How to Start a Business You Care About — With No Business Ideas and No Money (Greatest Hits)

0:00Let's be real. Nobody starts a business for the joy of calculating tax withholdings. That's where our partner Gusto comes in to take the stress out of payroll, benefits, and HR, so you can focus on why you started your business in the first place. Gusto is online payroll and benefits software built for small businesses. It's all-in-one, remote-friendly, and incredibly easy to use. So that means you can pay, hire, onboard, and support your team from anywhere. I'm talking about automatic payroll tax filing, simple direct deposits, health benefits, commuter benefits, workers' comp, 401k, you name it.

0:34Gusto makes it simple and all with no hidden fees, no surprises. Plus, if you have any questions, their team of certified HR experts are standing by to help. It's no wonder why more than 400 ,000 small businesses already trust Gusto and why it's the number one rated payroll software for fall 2025, according to the review site G2. So try Gusto today at gusto.com slash side hustle and get three months free when you run your first payroll. That's three months of free payroll at gusto.com slash side hustle. One more time, gusto, G-U-S-T-O dot com slash side hustle.

1:13Here's an oldie but a goodie from the archives from the Side Hustle Show Greatest Hits Collection.

1:22How to start a business you care about. Imagine going from having no business ideas and no money to making your first sales in two weeks. That's the transformation my guest today specializes in. How he does it, coming right up. What's up, what's up, Nick Loper here. Welcome to the Side Hustle Show, because why is 90 % of how? That's a quote I heard recently from Tim Ferriss, and how I interpret that is in entrepreneurship, you've gotta supply your own motivation. Why do you want to do this? That why is what gets you through the hard times. And remember, if it were easy, everybody would be doing it.

1:58So today, I'm excited to introduce Alan Donegan from popupbusinessschool.co.uk. Alan specializes in getting new entrepreneurs and wantrepreneurs off the sidelines and into the game, usually for free. How he does this is through in-person workshops that are free to attend, and he was gracious enough to sit down and share some of his methodology from those workshops with me in today's episode. Now, why is he so adamant about bootstrapping and not taking on a load of debt to start your business? Well, he had to watch his family go through a multi-million dollar bankruptcy and doesn't want anybody else to have to experience that same fate.

2:37Stick around in this episode to hear how Alan pulls business ideas out of people who've never had them before, how he has his quickly and cheaply validate those ideas, and what makes for a successful pitch. My goal for this episode? To help you come up with two to three business ideas you can start this weekend. Notes and links from this episode, plus a free downloadable PDF highlight reel summary with all of Alan's top tips from the call are at sidehustlenation.com slash Alan. That's A-L-A-N. I'll be back with my top takeaways from this chat with Alan after the interview. Ready? Let's do it. Some of the people out there are searching for the killer idea, the great idea, the unique idea.

3:21And there's so much pressure from traditional business advice to find your USP, your unique selling point. How is your business unique? How are you special? And that helps. But I tell you what, you don't need a game-changing idea. You just need an idea and you need to get on with it. Well, to give an example of an idea that is not a game-changing idea, we had a lady called Sharice come along to the pop-up business school in Kent. She was lovely. The question we always ask is what excites you? Because you could build any business you like. Why not build one that you actually enjoy running? So we ask what excites you?

4:01Because it's a little bit easier to answer than what's your true passion or those questions are very difficult to answer. But if you ask someone what excites you, what gets you going, what gets you out of bed in the mornings. It's easier to answer. So we asked Sharice what excites you. She looked a little bit sheepish and then she said, I get quite excited by cleaning and seeing the kitchen clean after I've finished. And the first thought that went through my head was, I know plenty of people who aren't excited by cleaning. There's probably a business in that. So she set up a cleaning business.

4:36Now is cleaning game changing? Is cleaning unique? week is cleaning different. The cleaning services have been around forever, but she enjoys the end results. She enjoys helping people and she makes a great living because she actually enjoys it. She's hired her first member of staff. She's growing a little business. It's incredible what she has achieved. So I think stop searching for the game changing idea and start something because the idea you start with probably won't be the one you end up running in five years anyway. way. You've just got to get in the game. So with the cleaning example, okay, there's a very obvious need and an opposite set of people who really dislike cleaning and would be glad to hire it out.

5:17What if I'm answering that question? Well, what excites you? Well, I like skiing. I like watching college football. I like reading business books. It's hard to see a direct business on the other side of that. Well, let's take all three of those. Let's start with skiing. There's plenty of people who want to learn to ski. There's plenty of people who want to go on ski tours, but don't know how to do it. There's ski bloggers. There's a million ways to make money out of skiing. The second one was watching college football. Now that is a competitive market. You're probably not going to go and play college football at the moment.

5:54You're a bit old for that. Well, well past my prime. Me too. But there's YouTube channels about it. There's bloggers about it. There's podcasters about it. There is every way to get involved with that subject. It's finding that way into it. And even on business books, I've seen businesses that they read business books and then they summarize them and they sell the summaries. And then there's become a trainer, read all the business books and then train businesses how to use them because they haven't got time to read them themselves. In every idea, there is a way to generate income. We just need to know what you're excited about.

6:36And then we can drill down from that and test different ways to make money. Any other interesting examples from the groups that come to mind on what at first glance didn't seem like there was a business there? The classic one is when I put online, you can make money doing something you actually enjoy. There's always one person who goes, well I enjoy sleeping how are you going to make money out of that and I didn't really have a good answer for that until recently until I met a young guy called Kieran from Glasgow who came to one of our workshops and he's built a blog reviewing mattresses and I can't believe it he makes a full-time living he does really well reviewing mattresses and then gets the affiliate commission selling mattresses so I genuinely don't care what it is that excites you there is a way to find money doing it, what you've got to do, and going back to the why, we get two main groups of people who come along.

7:30There's the people who are building businesses because they think they can make money doing it. And there's the people who build businesses because it's actually what they enjoy doing. And what we found is in terms of the why, the money wears off after a while. Unless you genuinely love building businesses, then it doesn't really matter what the subject is just build a business. But for most of us, it's find a business that gets you going because then you actually want to get out of bed and do it in the morning. Yeah, I probably fall into that first category of my first real business was a footwear comparison shopping site.

8:02And I'm not a sneakerhead. That's probably my own worst customer. I probably bought three pairs of shoes over the course of 10 years. I don't really care about the subject matter, but it was the day-to-day operations that became exciting, figuring out different optimizations and learning how to advertise smarter and drive traffic and negotiate deals with my advertising partners. Like all of that became very exciting and interesting to me, even if on the surface, the underlying subject was not. So you've fallen in love with the act of running a business and that's what you get to do every day. And if you're doing what you love every day, it's difficult to fail when you really enjoy what you're doing.

8:42There is a bit that you've got to be smart to get money out of it. And I've seen so many people who charge out there and they don't ask for payment or they're nervous about asking for payment or they don't bring cash in. But if you really love what you're doing and you work hard at making it work as a business, it's very difficult to fail. And that kind of echoes the, I believe it's Cal Newport in Be So Good They Can't Ignore You. I forget the exact title of the book, but basically echoing that sentiment is like, don't chase your passion, chase something that you're interested in, that you have some skills in perhaps, and you'll often find you become passionate about it down the road.

9:18When I started the podcast, of course, had no idea what I was doing, but had an interest in it and maybe a desire to keep it going and have become really passionate about it over the years and trying to make good radio and trying to improve week after week. What do you say, like maybe in the cleaning example, well, it's been done before. And on the one hand, I guess that's good because there's some validation there. But what about competition? How am I going to stand out? I think it was Richard Branson said there's always room in the market for the best in the world. When you're just starting out, you're not the best in the world.

9:50No, but you can get there and you can work at it. And I'll tell you what, Charisse, I don't know if she's the best cleaner in the world or not, but my timeline on Facebook is filled up with shiny kitchens that she's proud of. And that energy and passion that she just throws into doing what she's doing makes her stand out. And it's actually like, if you care about what you're doing and you're working to do a good job for people, it's surprising how far that goes. And I'm actually shocked that in today's world, it doesn't take a lot more than genuinely caring about your customers to make you stand out from quite a lot of businesses out there.

10:27Yeah, that was Chris Schwab from Think Maids. And he was a similar cleaning business, except he was not the one doing the cleaning. But he was like, I'm going to be the best phone representative. I'm going to be super responsive to customer inquiries and kind of take advantage of perceived weaknesses from other cleaning companies in the market. Alan, do you ever get anybody that shows up and is like, I literally don't care. I'm not that excited about anything. I just want to find something that makes money. Most people care about something and you can, with a bit of probing, find out what excites them.

11:01you ask a set of questions like so what would you do in your spare time if you had nothing on or what did you do when you were younger and no one was looking or if you had a weekend with your friends what would you plan and there's some questions to start to help you understand some of the ideas if people genuinely don't care and I've not found one of those yet that there's something they like if you probe hard enough if they genuinely don't care then they just need to start something. And they could even start a blog about finding your passion and talk about their journey and lack of having one.

11:38And I tell you what, if they did that with passion, they'd probably get somewhere. Okay, fair enough. So let's say you kind of go through these questions, you come up with some potential ideas. Are there certain business models that you guide people toward or that you like for people just starting out? In terms of specific business models, not really, because you never know whether someone's starting a product business, a service business, an online business. There's so many different ways to do it. I think our foundational principle is get the idea out there as quickly as possible and test it.

12:13And we have a saying, which is fail fast and fail cheap. The traditional way of starting a business is the exact opposite. You write a 30 page business plan, you set up a company structure and then you borrow a load of money and go heavily into debt and the last thing you do in that process is to start to sell the very last thing and if it goes wrong at that point that's failing slowly and failing expensively what we suggest to people do is exact opposite i mean what's the only way to know if your business idea will be successful or not. If somebody's going to pay you for it. If someone's going to pay you for it.

12:53And most people avoid asking that question. They'll go and see friends and say, what do you think about the idea? And the friends go, yeah, it's great. It's great. You should do it. Is that good feedback? It doesn't really help. Probably not. Unless you're asking them for a check. That's exactly what you should do is at that moment where they say it's great, you should do it. You should lean in and go, it's 20 bucks. I've got a sample in the car. Would you like to buy one? And it's only at that point you will get the real answer. People will be nice to you up until you ask them to get your wallet out of their pocket or their purse out of their bag.

13:29Once you ask for money, you'll get the real decision. You'll get the real answer up until that point. They're just being nice. Yeah. Now for a service business or product business, that is easier to get to a no or a yes right away. But how about for an online business like the mattress review blog or the ski tour blog or something like that, where it's like, it might take some time to fail fast. It might take some time to build up a critical mass of readership there. Absolutely. You're right. And it does. And those online business models, you do see the superstars create a podcast in six to nine months to get a good listenership.

14:10But for the average person, it takes longer. I think even if you're building that online model, there is still a way to ask for immediate feedback. So one of the failures I had in my business very early on was my website had no call to actions. There was nothing anyone could actually do on my website. There was just content and that was it. And even if it's just collecting email addresses, even if it's like, if you think I'm on the right track with this blog or this podcast or this online skiing guide, then click like so that I know I'm on the right way or leave a comment. I'm just getting into this.

14:45But if you ask for interaction and ask for engagement, if you don't get any of it, well, we've got some concerns. If you start to get some, you've got at least some signals. You've got at least some kind of reaction from people. So yeah, if you enjoyed this, sign up to my mailing list now. That just at least tells me that I should keep writing these articles for you. And I think it probably goes without saying is if you are starting that online type of business, you still have to go and tell people about it versus just putting it out on the internet and hoping and praying somebody's going to find it.

15:20Google may eventually find it if your content is strong enough, but it's almost, you're going to have to give it that initial push. And we found the same thing to be true, even on preexisting marketplaces like Amazon and Udemy and iTunes, or it's like, If you can provide that initial marketing push, the algorithms start to work in your favor. And then because until you do that, no one's even going to see your call to action on your website. They're not even going to see the little button that says, you know, sign up here for updates or join my mailing list. And there's a saying in society and culture, if you build it, they will come.

15:53And I think that's thanks to Field of Dreams and Wayne's World. And it's the biggest lie out there. If you build it, no one will come until you promote it, until you share it, until you get it out there and tell people about it. So if you build it, no one will come until you promote it. Imagine a world where your tasks are effortlessly organized, your projects are seamlessly managed, and your ideas are flowing freely, all with the help of artificial intelligence. That's the power of Notion AI, the cutting-edge productivity platform that's changing the game for side hustlers and businesses all around the world.

16:29You may have heard of Notion as a place to manage your projects, as a place to take and keep notes, and as a place to store important documents and process files. But what you might not know is that there's an awesome new feature I've been playing around with called Notion AI. I'm excited to partner with Notion for this episode because Notion AI is designed to help you with your work right in the place you're already doing your work, not in a separate AI tool. Notion AI helps you work faster, write better, and think bigger, doing tasks that normally take you hours in just seconds. For example, Notion AI actually wrote the intro to this ad, but that's not all.

17:03You can actually have Notion AI summarize your meeting notes, find action items, draft an email or a blog post, or even just help brainstorm ideas. It's pretty slick. Try Notion AI for free when you go to notion.com slash side hustle. That's all lowercase letters, notion.com slash side hustle to try out the incredible power of Notion AI today. And when you use our link, you're supporting the show. Try Notion AI for free right now at notion.com slash side hustle. What have you seen from your students as far as creative ways to go pre-sell an idea? Since you're advocating, hey, don't buy business cards, like don't build a website, don't go into debt.

17:40What have you seen as an effective way to go to market quickly and basically validate? Like, does this have legs? Is this going to be a good idea or not? We are blessed today with the advances in technology, how quickly and easy it is to build a website, to put something online, to get it designed. I guess a real life example was a lady at one of my previous courses came to me. She was doing a health care product and she came to me and said, how many bottles should I buy? Like, I'm just about to order the packaging and all of the stuff. should I buy 5 ,000 should I buy 10 ,000 and she was looking for a straightforward number answer of what she would buy I tell you what what we found is there are so many entrepreneurs out there who have bought the stuff and they've got it in their garage and they don't sell it and my advice to her was well let's try and pre-sell it and she said well I can't pre-sell it because I don't have a picture of it, I need to order some to get a picture.

18:43Well, just hire a graphics designer, you know, on people per hour or on fiverr.com or anywhere and get them to knock up a version that people can see, write a page and start to promote it and get it out there. And then you'll get a very quick feeling of whether people actually want it. So use weebly.com or build a free website, put up a one pager, promote it everywhere and see if people engage and buy. This is not a new idea. It has been around forever, but for some reason it's not widely known. Way back when I was younger, early 90s, there's a business called Cotton Traders that sold cotton polo shirts, cotton t-shirts, cotton rugby jerseys, stuff like that.

19:32And they used to have the thing in the back of the newspaper very back of the newspaper there was like that cut out bit that said here's the picture we're producing these tick your size post it into us with a check i don't know if your audience are old enough to remember checks but you post it i'm sure some of i still i'm still writing checks are you very infrequently but it happens yeah i guess you do a lot more checks in america then but yeah they said post it in with a check and then in the very fine print it says delivery is six to eight weeks why is delivery six to eight weeks and it's because the polo shirts didn't exist and what they would do is wait for all the checks to come in they would go and cash the checks to make sure they had the money and then place the order with the factory to produce exactly that number of t-shirts and shirts and the model has been around for a long time.

20:24It's just, it's not really your entrepreneur's first thought is go pre-sell it. And it doesn't really matter how you do it, whether it's a website, whether it's a Kickstarter page, whether it is just going onto the street and saying, here's my idea, here's my sample, would you like to order one? It doesn't really matter how you do it. Just go and check the idea, get it out there as quick as possible and see if people will buy. And I tell you what, you'll learn more from one good customer interaction than you will from weeks of Google research. Yeah. Have you got people kind of going down that path?

20:58So one of the popular side hustles of the last several years is the Amazon FBA business, Fulfillment by Amazon. I'm going to order this bulk shipment of products from China, and I'm going to send those into Amazon and Amazon's going to ship those out to my customers as they sell. But you could be looking at a thousand dollars five thousand dollars minimum order there so it sounds similar to your beauty product woman where it's like until i get it out onto the marketplace i don't have anything to sell so you would advocate getting one or two samples and like standing on the street corner and getting pre-orders it seems like if you're coming up with a yoga mat get a sample design it go down the yoga studios and speak to the customers don't ask them their opinion ask them to buy if they say no then ask their opinion.

21:47If they say yes, then tell them it's coming soon and you'll get it to them and take the money there and then. Yeah, get a sample, get a picture, get something, pitch your idea. And I tell you what, even if you don't have a sample, just going out and pitching your idea and talking to a real life customer and saying, here's what I want to do. Here's what it'll look like. Here's what they'll do. Do you have this problem that I'm trying to fix? does it help you just the act of pitching your idea will help clarify whether people actually want it um sell the value before you build the product and i think that's one of the most important bits is sell what it is because if you can't sell it from an idea or at least get people interested enough to give you a deposit you're going to struggle when you get the actual thing And that reminds me of Abby Ashley, a recent guest on the podcast.

22:39Her initial pre-sales page for her virtual assistant course, she said, was a Google Docs sheet. She just shared the link to this Google Docs page. It was like, hey, this is totally free. No website needed. And I forget. I mean, she sold thousands of dollars worth of this thing before she had created it. I was inspired by that one. So on the pitching front, we've kind of talked through some service business ideas, some physical product ideas, some online business ideas. And you kind of alluded to this a moment ago with, OK, what's the problem that the customer has that I'm going to solve? But I'm curious, what have you seen as some elements of successful pitches?

23:20So the elements of the successful pitch, I think, first off, we always run this exercise. I probably shouldn't give this exercise away, but I'm going to anyway. So if you're coming on the course, forget you ever heard this. I put up a big picture of a Mont Blanc pen on the screen, and I pull out my Mont Blanc pen that my brother gave me for my 30th. Thank you, Roy, if you're listening. And I described the pen. It's got an enamel inlay barrel. It's got a platinum nib. It's a fountain pen. It's got the Mont Blanc crystal at the top. It's a stunning pen. It's about$600 worth of pen. And then someone from the audience, right, sell me the pen.

24:01And what happens every time is people sell me the pen. They go, it's an amylin lay barrel. It's got a platinum nib. It's got the Montblanc crystal. They sell me what they've got. What every person who's pitching forgets to do is to understand the client first. So are you even looking for a pen? Do you use a pen? Do you give expensive gifts? Like there's so many questions you can ask before you pitch to understand. And I think people go straight into the pitch when they're new at this because they're so excited about what they do. And it's exactly what I did. I was so excited about what I did. I would pitch it to everyone without understanding even if they have the problem.

24:47So I think the first key to pitching is don't pitch, ask. Understand the person, understand their problems, understand their pain. And if they don't have the pain you're trying to fix, don't even bother pitching. Move on to the next person or ask them who else you should speak to. After you've understood, it's far easier to shape the pitch to actually hit what that person is interested in. My tips then for the actual pitch is start with the bits that they're interested in and start in the heart of it, the very heart of it. No waffle, no messing about. Here's the key bit right in the center and get them interested with it and then build from there.

25:34If you kind of waffle, yes, we've been in business for this many years and, you know, we use all natural this and we've got offices here and here. and I really like this stuff. People are bored after two minutes. You've got to get straight into the heart of the subject matter. So I think understanding them, what they really want, asking questions, then diving into the heart of it, the most important thing to them, is going to get them hooked. Did you know there's a disease running rampant alongside hustlers and new entrepreneurs? It's called superhero syndrome. Symptoms include a feeling like you've got to do everything yourself, thinking you're the only one who can do it right, and struggling to let go of certain tasks.