Guarantee Your Business Idea Will Work

0:00The sooner you allow people to speak into your offer, the faster they're going to become evangelists and help you grow it. That is what makes a good business. This show is for you if you want to guarantee with a 100 % success rate that your business is going to take off. Never mind the fact that 20 % of businesses don't survive the first year and 50 % of businesses don't survive past three years. What I am talking about today is guaranteeing your 100 % success rate when you start a business. Ooh, that sounds juicy. In fact, it is the exact thing that the largest tech companies, Fortune 500 companies, and the most successful entrepreneurs do every single time they start a business.

0:39But before I tell you what it is, you have to promise me to keep an open mind because it's so simple, it's almost scary. Every time I talk about this concept, people immediately turn away or they turn it off. They look at me like I'm crazy. I think that's giving me too much credit. I did not come up with this idea. I simply studied the best in the business game and saw what they did, and then I decided to try it for myself. It was only after doing it out of necessity that I saw it actually worked. But I believed I was doing it wrong the whole time. After I studied the most successful entrepreneurs and the largest businesses, I realized that how I started was actually the best way to start.

1:20So what is the way to guarantee 100 % of your business success rate? It's to sell your offer before you've actually created an offer. I know people are like, oh no, no. Yes, this is exactly what I did when I started my online business, but I was embarrassed and I was ashamed because straight up, it just felt ghetto. And in all actuality, it's the key to my success. I'm going to break down exactly what this process looks like. And I'm also going to include examples when I didn't do this and then the business idea flopped. So get ready for this breakdown because I am going to share step by step what happened and how you can do the same.

1:55So what am I talking about? It's called a seed launch, but you probably might commonly hear it referred to as a beta launch. You're going to hear me switch between those two because that's how I call them. So here's why it has a hundred percent success rate. You validate demand. You get money. You know exactly what to build when you pre-sell the offer and people buy it. A large part of why online businesses fail is because what they do is like, oh, I'm going to do this in the opposite order. So people will work for months or sometimes years creating an offer without validating demand. And then when they put it on the market, nobody buys it.

2:30So the steps of building an offer are the same. But how you guarantee success is by reversing the order you think is normal. It is the unnormal approach to business that guarantees your success. It's when you validate demand and when you get money and when you know exactly what to build that you feel confident in the foundation. That's how you know you're not wasting time. That's how you know the business can actually work. It's also how you build confidence, even if you're starting from scratch or even if you felt ghetto like myself. Now, I've spoken to thousands of people who want to create an online business, literally thousands.

3:05And after spending months or even years creating something that nobody bought, they take it personally. They think they failed. They don't think they have what it takes. But if you were to pre-sell an offer that nobody buys, well, then you haven't lost time. You haven't lost any energy. In fact, you've saved yourself time from building an offer that nobody wanted, and that's a good thing. Yes, it might hurt our feelings, but it's not gonna hurt your business. In fact, it's gonna save your business. Knowing what not to build is just as valuable as knowing what exactly to build. Welcome to the Jasmine Starr Show, where I talk about building online businesses to tens of millions of dollars and how I've done it over the last decade.

3:47I'm happy you're here, and we are going to talk about today is walking through real-life examples of how I have pre-sold online offers, generated income before that offer was even created, and proved that there was product market fit. I have pre-sold a course, I've pre-sold a membership, I've pre-sold a tech company, I've pre-sold a mastermind for seven-figure entrepreneurs, and I'm gonna walk you through how I've helped thousands of business owners do the same thing so you're in the right place. So before I get into specifics, I want to start with my origin story of building an online business.

4:21So this is the real rule. I originally wanted to create an online course all about building a personal brand. In fact, I rented a studio. I sold tickets for a studio audience that cost$2 ,000 a piece. I hired an entire video crew to come and record the event and my content over a three-day period. I had over 14 hours of video footage that I was planning I'm going to create my course. Did I validate demand? No. Had I gotten paid for a digital version of this event? No. Did I know exactly what I wanted to build before I hired an entire content team to come and record it? No. I'll tell you what did happen.

5:00I spent months creating the content. I spent tens of thousands of dollars putting this event together and$14 ,000 hiring a video team. and that was all before I even knew if I could sell a single online course about building a personal brand. Ooh, now people, you might be hearing this to me like, girl, you're crazy. Yes, I was, but I had a dream. I just thought it was gonna work. So thankfully, at this time, I had hired a business mentor. Now, I had invested$25 ,000 to be a part of his mastermind. Now, he looked at me and he honestly told me, like straight out, I was out of my league. Okay, he didn't use those exact words, but for all intents and purposes and for telling the story, He literally was like, girl, you are out of your league.

5:42He pointed out that I was trying to sell an online course for$2 ,000 when I had never, not once, made an online offer before. What he suggested was to start with a simple program to validate an offer, to position me as an online business owner, and basically to simply prove to myself that I can get traction online. And that was some of the best advice I've ever received. And it was absolutely priceless. Now, I'm going to be real. It wasn't easy to hear it. In fact, I wanted to ignore it, but I trusted him. And I had invested in his advice and his insight to coach me, like when the online space, well, it was so brand new to me.

6:18So I just said, I'm going to trust you. When I agreed to create a simple first offer, I had to decide like what exactly I was going to create. I didn't know where to begin. So I asked my mentor and he asked me one simple question. What is something that people often ask you about? Or what are people going to advise for? Now, the answer for me was really simple at the time. It was 2016 and business owners asked, hey, Jasmine, how are you using Instagram to grow your business? Now, I'm gonna tell you, I thought it was like too simple of a topic. I didn't think that what I was doing was special. I didn't even think that I knew exactly what I was doing, but it was working.

6:55And so the truth was that people asked me about it. Okay, so then I decided to create a course about using Instagram to grow your business. And then my mentor added an extra challenge. He said, can you start selling this in one month? Okay. Now, to be clear, I had never done anything like this before. I had never launched an online offer, but I agreed to his challenge because I wanted to see how quickly I can make an idea come to life. I didn't have time to create and record the entire course. So what I decided to do was to sell it before I built it. My mentor's exact words were, you want to build the plane as it's flying.

7:32Okay, so I created an outline of the course. I named the topics and the lessons, but I told people that I was gonna be teaching the course live and in real time. Now, on the inside, what was going on on the inside? I felt foolish, I felt skeptical, and I felt a little bit uncertain. But I have to tell you, that was the best business decision I have ever made. Here's why. I was able to get feedback from my early customers. They were able to help me make the course better while I was doing it in real time. I was creating a community with other business owners, and I was able to ensure that their experience was exceptional in real time.

8:10One month later, in just a single week, I sold enough courses to generate over$255 ,000. And that was just the start. That single course made over$1 million in one year. And yes, the topic and the delivery, they were strong. But what made it extra special was that people enjoyed the live community and the accountability. Now, if you think this is a completely wild idea, I might totally agree with you. With the exception of this tiny little platform called GoFundMe. Okay, you are probably very familiar with GoFundMe. People put out ideas and they allow other people to participate in fundraising for an idea or a situation before it's even created.

8:54Like we see all these other fundraising platforms out there where people are giving money to a business owner for an idea. That's exactly what we have the ability to do with an online offering. So over the years, I've experimented both with teaching live courses as well as recorded courses. But I have to tell you, the ability to create live is the best sounding board. It is the best way to create really strong testimonials in a true, powerful way and to have people speak into the structure to make sure that it's something people want and find valuable. And a lot of the times, people are so satisfied with their experience that they tell other people about it, and that is pure goodness.

9:33And so here's the best part. If people don't buy it, that's a clear sign that the market doesn't want it. Now, you could have spent months or even years working on creating an idea that you think is amazing, but if the market doesn't want it, well, it's a complete waste of time. Now, I get it. That's hard to hear, but it's just business truth. When you pre-sell your seed launch, you're guaranteeing your success. Elon Musk pre-sold Cybertrucks and people put down a thousand dollar deposit to save their site. Jeff Bezos pre-sold books on an online bookstore website called Amazon. Now I've pre-bought skincare, vitamin gummies, pajamas, books, all without knowing what I would actually get.

10:14So pre-selling and pre-buying are totally normal, but somehow in the online business space with online business owners, well, they think it's something, oh no, we shouldn't do. Back in 2021, I wanted to expand our tech team as we built Social Curator. So we were transitioning from a membership to a software as a service business. And the startup costs, oh good Lord have mercy, they were expensive. I'm a completely bootstrap founder and I didn't want to get a bank loan. So I decided to pre-sell the new features of the platform. Now it felt like a crazy idea, but I made an announcement to our members and I said, hey, we're going to have an unlimited amount for a lifetime subscription that we were going to be selling just for one hour.

10:53Now I didn't know how much we were going to be able to fundraise. But you can just imagine my shock and surprise and a bunch of delight in less than an hour. We had raised$555 ,000, less than an hour from people who pre-bought a software that wasn't even completed yet. I will never forget sitting outside. We're having lunch. We went out to eat. I was with my husband and I was completely, I kept looking at my phone and refreshing it. And I was like, oh my God, I was dumbfounded that we had found a way to fund the next iteration of our tech platform with$555 ,000. And it's about this time where a lot of people are skeptical.

11:36Now, I've realized that after thousands of conversations with business owners, the skepticism is simply a byproduct of perfection. That's what I realized. People are skeptics. They're like, no, no, I can't put it out unless it's perfect. Entrepreneurs want to put out a perfect offer in a perfect way at the perfect price. But I'm going to tell you that just doesn't exist. Perfection is subjective. That means that what you think is perfect, well, it might not be perfect. Like that person might not think it's perfect. And what you think is perfect, another person might think it's perfect. What they think is perfect, you might not think it's perfect.

12:08So that nullifies, that basically scratches out any idea that perfection exists. So while you're waiting and working to make something perfect, you run the very high risk that people might not think of your version of perfect as the version they're wanting to buy. So while many people wait to create the perfect offer, the only thing that makes it perfect is the market speaking into it and shaping it and buying it and then endorsing it. I have never, not once, even for the largest companies, ever seen somebody launch something and never make a single change to it. Never iterate on the idea. Never fix things as they go.

12:46So here's the deal. Changing, iterating, and fixing is the process of building a successful business. The sooner you allow people to speak into your offer, the faster they're going to become evangelists and help you grow it. That is what makes a good business. And right about now is the part of the conversation where people will insist, no, that it wouldn't work for them because they don't have a large audience. Now, I'm going to admit that having an audience makes it easier, but it doesn't mean that it wouldn't work if you had a small audience. In fact, I'm going to argue the opposite. I want to share two stories from clients from the inside of my program, The Consistent 10K.

13:24And I'm using that as examples because each client had less than 250 followers, but created extraordinary results by following my system of pre-selling their offer. First up is Lindsay. Now, Lindsay and I chatted in an Instagram DM, and like the case for many people, she was a bit nervous to invest in a coaching program without knowing that it was going to work. Our first conversation was in November, but by December, she had already begun the program, and she was saying really incredible things after her first 30 days. And this is what she said in January. Now, if you notice at the bottom, she was a bit afraid that she couldn't quite believe she would be able to leave her full-time job working at a public school.

14:05About three weeks later, after the success of what she had accomplished, she put in notice to quit her nine-to-five. Y 'all, in three months, she had built a business that was consistently earning more than$10 ,000 to$15 ,000 each month. Her seed launch was proof that her offer really worked. Now, let's focus on Bonnie. Now, Bonnie at the time had 228 followers, and she made$44 ,000 in her seed launch by what? Pre-selling her new refreshed offer after restructuring her pricing with consistent 10K business coaching. And all of this happened in less than one month. So one of the best things about pre-selling your offer is not only that you have cash up front, but you have people waiting for what it is you're going to teach them.

14:51Now that level of expectation and that accountability, well, it really does help you move quickly and complete what you set out to do. And speaking of accountability, on the inside of the Consistent 10K, each of our clients, the ones that I just used as examples and others, well, they work one-on-one with a coach to make sure that they're getting the results that they want and staying accountable. Now, this is not to say that people haven't tried to build a business or do something online before. The fascinating thing is that what I've seen is when people are working with a coach, I've noticed that our clients are more committed to their coach.

15:25Like they're more committed to other people than they are their own goals, right? The coach is keeping them accountable to do what they said they're going to do. And their customers are keeping them accountable to deliver on what they said. Now, those two levers of accountability have created incredible amounts of momentum and growth. And please don't forget the added benefits of pre-selling. Like specifically, when you pre-sell, number one, you're building your personal brand along the way. Number two, you're creating a sales system that consistently attracts new customers every single day. And number three, it allows you to build with momentum and get customer testimonials.

16:01Now, I don't want to get too advanced, but I definitely want to point out that I've used Lindsay and Bonnie as example testimonials to show that pre-selling works. I also want to point out that I teach entrepreneurs to do the same thing. When you pre-launch, you have the ability to gather testimonials along the way because it acts like proof of the concept, but it's also powerful pieces of marketing. Now, I've shared their testimonials on social media, and now I'm sharing it here on my show. Now, these types of testimonials make your marketing and sales work perfectly, hand-in-hand, and it's proof you don't need a big audience to succeed.

16:36I have learned that when it comes to pre-selling, it's less about having a really great idea that you think will help people, and it's entirely about finding problems you can solve. The best businesses solve problems for people. Now, I always joke that I'm a problem hunter. I'm out here in the wild. Whenever I look for problems, I'm always finding solutions and seeing how much money I might be able to generate if I were to create a business around solving that problem. It is an absolutely weird hobby, I know, but it has also trained my mind to look for ways to be a problem solver, not just in business, but in my life.

17:10Now, I think I might have mentioned this on the podcast before, so if I did, listen, listen, I'm getting old and I'm repeating stories just like my father. But my husband and I were staying at the Four Seasons in Maui, and they offer complimentary coffee every single morning. And the way that they had set up the coffee station, it was set up so poorly that it caused a line. So let me just describe it. There's a line of people waiting, and then what they put out first and foremost is the cream and the sugar. And then they put the two coffee stations, the decaf and the caffeinated coffee. Who in the world puts their cream and sugar in before they put their coffee?

17:42It doesn't make sense, right? The order of operations was off. So what was happening was like people would wait in line. They'd walk down to the coffee machine and then walk back up to the cream and sugar station, which was taking about twice the amount of time. How is it taking about twice the amount of time? I literally sat there and I counted the seconds. Y 'all, I have a problem. Somebody needs to pray for me. I look for problems and then I look for solutions. I'm like, how much does someone go and pay me? Because what I've discovered in business over time is the more complicated the problem is to solve, the more money people will pay to solve it.

18:12Yes and amen. So obviously, who's going to pay me to fix the Four Seasons coffee situation in Maui? Nobody. They're on island time. But I'm just using it as a really clear example that I'm always on the hunt. Because the more problems you solve, the more opportunities there is to make money. Let's go! Okay, so let's get back and keep the main thing the main thing. In order for me to understand if it's truly a problem, I always recommend talking to a group of people who would be your prospective clients. So for example, every time I pre-sell an offer before I actually create the offer, I'm having lots of conversations with people so I understand how they speak about it, what they want and what they don't want.

18:48For example, in 2024, I had hundreds and hundreds of conversations with people who wanted to build an online business, so online business owners, and I was asking them, what are they struggling with? What do they want? What would make their life easier? And I started noticing a lot of trends and patterns between what they were saying for over a year. So I studied the trends and the patterns and I identified what the key problems were. And then I set out to solve them for myself. The team and I created an entire system that empowers people to build a consistent business and get real results and do something they're really passionate about.

19:24All while helping people generate income on their own. Y 'all, when people make money, when you find a way to make money online, nothing lights me up more. Like that is my purpose on this world is to teach people who don't believe that they could do something to go out and do something and make money. Not for the sake of money, but for changing their legacy and taking control of their life and then getting unstuck. In late 2025, I did a seed launch with just eight clients in the first week of releasing the consistent 10K. Yes, eight. We launched a program with eight clients. And while that number is really small, I am not embarrassed by it.

20:00In fact, I am so proud. I knew we were going to start small. I knew we were going to make changes and iterate and get better every single week as it went by. By the time we started 2026, hundreds of people had completed the program and they were getting incredible results themselves. Now, the best news was that we had a system to continue growing over time, which is exactly what we teach our clients to do. Y 'all, I always say I ate my own dog food. Now, I just want to be transparent. There have been plenty of times that I have tried a sea launch and did not get people to buy. Now, of course, the temptation is to worry.

20:34I'm never going to be able to come up with the right idea. But I always express gratitude because it was always so much better than spending a lot of time creating an idea or a business that people actually didn't want. I didn't take it personally. I took it as a learning lesson. And then I started asking, how can I get better with this information? There's also one thing that I want to address before I end this episode. And that's the idea that pre-selling an offer, well, it isn't all cotton candy and kittens and pizza parties. It's a lot of hard work. In fact, it brings up a lot of negative emotions for people.

21:07Embarrassment, fear, doubt. Putting yourself out there requires courage and vulnerability. And it also requires being seen. I can't tell you how many conversations I've had with entrepreneurs who want to grow their businesses. But they have a hard time. They are worried about. They're petrified showing up online and creating content. They are worried about what people will say, if they will feel stupid, and what their friends and family will think. Now, those are all real emotions. I am deeply empathetic to the weight of making that decision. I get it. But at the same time, whenever I pre-sell an offer, I'm not thinking about how I feel today.

21:43I am thinking about how I will feel in the future. And I will only feel one of two ways in the future. Number one, I will feel elated that the idea is working. There's product demand and I'm making money before I built it. Or two, I'm going to feel bummed that the offer didn't sell. But I'm also going to be thankful because I didn't waste time creating it when nobody wanted it. I want to remind you that the cost of building your dream life and your dream business will cost you your current life and your 9-to-5 job. You can't have both. I hope that you look at the future opportunities and really believe that the sacrifices you make today and the courage that is required and the uncomfortability of doing things publicly outweigh what it will look like and feel like to live a life generating consistent 10k months.

22:31And I want you to remember that 10k months are the floor, not the ceiling. I am a walking embodiment of that. I am building an eight-figure arm of my business using this exact method because I know it works and I want you to do the same on your own terms so you're not repeating the same pattern that you have year over year. I create these shows just to document my process, to share my insights, and I hope that you take action. If you would like to learn more about the consistent 10k method, simply send me a direct message. I respond to my direct messages on Instagram at Jasmine Star and just send one word, just send method, because I would love to connect with you personally and learn more about what you'd like to do, your ideas, and see if building a business online right alongside of us would be in alignment.

23:14I wish you all the best as you pre-sell your offer. Step into your confidence and build a life the way that you've always wanted. Thank you for watching and listening to The Jasmine Starr Show.