How to start a rad little business.
I’m a capitalist at heart.
I love starting and building businesses. I genuinely enjoy building products and services that people want or need or just love.
I even like sucking at it in the beginning and getting better slowly over time, making improvements based on what works and what doesn’t.
The first business I tried to start in my late teens or early 20s was a total flop. I wanted to somehow be in the record business but I didn’t have any money or a clue on how to open a record shop. So I started what I was then calling a “vinyl distribution” business.
No one needed a vinyl distributor. All the record shops back then bought directly from the labels. I was creating an unnecessary middleman that would have just cost a record store more of their slim profit. But I didn’t know a damn thing about margins back then. Or what potential customers wanted. I never bothered to ask.
I had a logo, business cards, letterhead, and a fax machine. I found every record label’s fax number by looking through the mini-catalogs that came with 12” vinyl and asked them for their catalog along with wholesale pricing. I got those lists and thought “Oh man, I’m in business!”
I had a product to sell. So I went to the local record store in Colorado Springs, CO, where I was living at the time, and told the owner I had access to labels like Sub Pop, Amphetamine Reptile, CZ, K Records, and a few others. The woman who owned the place said something like, “Cool. So do I.”
Well, that wrapped up that business model. I weakly tried reaching out to a few more record shops in Colorado, but everyone said the same thing. They didn’t want what I was peddling.
Ta Da! I failed.
But here’s the funny part. I was hooked! I so badly wanted to own my own business after that. I’d always been drawn to and worked for small businesses and entrepreneurs, and I knew that was what I wanted to do when I grew up.
Businesses are fun. They’re like Lego sets, where you can try so many different things with them. The experimentation and exploration are endless. And if you find something you enjoy, you can earn a good living doing that while providing something someone out there needs.
My buddy Jacob Jones and I have created our first online course on how to start a business or side hustle.
We made it for the younger version of ourselves, but if you’ve always thought about starting something up, this might be for you!
We walk through finding the right idea, deciding on what business model to choose, branding, operations, hiring contractors and employees, among other things.
This ain’t about getting rich and flexing your Lambo on people. This is about building something cool and sustainable in a DIY way, just like we did when were young.
