use for work (or anything else) while also segmenting contacts by color and connecting business apps like Slack and Evernote.
Marketing tools
From social media marketing to email marketing and general business marketing, there are quite a few tools that any small business needs when it comes time to market their services or products to the world. For social media, we recommend checking out Buffer or Hootsuite (neither of which are totally free, unfortunately). For email marketing, MailChimp is easy to use for beginners. And, for designing marketing assets, Canva is a fantastic resource.
Stop listening to other people
Still not sure how to keep your daydream and turn it into something profitable and pursuable? Our biggest advice is to stop listening to other people. Seek out the people you trust to help support you on your journey and then find others who have also taken the leap into entrepreneurship to guide you. Everybody else? Drown them out with the noise of your passion and success. If they’re still throwing their two cents into the conversation, get a Burner number and don’t give them access to your new deets. It’s as simple as that!
