Start Messy. Forget Perfection. Make Money.

0:00If you've been feeling stuck in your business and wondering if you're the reason it's not growing faster, I have something for you. I'm hosting a free, no-pitch, live class called Three Money Beliefs That Made Me Millions. And I'm sharing the exact mindset shifts that helped me go from million-dollar years to million-dollar months. This isn't fluff. It is a surprising strategy that changed everything for me, and I want to share it with you. Like I said, no pitch, no fluff, just you and me talking about how we shift our beliefs around money to make you millions. Save your seat now at jasminestar.com forward slash millions.

0:32I can't wait to see you there. You're going to start in your 60s or your 30s. You're going to start in October or May. You're going to start on a Tuesday or you're going to start on a Friday. You're going to start scrappy. You're going to start messy. You're just going to start. This is for you if you want to start a business. This is also for you if you find yourself watching videos or listening to podcasts about starting a business. And this episode is for you if you want to get out of your own dang way. Welcome to the Jasmine Starr Show. My name is Jasmine Starr and I empower business owners to scale from seven to eight figures.

1:07But today we're taking out a little bit of a brief place to talk about people wanting to start. Now, here's the beautiful thing. There's multitudes of starts in your life and your professional career. Every time I want to start something new, every time I've pivoted, I end up back at the same point. So the thing that I'm going to be talking about today is not just starting a business for the first time, although that's where most of the focus is going to be. It's to really focus on starting. Oh, the lovely place of starting. It is beautiful and it is also agonizing. So many of us have this inner voice, this knowing that there is an entrepreneur inside of us.

1:46If you've made it to this point on the Jasmine Starr show, that voice is ever prevalent on the inside of you. So we're going to call a spade a spade. You are either an entrepreneur or you have aspirations of becoming an entrepreneur. So let's take a little bit of a sidestep. A few months ago, I was in Arizona. I was meeting with a group of eight-figure founders, and Amy Porterfield and I were traveling from Phoenix, Arizona to Newport Beach. She was going to be speaking at my mastermind. And so very typical of our relationship. I was walking to the airport. I'm talking trash. She gets holed up at like a TSA.

2:20And so I get over to where we put down our luggage to go through the conveyor belt for our screening. And there's a woman standing in front of me, and I'm kind of like hollering back at Amy talking trash because like TSA just loves giving her a hard time. And the woman in front of me turns and looks and then she sees Amy drop her suitcase right behind my suitcase. And she said, I listened to your podcast. I said, oh, that's incredible. That's amazing. And she looks at Amy. She's like, I listened to both of your podcasts. And as we're going through TSA, we start chatting. And here's the part that Amy's going to hate me sharing is that Amy's luggage got pulled out of TSA.

3:00She had to go through an extra screening. So she walks away and I'm talking with this wonderful woman by the name of Diana. And she tells me that she listens to business podcasts and she watches business videos and she's been listening to my podcast for a while and she has the desire to start a business, but she hasn't yet started. So we had this conversation around how she was really inspired by Latina founders. It's one of the reasons why she likes listening to my podcast. and she also mentioned two other Latina founders who she found inspiring, both of whom I know. She had mentioned Julissa Prado of Resource Curls and she also mentioned Sandra Velasquez of Nopaleta.

3:37Now, Nopaleta, if you're not familiar, it is an upscale Mexican beauty brand. I met Julissa as part of Inc. Magazine's Small Business Challenge. Julissa was brought on as mentor and I was brought on as mentor and I have done three years of the Small Business Challenge alongside Julissa. So we're very familiar. I am familiar with her business. So Riso's Curls is sold at all major hair and beauty outlets, also sold in Target. And this is hair care for women with curly hair. And she realized that as a woman of Latina descent, she had a very specific type of hair texture that the other curl activators weren't actually addressing.

4:12So she created her own product and it ended up getting featured nationwide and carried nationwide. Now, Diana has a cool idea for the beauty space. I'm not going to get into the details of it because it's hers. And I love it. And I actually believe the market needs what it is she wants to sell. And I was like, I love this idea. This is incredible. And then she told me, you know, should I get funding? Should I secure funding? Should I go for venture capital? Should I get investors? And my first response was, okay, you're not even going to finish your sentence. I'm just going to jump in. I'm going to tell you a couple of things.

4:47And I want to take a moment and say that this advice just isn't for Diana. It's for you. It's for me. And that advice has always been just start. Start in October or May. Start in your 30s or your 60s. Start on a Tuesday. Start scrappy. Start today. Just start. We get so caught up in like the logistics and the details of how big this is going to be that when we realize the vision of what we want and we compare it to where we are today and then we notice the chasm on the in-between and we're like, I don't know how I'm gonna cross that chasm to get to where I wanna go. We get caught up when all I'm simply saying is like, when you start, it leads to the next step.

5:31And once you get from step one to step two, you will understand how to get to step three. And then you're gonna learn how to get to step four. But if you're wondering how you're gonna get from step one to 212, you're going to feel very overwhelmed, which is why I looked at Diana there at Phoenix Airport and I said, oh, just start, Diana. Get a proof of concept. Before anybody is going to invest in your business, you need to invest in your business. And it's not just with money. It could just be with time, knowledge, market, understanding. So I want you to prove your concept. I want you to prove your market.

6:04I want you to prove demand. I want you to make money. That is what I want you to do. Because if you can get money and you could prove that you can make money because you understand your market and you have proof of concept, then game over. Then we get to have different conversations, but you need to earn the right to have those conversations by proving that there is a demand for the thing that you want to sell. And how is that proven? Money. It's just money. If in the fact she decides to get venture capital, if in the future she decides to get investors, the best way to get terms that are favorable to a founder is to find a way that you can make your own money, prove that you've made that money, then you come to the table with bargaining chips.

6:43So we look, and Diana was looking at brands like Riso's Curls and Nopaleta and thinking, okay, well, if my brand isn't in Nordstrom, if it isn't in Sephora or Ulta, well, then it can't compete. And I'm like, no, quite the opposite. I have been very fortunate to sit across from Julissa and understand her backstory. I actually met Sandra Velasquez as part of the LBEN program, Latino Business Action Network. We enrolled in Stanford University, and this is a program for Latino founders who are scaling. So I met Sandra in my cohort. I can't say enough good things about Elbin. If you are a Latino founder and you have a business that's doing over a million dollars, please apply to this program.

7:26It's worth its weight in gold. So Sandra and I met and I got to learn a lot about her backstory. And I got to learn a lot about Julissa's backstory. And Julissa started Riso's Curls in her family's home. She was actually getting her cousins to do the packaging for her products. Before she ever got featured in Nordstrom or any of these biggest retailers, she was doing it with her cousins doing the packaging at her parents' home. When I talked to Sandra and I started understanding, she started Nopalera during the pandemic. And for people who are unfamiliar, Nopalera is a prickly pear. It's like a cactus.

8:07And the backstory of her creating her products was she wanted to create soap with aloe vera and she didn't have any aloe vera. And so she was at her mom's house in San Diego and they had a cactus plant in the front of the house. And she said it had that like gel-like quality. And so she started experimenting with what that ended up being. And there's a lot of medicinal properties. Like Mexicans use cactus in a lot of varieties, specifically in like homemade remedies. So she thought to herself, how could I get this cactus and how could I elevate it to create a luxury Mexican brand? And she was creating soaps.

8:42and when she started her business, she was$110 ,000 in debt. This is during a pandemic. She had lost her job. She was living in New York. She was in her 40s. She's a single mom, came out to the West Coast to be with her family and she believed that she could create a premium Latina brand. And she did it on the back of payment plans for designers to create her branding. She did it on the back of working out of their homemade kitchen until they grew out and then got a studio space. She has now scaled multi seven-figure business. And both of these women didn't start with venture capital. Most of these women didn't start with investors.

9:21These women bootstrapped their business. They figured out that they could serve a very specific market in a very specific way. And they did it from their kitchen tables. They just started. And that's the thing I want people to think about is don't worry about step 200 when you're just trying to get to step number two, the next step reveals itself the minute you have the courage to take the next step. So they were completely bootstrapped and they decided I'm simply going to start. And that's the whole point of this entire Shorty episode. So do you have a product idea? Great, sell it on Shopify, make content, get sales.

10:00Do you have a digital product or service? Amazing, create your online storefront, make content, get sales. It's simple. It's not easy. And that's where people get stuck. It is simple. It is not easy. So let me cast a vision of your future. You will face challenges. You will feel frustrated, embarrassed, and angry, oftentimes all on the same day. You will feel alone. You will feel misunderstood. You will feel like you are standing in the Parthenon with people staring at you, and you don't know the next best move. But you won't stop. You are going to face those challenges. You are going to figure out the next step while people watch.

10:49And you are going to push on because everything in you knows that that is what you're supposed to do. And if you don't do what you know you're supposed to do, you will realize you are living too small of a life. and you don't want to look back at someday in the future at where you were today and say, you didn't take every opportunity to pursue the thing that you had wanted. So if you want me to tell you how to start a business, I am simply going to tell you to stop talking and start doing. Just start. Start in October or May. Start in your 30s or your 60s. start on a Tuesday, start scrappy, start messy, start today.

11:37Just start. And I'm going to repeat the thing that I had said before. If you have a product, great. List it on Shopify. Make content and get sales. If you have a digital, I'll stop there because you're like, I don't know how to do that. Great. So you're going to go to this tiny little obscure website called YouTube and you're going to type in, how do I create my first listing on Shopify? Guess what? You're going to find hundreds, if not thousands of videos on how you're going to do that. So you're going to start at your proverbial kitchen table and you're going to create a listing and you are going to post it.

12:15And then you're going to make content because if you are not talking about your business aspirations, nobody else will. Nobody knows your great product exists except for you. And what does content do? It makes you uncomfortable. It makes you feel embarrassed. It makes you feel angry. Oftentimes all in the same day, and then you feel like you're speaking into the void, guess what? You're going to have to speak into the void until one person listens and buys. That's the game, friends. If you don't want to play the terms to that game, put the ball down. Ooh, did I come out sideways? I'm really just saying it with love.

12:44Let me just save you some time. I'm going to cast a vision of your future. Are you going to count the cost? You count the cost, let's go. If you would like to build a digital business, digital products based on services, find your online storefront, make content and get sales. Now, if you're not quite sure how to do that, well, send me a DM. Let's have a conversation. Let's figure out what it is you want to build. I will send you options of how we can work deeper. I can send you free resources. I could point you to other YouTube videos. I have hundreds and hundreds of podcasts talking about how to put together an offer, how to create content, and how to create sales.

13:17I'd love to hear from you. I don't want you living a small life. I don't want you getting and staying at step one, how you're getting to step 200 when all I'm asking you to do is to get to step two. That is how you get started. So you are going to just start. You're going to start in your 60s or your 30s. You're going to start in October or May. You're going to start on a Tuesday or you're going to start on a Friday. You're going to start scrappy. You're going to start messy. You're just going to start. That is what today is all about. If you are looking forward to getting started, send this to a friend or send me a DM.

13:51I just want to root you on. And this was me just showing up, reminding you that getting started is the hardest part. And it is also the most rewarding when you could look back and say, I left everything out on the field. Thank you for watching and listening to The Jasmine Starshall.