I'm starting! Told all my friends and family

[littleboy]

Hey everyone,

Super excited, I'm actually starting. I just turned 20, four days ago, and joined Rob's FoxWebSchool. I read The Millionaire Fastlane about a year ago, and have been fantasizing about becoming an entrepreneur ever since, but had no idea where to start. So I'm starting with Rob's course, to gain experience and momentum. As a lot of you might already know from here, that program is about using webdesign as a stepping stone into entrepreneurship.

Dropped out of high school at 16 because I didn't like where life was taking me, and since that have been working minimum wage, traveling around the world, and dreaming about starting my own business. No more dreaming! I told my parents, sister and my friends that by this time next year I'm going to be earning enough to live in Manhattan, because that seems to me as probably the best place to really build your business, with all the business folk around.

Anyway, I'll post my progress to keep myself accountable. Step 1: Earn enough to live in Manhattan, through webdesign, by next year. That'll teach me a lot of useful skills. So far, I've learned the basics of website coding, joined the FoxWebSchool Sales Legends program, and found someone to make my first portfolio website for.

Cheers

 

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[Johnny boy]

Manhattan??

Answer this question. Is it easier to start a business when your rent is $3000 a month or $600 a month?

You will be working a job you hate for too many hours and will not have enough time for your business. So much is done online anyways, why would you live in the place where your dollar earned is so much weaker? You could make the same dollars and spend Baht or Pesos and have much more free time to dedicate towards your idea.

I started my business when I was living at home and moved out once I was making money. If I moved out earlier I would've likely gotten a job so I could afford to live and would've had less time for my business.

 

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[littleboy]

Week #1

Hey there,

Alright so technically I started learning code just over a month ago, but this is week one of the course, and week one of being 20. Also apparently you don't need to know code to make websites, you can just use wordpress (never heard of that before, I'm new to this). So I stopped learning code, at least for now.

I'm going to make a free website for my grandma, she takes care of elderly people, freelance, and could use a website to get more clients. That'll be my first portfolio project. She's going to pay for the website hosting, I sent her a link + instructions, and then I can start.

Got in contact with a lead generation company that was recommended by someone in Fox's course, for 60 dollars they'll find you a hundred companies in a specified niche and location who's websites look like they could be improved, so that'll save a lot of time probably. They also make the websites, so I want to see, once I get going, if I can outsource that to them, and only focus on making the deals / sales calls. Just something to look into, but potentially a way to earn a lot more than if I spend my time also making the websites, we'll see about that later.

For the rest, just working my way through the course videos.

Cheers

 

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[littleboy]

Manhattan??

Answer this question. Is it easier to start a business when your rent is $3000 a month or $600 a month?

You will be working a job you hate for too many hours and will not have enough time for your business. So much is done online anyways, why would you live in the place where your dollar earned is so much weaker? You could make the same dollars and spend Baht or Pesos and have much more free time to dedicate towards your idea.

I started my business when I was living at home and moved out once I was making money. If I moved out earlier I would've likely gotten a job so I could afford to live and would've had less time for my business.

Ha! Good point.

Yeah it's mainly just to have a specific goal, earn enough with webdesign to be able to live there, but it's true even if I'd be earning enough it's still a lot less stress to live somewhere cheaper. Besides, you can save a lot more money and time that you can then use for example to try out other businesses. So I guess I'll change my goal to "make enough with this business to theoretically be able to live in Manhattan by next year". One year is also not necessary, but I think it's good to set a time that's pretty close in the future so you can't afford to waste any time.

Yeah me too, I'm living at home now, no expenses, makes it a lot easier to focus on learning this stuff since I'm not earning anything at all yet.

 

[littleboy]

Week #5

Got that barbershop portfolio client! It is much easier to just go talk to people then send out emails, at least so it seems from my limited experience. Like I said I had made a list of about eight barbers on google maps with good reviews but no websites. I was a bit nervous actually to go out and talk to them, but the first one when I asked him if he wanted a free website immediately said he would love that. Said he had wanted one for a while but it was too expensive (said about 800 to 1000 euros for a barber). Anyway he is very happy. He also said he knew a lot of other people who would like a website so hopefully I can sell a website to one of those people for a couple hundred bucks after doing this project, and then we'll be off and running towards the big projects.

So, been working on the homepage for his site. You can use templates, but I figured I'll use templates later to save time, but first I want to learn how to make everything from scratch. So I found a barber template that I like, and am using that as inspiration for the design and am learning how to build everything. This way, after a couple websites I'll really know how everything works.

My first portfolio site was for my grandma but that's going a bit slow. I finished the layout but need to get the pictures, and the information to go on the site.

Another reason to work with local businesses, you can just go over and take the pictures yourself and ask any questions you have in person.

Plan for next week:
- Send my grandma a clear, final email to ask all the information I need to write the copy on the site
- Go to the barber and take the pictures, and ask him about all the information I need to write the copy
- For the rest just keep working on creating the layout and design for the different pages on his site, focusing on making it so that clients will book or contact him

It feeld good, heading in the right direction

 

[Odysseus M Jones]

I just turned 20, four days ago, and joined Rob's FoxWebSchool

Alright so technically I started learning code just over a month ago, but this is week one of the course, and week one of being 20. Also apparently you don't need to know code to make websites, you can just use wordpress (never heard of that before, I'm new to this). So I stopped learning code, at least for now.

However, barbers in my country have opened up again, so I made a list of barbers without websites,

honestly just by using Google maps you can find an infinite list of businesses in every niche. It also tells you their phone number and if they have a website or not.

Next week however I'll cold call barbers specifically, since I have already worked for a barber.

My plan now is to just work with barbers until they recommend me to a friend in another niche,

Called 90 barbers. Cold calling is hard hah.

Above are the main takeaways, IMO, from your thread so far.

Some questions to ask yourself:

How much do barbers charge for a haircut?
How many haircuts to recoup your fee?
How many free slots does a barber have?
What kind of sales growth can a barber expect with a website?
Are barbers looking to scale their business?
What's the catchment area for a barber?

Why target businesses without websites?
Either they can't afford it or don't need it.

Why not target businesses with bad websites?

If you believe personal visits are easier to close than telephone/email;

Why not target hair & beauty salons?
Perms, wedding styles & beauty treatments can run into hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars. You'll meet your desired "attractive"people there too.

What other high street/retail has high $$$ transactions that would benefit from a better website?

What other kind of companies near me have high average order values that would benefit from a better website?

What kind of companies would see value in spending $2000, $5000, $10,000 for a website?

How many barbers do I need to call, meet, sell & design websites for to make $10,000?

How many companies that make boring products/services with big order values to do the same?

Is time is my most precious resource?
How can I use that finite time to garner a greater return on my investment?

Is it better to spend one hour with a barber, a wholesaler, a carpet store, a builder, a hot dog vendor?

Who won't think twice about dropping $5000 on a website?

Think about your answers, decide upon a niche worth pursuing, formulate a plan of action & give it a go.

If you still think approaching barbers is the way you want to go, no problem, go ahead, after all it's your business & you have to the work.

Look forward to your update next week.

 

[Odysseus M Jones]

beauty salons and a lot of them, even ones with ten or twenty employees, often have websites that could definitely be improved quite a lot.

Improve it & show them, nothing beats a concrete example. Just do a landing page.
It's practice for you too, do it quickly like you have a deadline.
Worst case you have another portfolio piece.

So I'll target those and learn through experience whether they're really as closed off to someone with just one portfolio piece as my fears thought.

If you talk about them, & how they benefit, build trust, they won't even ask to see your work. Lots of newbies have done that.
Give them an offer they can't refuse.
No Risk
Tell them if they don't get results they can have a full refund.
It's the puppy dog close. Google it.
You want people to be happy with your work.
Go big.

 

[littleboy]

Nice work! Getting paid to learn sales is a good move too.
Perhaps for prospecting you could adapt an idea whereby you send video audits of potential customers websites.
It works for digital marketers.
It adds a whole new dimension of professionalism if you target big companies.
Here's a thread with info.

GOLD! - HOT! - FTE - 21 Years Old , $7K + Cashflow Business - How I kicked my a$$ into gear after years of action faking

Wow, it's been a long time since I've been on this forum. Hey guys, I'm Xolorr. I'm 21 Y/O from South Africa, and here's my story of how I kicked my a$$ into gear, finally started making some bread, and have some actionable advice that won't be fun but has helped me go from a broke-a$$ 21 y/o...

www.thefastlaneforum.com

Perhaps @Xolorr could offer some perspective?

Sweet, video audits a good idea, I'll keep that in mind for sure.

I’d count impressions first on a whiff of spend (€5/day? €10/day?). Then figure out where to focus your spend and try to get profitable?

Maybe these might help?

• How to get profitable or fail fast with AdWords
• Google Ads for Business Owners (Workshop Replay)

Cool thanks, yeah those are helpful.



Week #17

Got a sales call from the ads leading to my website! The call went quite well, it's for a taxi company of four taxi drivers. He seemed interested in working together, but the proposal was a bit messy, and I haven't heard back from him yet. I wanted to send the proposal the same day, but it was a bit rushed since I've never made a proposal before and was learning about that at the same time. I'll follow up with him this week. Fox Sales Legends is very good for learning how to make sales calls and proposals, by the way.
So, apparently the ads and the website work, and that feels great. Even though it's quite expensive, at least for now. Google Ads Stats - total spent: € 239; avg. cost per click: € 3,80; click-through rate: 2.38%; total clicks: 63; results: one sales call.

I put the ads on pause though because for some reason the tracking for website behavior isn't working, so I don't know which ads are creating the most interaction on the website, and therefore I can't improve them. That's one thing I want to do this week.

As for the sales job, that went quite well! I had an interview in downtown Rotterdam, the biggest city in my area. The business owner wasn't happy at first, because I had basically no sales experience. He said this was an advanced sales position, that it's not cold calling consumers but making deals with businesses. But then we talked about his business, and how he got started, and then I showed him my website and told him what I was doing. He got more and more interested the longer we talked and he asked me to read the sales script. In the end he told me that I reminded him of when he got started in business, and that he's going to give me a shot. He still needs to talk to his business partner but probably I can come in on tuesday or wednesday for a day to see how I work.

It sounds very interesting: this company does the marketing and thinks of business projects they can do. For example right now during the pandemic they have a "vacation at home" program where they do stuff like interior design for homes to give a "vacation feeling" and some other similar projects. My job, if I get it, will be to find companies who want to do the interior design. So you get a lot of experience making deals with other businesses, and you see a lot of business ideas come and go and see which ones work and which ones don't. The other thing they do is sell SEO packages, which of course would be as close as you can get to completely relevant experience to selling webdesign. It pays well too, commission based, but according to him you should be making 6k / month and if you're good you can make double. Of course he might very well be exaggerating, but coming from making at most 1750 a month that's a seriously good deal.

So that's that for now. I'll be figuring out what went wrong with the tracking I set up, and I'll follow up with the taxi business about their website. I hope the partner at that call center agrees to give me a shot. If I do get the job, I think I'll translate my website to English and run ads in the US and Canada, so that I can take sales calls in the evenings here, after work.

 

[Michael Raphael]

Hey everyone,

Super excited, I'm actually starting. I just turned 20, four days ago, and joined Rob's FoxWebSchool. I read The Millionaire Fastlane about a year ago, and have been fantasizing about becoming an entrepreneur ever since, but had no idea where to start. So I'm starting with Rob's course, to gain experience and momentum. As a lot of you might already know from here, that program is about using webdesign as a stepping stone into entrepreneurship.

Dropped out of high school at 16 because I didn't like where life was taking me, and since that have been working minimum wage, traveling around the world, and dreaming about starting my own business. No more dreaming! I told my parents, sister and my friends that by this time next year I'm going to be earning enough to live in Manhattan, because that seems to me as probably the best place to really build your business, with all the business folk around.

Anyway, I'll post my progress to keep myself accountable. Step 1: Earn enough to live in Manhattan, through webdesign, by next year. That'll teach me a lot of useful skills. So far, I've learned the basics of website coding, joined the FoxWebSchool Sales Legends program, and found someone to make my first portfolio website for.

Cheers

Amazing vision brother. Keep up the hustle and perfect the sales game. As "CEO" you're a glorified salesman, and no matter what venture you end up building you will be your number 1 sales guy. SaaS is an amazing product. Dont feel like you need to move to NYC, if you build a SaaS product you can do it from anywhere. Go door to door and find out what businesses need, home owners need, and use your drive to build a product that you can manage from anywhere and execute!

 

[Michael Raphael]

They also make the websites

Don't outsource this directly, control the outsource. Find a team of developers in Eastern Europe or Asia. Why outsource and lose the power to have control over the team. Then you can do the sales and grow organically. You hire 1 guy who can do a wordpress site for $250-$500 per site and you charge $2000+ learn some SEO tips and one-time fixes with plugins and charge extra $500 to just do the one-time SEO things. Easy $$

 

[littleboy]

Week #2

Wow, it feels like a lot longer than just week 2 hahah. That's a good sign though, means there's lots of new impressions.

Started building my first portfolio website, for my grandma, to help her get more clients (she helps people who need extra care at home). Taking a side course on increasing website effectiveness that someone recommended: Landing Page Design & Conversion Rate Optimization 2018 if anyone's interested. Seems solid so far.

It's a slow process building this website since it's my first one, but I'm really learning how to make good sites now. Best way to learn is by doing.

Just putting in the work, learning. Talk to you next week.

 

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[littleboy]

Week #3

Completed that Udemy course, was really helpful in getting an idea of how to design sites to create sales / leads. Went through it very carefully, taking notes on everything and sorting them by subject. This way I'll be able to put the information I learn from other resources in the same summary, and in the end I'll have a very handy reference book.

Worked on that site, I'm starting to get an idea of what I'm doing now, and what to focus on. Using youtube and google to find mini tutorials whenever I get stuck on something.

 

[littleboy]

Week #4

Sent out 50 cold emails, response rate = 0. Guess that's how it goes when you're new. However, barbers in my country have opened up again, so I made a list of barbers without websites, according to google maps. I'll go talk to them in person until I find someone who wants a (free) website.

Got the layout and stuff pretty much set for my first website. Still got to do the copywriting and some last details, add some pictures and then that's ready to go and I'll have a first portfolio piece.

Also, got a bit in a funk the second half of Thursday and the first half of Friday, but I'm reading Unscripted and, perfectly timed, got to the section about defining your "why's", so I sat down and really thought about why I'm doing this and made a list. That helped a lot actually. Here it is:

My "Why's" for getting good at web design
- Freedom and the ability to live anywhere (i.e. have a bed and good food when not living with my parents or in a super cheap country, as well as having a place near a beach or something with lots of attractive people - won't expand, this is a business forum, but what do you expect I'm a young guy that's part of my motivation)
- Learn business skills so I can grow an actual business later on
- Gain a deep confidence, through experience, that I can achieve worthy goals
- Not have to worry about money
- No boss, nobody that can tell you what to do
- No more minimum wage, can travel to more expensive places without sleeping in tents / on roofs / on the streets (did that last year, it actually was quite awesome but it did show me that a bed and pasta sauce are quite nice. I'm not legitimately poor, my parents have good middle class jobs, but I wanted to travel and personally was broke.)

That got me going quite well again.

Anyway, that's that for this week, next week I'm going out until I find a second portfolio client, and will work on getting that first website done.

 

[littleboy]

Week #6

Have to say, my memory of last week is quite blurry. As far as I can recall it went pretty smooth. A friend of mine wants to become a business photographer, so he took the pictures for free, to add to his own portfolio. I got the barber site done for the most part as well.

The barber was a bit confusing with his business ideas: he wanted people to make reservations, but gave them a discount if they did not reserve, because he thought it wasn't fair to make people wait and have them pay the same price as people who reserved and could just walk in. WTF. No amount of reasoning could make him change his mind. I might screen future clients for how business oriented they are - makes it easier for me to get good results for them.

My grandma sent the information for the text for the other site, and I created a basic sales structure to organize it into good copy.

Next: create a booking system for the barber site, optimize it for speed and SEO, and for the other site: write the copy. No experience whatsoever with any of these yet, so it'll probably take some time, and I'll hopefully learn a lot from it.

 

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[littleboy]

What makes you say that?
Is $4000 to a larger company as significant as $400 to a barber?

So much this.

You must learn to disassociate price and effort. Pricing becomes more of an exchange of value and potential ROI determines price more than anything imo.

Scaling pay to effort is not the route you want to take

Yeah I was unclear, I meant even if it would take ten times as long it would still be better, not that it actually takes ten times as long.

Also Isaac I just saw your FSL testimonial/advice video - correct me if I'm wrong, but sounds like that is exactly what you were talking about: first you were struggling because you were pricing your work relative to the amount of effort you put in, then when you reframed it to customers relative to the value you provided everything went through the roof.

Why do you think that?

I thought that they wouldn't pay attention if I didn't have many past projects. Not based on any experience or anything really, just my own biases and beliefs/fears. I'll definitely start targeting bigger businesses than barbers now though. I looked around today at beauty salons and a lot of them, even ones with ten or twenty employees, often have websites that could definitely be improved quite a lot. So I'll target those and learn through experience whether they're really as closed off to someone with just one portfolio piece as my fears thought.

Why do they need a website?
Do they have unique services that customers are unaware of?

Barbers, as far as I know, mainly just to let people know they exist in the first place, show they're good through pictures / reviews, show what their prices are, and make it easy for people to contact them. The one I made a website for didn't have anything unique when I asked him, just that "we're good at giving nice haircuts".
There are definitely businesses that would get more value from a website than a two man barbershop.

 

[littleboy]

Week #13

The bulk of the website is finished, still need to make a logo, finish up the design, and then do some back end final stuff.

Have been taking a google ads course. Once the site is done I'm planning on sending people there through google ads, with the goal of breaking even. If I can break even I can adjust and improve so that it becomes profitable.

 

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[humananalytics]

I live in Manhattan and helped my company decide on which website vendor to go with for our website revamp.

First, I think it is good to have goals to live in a place like Manhattan. Just know it will be pretty expensive! You could make it work, if you are able to set-up more in-person meetings for higher dollar value clients. Just keep in mind, high dollar clients are demanding. Before we decided on our website vendor, we received formal RFPs (20-40 page PPTs after we sent the vendors our formal requirements), and 2/3 vendors traveled to meet us in the office.

Second, I helped my current employer choose our recent website vendor. I think all in, we are paying them around 80k for our website. We are a <100 person company, with 20-30M in revenue. I think it could be helpful for you, so I'll list some of the vendors we considered:

• 20k website, off-shore Indian company, RFP had numerous typos, so even though they were cheap, they weren't a viable contender
• 80k award winning Eastern European company (40-80 employees), has done some fantastic work for a few F500 clients - who we went with. Their design work is incredible, and they even flew 3-4 people from Europe to US for their RFP pitch. Even though they are using Wordpress (for our sake to make content management easy), website does not look cookie cutter and they've been working on our website for the past 8 months with a team of 3-4 people.
• 140k award wining US company (80-100 employees)
• 40k US company (10 employees), but their website seemed too much like cookie-cutter Wordpress websites. They also pitched to us with just 1 guy, who just used webex (vs. everyone else brought 3-4 people of their team to pitch in person).

It will probably be difficult for you to reach these type of figures until you're a few years out, but the range of what you can potentially charge for a website is quite large. However, I will say that I found the pricing for various website vendors was quite fair, in the sense you get what you pay for.

 

[humananalytics]

Is your company a SaaS? Why did your company feel like a new web design/website was needed?

My experience working with companies like yours (20-30 million, <100) is that they can be quite particular about what they spend their money upon, you're not really considered a startup but you're also far away from being large enterprise. So you wouldn't usually invest money in something unless you know it's going to impact your bottom/top line significantly e.g. increased leads via SEO

My employer is a management/tech consulting firm.

Our website was horrible. Visually it was OK, but it was not even optimized for mobile and even worse, our services were so poorly listed, it was unclear what type of company we were. Our website mostly highlighted 1-2 areas of service, that account for literally zero of our revenue. Meanwhile, the area we obtain 50-70% of our revenue was not even on the website.

We do not know if it will help us convert more leads, but at the very least it will help us recruit more candidates. Management consulting tends to be a bit of a talent war, with high churn, well paid employees (I think almost every consultant here is paid six, figures except 1 person) and our current website presents us very poorly. When potential employees try to do research on our company, they come to our website and leave pretty confused. We often pay recruiters 20-25% fee per hire, which works out 20-40k+/per person we hire in recruiter fees. In that context, 80k for a website isn't horrible.

Something to consider in terms of selling a website is that we looked at the website in primarily 2 ways: clients and potential employees. Most people selling new websites focus the the first, but for some industries the latter is more important. Most of our sales come from relationships and formal RFPs, not many people look to our website for sales.

 

[Xolorr]

On a very very good path, and based off the title I almost expected this to be a 2 post "I'VE STARTED" and then never return to the forum.

Pleasantly surprised!

My $0.02 is that most of your time should be spent on lead gen/prospecting at the moment, and be wary of imposter syndrome.

Those high ticket clients aren't out of reach for you if you keep growing your skills and consistently outreach every day.

Can't wait for next week.

 

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[littleboy]

Week #14

The design and copy and images of the website are done. Next will be the back end: seo, security, speed, this stuff always frustrates me I don't know what I'm doing here yet. I'll post a link once I get everything working.

The design of the logo is done: a black U with a blue W with the right part of the W an upward arrow, cause the name will Ultimo Websites (my name is Timo ha). Paid someone on fiverr to digitalize the logo, I made a drawing, but that was a lot of back and forth hassle and in the end he gave a half assed logo, even tho it's a super simple logo. Think I'll try again but find someone who charges more, with a lot of great reviews.

Got through a good part of the google ads course, and am beginning to get a good understanding of it. I've made some simple ads and will run them once the site is ready. It says in the ad that sites are €1500+, so hopefully only people who are looking for a website in that range will click. Clicks are about €5, so I need one in 300 clicks to become a deal to get the ball rolling. Then it's a matter of optimizing, and testing with raising prices. I'm planning on investing everything back into ads. If I get more projects than I can work on at one time I'll definitely raise prices, which means a bigger ad budget, which means more people interested, which means I'll, sadly, have to raise prices even more. That's the plan at least. I think this can work - I'm excited! Have a friend who did webdesign and he said that he got about 3 clients for about 500 bucks - I'm aiming for 1 for 1500 bucks, so I'd say it's has a realistic chance, and if it's better than 1 for 1500 bucks it might explode. Hopefully, but we'll see.

Next week (so this week, it's already Monday) I won't be doing anything, brought some books but we're going on a family week to my grandparents.
It does give me some space to think about where I want this whole thing to go. I'm planning on adding services such as google ads and SEO once I get going. Eventually I want to hire some webdesigners. The math seems simple: you can hire good designers for 5k/month, and I'm assuming they can get at least one website done per month, probably two. I hear from folks that once you get going and you sell focused on the results your website gives, you can sell websites for 5k - 10k definitely. Which means a margin of something around 5 - 15k per webdesigner you hire. Of course you still need to pay for marketing and taxes, but if you run the marketing yourself and do the sales and stuff yourself and get really good at that, so that you can have a team 5 webdesigners working for you fulltime, you're looking at quite some good money (at least compared to minimum wage).

Anyway, no idea if that will work, but we'll see. That's the goal with this business, past once I'm able to do this at full scale as a freelancer. The purpose of this webdesign business is mainly just to learn business, that's why I put it in intro, since this is my intro learning-by-doing business.

Cheers and I'll update in two weeks.

This is the google ads course if anyone's interested, it's very thorough:

Guide To Google AdWords Training: Turn Profit With PPC

Google Ads 2021: How our clients have transformed their sales using Google Ads & get your Google Ads certification!

www.udemy.com

 

[littleboy]

Week #16

The website is done! Professionele Website Laten Maken | 100% Garantie | Ultimo Websites - it's in Dutch though. Added the guarantee which @Odysseus M Jones suggested, 60 days money back - with the requirement that they take the website I built offine. Nobody has money-back guarantees in webdesign as far as I know, so that's good. I don't really have a portfolio to show so it's important to have something like this to stand out and create trust.

The google ads are running for €750 / month, have enough saved up to run for a little while at this pace. Now just got to learn how to analyze and optimize them.

Once I get a grip on that, most likely this week, I'll have a bunch of free time. I'm thinking about getting a job at a call center: they give you free or even paid training for cold calling, plus I'll earn about €13 / hour I checked, which is what like 2k / month, so if I invest all of that in ads that'll give that a major boost. Win-win!

Also thinking about other ways to start prospecting, maybe leaving business cards in waiting rooms or hanging up posters in places. Another thing I might try is, there are companies that just deliver door-to-door ads, so I could hire them to deliver flyers. Or send out more targeted direct mailing campaigns to business owners - will have to look into how to get addresses and names for that. Could also of course send letters to business addresses - maybe even with a coupon of say €100 off on a website, that way they probably won't throw it away.

Anyway, a lot to look in to. But first: learning how to really analyze and optimize google ads, then probably get a call-center job to get some cash flow to invest in marketing, and I think I'll look into direct mailing as well. And cold-calling, since I'll probably get pretty good at that.

 

[Andy Black]

That's some serious moolah, @Andy Black what's your thoughts on this spend for a new business as yet without revenue?

I’d count impressions first on a whiff of spend (€5/day? €10/day?). Then figure out where to focus your spend and try to get profitable?

Maybe these might help?

• How to get profitable or fail fast with AdWords
• Google Ads for Business Owners (Workshop Replay)

 

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[JacobNZ]

Hey everyone,

Super excited, I'm actually starting. I just turned 20, four days ago, and joined Rob's FoxWebSchool. I read The Millionaire Fastlane about a year ago, and have been fantasizing about becoming an entrepreneur ever since, but had no idea where to start. So I'm starting with Rob's course, to gain experience and momentum. As a lot of you might already know from here, that program is about using webdesign as a stepping stone into entrepreneurship.

Dropped out of high school at 16 because I didn't like where life was taking me, and since that have been working minimum wage, traveling around the world, and dreaming about starting my own business. No more dreaming! I told my parents, sister and my friends that by this time next year I'm going to be earning enough to live in Manhattan, because that seems to me as probably the best place to really build your business, with all the business folk around.

Anyway, I'll post my progress to keep myself accountable. Step 1: Earn enough to live in Manhattan, through webdesign, by next year. That'll teach me a lot of useful skills. So far, I've learned the basics of website coding, joined the FoxWebSchool Sales Legends program, and found someone to make my first portfolio website for.

Cheers

Good stuff, stay persistent and consistent and I have no doubt you will achieve your goal. All the best.

 

[Nick perry01]

Hey everyone,

Super excited, I'm actually starting. I just turned 20, four days ago, and joined Rob's FoxWebSchool. I read The Millionaire Fastlane about a year ago, and have been fantasizing about becoming an entrepreneur ever since, but had no idea where to start. So I'm starting with Rob's course, to gain experience and momentum. As a lot of you might already know from here, that program is about using webdesign as a stepping stone into entrepreneurship.

Dropped out of high school at 16 because I didn't like where life was taking me, and since that have been working minimum wage, traveling around the world, and dreaming about starting my own business. No more dreaming! I told my parents, sister and my friends that by this time next year I'm going to be earning enough to live in Manhattan, because that seems to me as probably the best place to really build your business, with all the business folk around.

Anyway, I'll post my progress to keep myself accountable. Step 1: Earn enough to live in Manhattan, through webdesign, by next year. That'll teach me a lot of useful skills. So far, I've learned the basics of website coding, joined the FoxWebSchool Sales Legends program, and found someone to make my first portfolio website for.

Cheers

congrats bruh. You're life is going somewhere

 

[mve0991]

Good luck man, be happy with where you already are at your age!

 

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[Strider007]

Hello and welcome!

 

[Lyinx]

Week #4

Sent out 50 cold emails, response rate = 0. Guess that's how it goes when you're new. However, barbers in my country have opened up again, so I made a list of barbers without websites, according to google maps. I'll go talk to them in person until I find someone who wants a (free) website.

Got the layout and stuff pretty much set for my first website. Still got to do the copywriting and some last details, add some pictures and then that's ready to go and I'll have a first portfolio piece.

Also, got a bit in a funk the second half of Thursday and the first half of Friday, but I'm reading Unscripted and, perfectly timed, got to the section about defining your "why's", so I sat down and really thought about why I'm doing this and made a list. That helped a lot actually. Here it is:

My "Why's" for getting good at web design
- Freedom and the ability to live anywhere (i.e. have a bed and good food when not living with my parents or in a super cheap country, as well as having a place near a beach or something with lots of attractive people - won't expand, this is a business forum, but what do you expect I'm a young guy that's part of my motivation)
- Learn business skills so I can grow an actual business later on
- Gain a deep confidence, through experience, that I can achieve worthy goals
- Not have to worry about money
- No boss, nobody that can tell you what to do
- No more minimum wage, can travel to more expensive places without sleeping in tents / on roofs / on the streets (did that last year, it actually was quite awesome but it did show me that a bed and pasta sauce are quite nice. I'm not legitimately poor, my parents have good middle class jobs, but I wanted to travel and personally was broke.)

That got me going quite well again.

Anyway, that's that for this week, next week I'm going out until I find a second portfolio client, and will work on getting that first website done.

Love your drive, following along...
I have experience with physical products/manfacturing, if you ever have any questions feel free to reach out (and yes, we need an improved website, and no, it's not in your niche of websites, it's based on an a different platform (e-commerce) that is constantly being updated )

 

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[littleboy]

Love your drive, following along...
I have experience with physical products/manfacturing, if you ever have any questions feel free to reach out (and yes, we need an improved website, and no, it's not in your niche of websites, it's based on an a different platform (e-commerce) that is constantly being updated )

Awesome, thanks man!

Once I know what I'm doing I'd be happy to take a look and give pointers on your site or help you out with any questions about websites.

 

[littleboy]

Week #7 & #8

Forgot to post last week so this is for two weeks.

So, I've finished the barbersite. Tomorrow I'll go to him and write down the text (just 3 sections of each a couple lines). He said he'd write them but still hasn't done that, so I'll just do it for him ha. After that just transfer the hosting to an account that he's paying and we're done.

Added some more pages to the other website, still waiting for pictures and text there too. Gotta find clients who are motivated to get their site done quickly.

Speaking of which, Friday I went out to about eight businesses in person, to see if they were interested in a website. One of them wanted to know more. Next week is going to be a lot of prospecting. I made a script for a video explaining what I did for the barber site and will make and send that to businesses after I cold call them next week. Got a huge list, and honestly just by using Google maps you can find an infinite list of businesses in every niche. It also tells you their phone number and if they have a website or not.

It's getting exciting! At the stage now where I can get a paid client. I have no idea how smooth it will go, have never done any prospecting before. But I got the time, so I'm just gonna call or go door to door or advertise or keep trying stuff until I get a client. It feels good. Know how to make a website now, so yeah. Let's go.

 

[littleboy]

Week #9

I have to admit that I was lazy this week. There was quite some time where I either wasn't doing anything or told myself I'd just summarize books. This I think was mainly out of fear.

I did make a video that I can send to prospects, and cold called 46 businesses. Most of them didn't pick up, and the rest wasn't interested. Next week however I'll cold call barbers specifically, since I have already worked for a barber. Also I'll keep it very simple and just ask if I can send an email, instead of asking if they're looking for a website, something that got recommended in the Fox web course. My plan now is to just work with barbers until they recommend me to a friend in another niche, then after having made a website for a different niche I can start prospecting in that niche as well.