The word “entrepreneur” is defined as follows:

Entrepreneur (noun):

• A person who organizes and operates a business or businesses, taking on greater than normal financial risks in order to do so.

Despite that being the definition of an entrepreneur, you may be surprised to find that most entrepreneurs actually start with zero dollars in their bank accounts, and sometimes they’re even in debt.

So if you’re wondering how in the world you become an entrepreneur with no money, let me comfort you by saying that most of us who have succeeded at it started with no money.

Self Fund or Borrow

When it comes to starting a business with no money, it is absolutely possible, especially in the digital age. However, you will always need at least some money, even if it’s just a couple of hundred dollars for the basics.

You have two paths: on one end, you can borrow money from a bank or seek investors if you think you have a good idea. This is an option, but it is a terrible option if you don’t have experience as an entrepreneur. You want to borrow money once you’ve spent some time making mistakes and learning how to grow a business. Until you’ve done that, borrowing money will cause you more harm than good.

So your other option is to self-fund, and that requires generating your own cash flow. The only way to get cash flow when you have none is a little something called “sweat equity.”

Sweat equity (noun): The value added to a project or business as a direct result of hard work, effort, and labor put in by the owners or employees, rather than financial investment. It often refers to the non-monetary investment that individuals contribute to a business or project, typically in the form of time, expertise, and effort. This term is commonly used in contexts where founders, employees, or partners are rewarded with equity in the company for their contributions instead of monetary compensation.

In other words, your labor.

Let’s talk about the first way to become an entrepreneur with no money.

Self Funding Your Way to the Top

If you truly have zero dollars and are living paycheck to paycheck, then you have to earn some extra money to self-fund. When it comes to starting a business, there are two ways to earn money:

Product – This is not an option as you have costs that are associated with this, including marketing, manufacturing, and operations. In short, there is a ton of overhead associated with this path.

Service – The other option is to offer a service. Offering a service has its advantages because there is no overhead, other than what it costs you to do the service, and you can usually charge upfront for it, which means you get the cash you need to do it before you have to do it.

So because service is the way to go, let’s talk about how to offer and grow a service business the right way.

Learn a Skill

If you don’t have a skill, you have to start here. At the time of this writing (July 2024), there are a ton of opportunities for you to step into service-based entrepreneurship, especially with the rise in AI tools. This can be any skill, from marketing, accounting, all the way down to painting homes or helping people move. Any skill that you have the ability to offer or can acquire to offer, will help you start on the right path.

When I started my marketing agency, there was no marketing agency—it was just me.

I was taking the skills I learned in my first business and using them to offer a service in my second business. This included SEO, running paid advertising, designing websites, and really just any digital marketing across the board.

Pick one skill you have or that you can learn, and then:

Offer it as a Service

Once you’ve identified the skill or spent some time learning the skill (through books, courses, teachers, etc.), it’s time to offer it as a service. The first thing you will need is a website that explains what you do, how you do it, and gives people a way to get in touch with you.

You don’t need money to build a website.

You can go to themeforest.net or envato.elements.com and download a theme for less than $50 that comes ready to go. All you have to do is learn a bit of WordPress and how to change text and images in a premade theme.

You can use a $10 software like Canva to design your logo, and your domain name (website name) will cost you $12, in addition to hosting which will cost you $20/mo max.

For less than $100, you can have a professional website.

Despite having much success as an entrepreneur, I still practice what I preach. The website you’re reading this on now costs less than $100 to build. Rarely does spending thousands of dollars on a website make sense, unless your business’s complexity requires you to do so.

A website is the first thing you want to get up and running because it is the face of your business and will allow you an easy way to show people what you do. It will also be central to your marketing activities.

Also, once you learn how to build a website, this can be the service that you offer.

You can easily charge $500-$1,000 per website for the labor it takes you to swap images and create content for them.

Before you go crazy buying T-shirts, mugs, incorporating your business, opening bank accounts and the like, get your first client.

Market and Sell Your Service

There are a few different ways to market your new service that you want to provide.

The first and the lowest hanging fruit is to reach out to every single person you know with a social DM, text message, or email, telling them that you’re now in the (business) and if they know anyone who needs the (service) you’re open to taking on clients.

You’ll be surprised that you get a client this way if you can just shed yourself of your bashfulness to do the outreach.

The other option you have is to hit Google and Yelp and call them to offer your service. If you’ve never sold anything before, you need to learn how to sell.

If you’re going to be an entrepreneur, selling is of the utmost importance. If I’m you and starting from the beginning, I would get a sales job first.

Or you can read “The Happy Sales System” and learn my entire process of selling in a one-hour read.

Call and email a few hundred people every day with your offer and you will get business. Once you get your first client, do the math backward to see how many people you need to reach out to, to get the income that you want.

Beyond that, you have the option of marketing your website on social media and Google search, both through paid and organic methods. Paid is running ads, organic is getting followers and visits through methods that don’t require advertising. This takes skills though so I wouldn’t go blow advertising budgets on trying to DIY this.

If you really want to learn marketing, read as many books as you can get your hands on. If you want to learn specific strategies, read “Breaking the Profit Plateau.”

If you lack marketing skills, one of the best things you can do to promote yourself is to get on social media and educate people about the tips and tricks in your industry that pertains to your skill.

Find creative ways to get yourself out there.

The key to making money is having something of value and getting it in front of enough people.

Once you find a way to acquire clients, you don’t want to be stuck in the loop of doing the work, so at this point, it’s time to separate yourself with some of that money you’re making, and:

Hire People to Do it

When you have no money for your next venture, you start off as self-employed, and once you acquire a couple of gigs, you hire. Your goal was never self-employment (unless it was); it was to become an entrepreneur.

Once you make enough money, you want to start contracting your work out. Notice I said contracting, not hiring employees.

The reason you want to start with contractors is you want to build up a repeatable path for client acquisition. In the business world, we call this a “funnel.”

Until you have a good marketing and sales process set up, you’re better off hiring contractors that don’t require payroll. Do not put anyone on your payroll unless you have enough cash to pay them for six months without anything coming in, otherwise, you may find yourself in trouble of having to lay people off, which is never pleasant.

Now, if all you wanted was the label “entrepreneur” then you’ve successfully accomplished that once you hired your first, second, or third employee.

Once you create a business that provides jobs, generates revenue/profits, and is scalable, you’re an entrepreneur.

However, if you had a very specific idea you wanted to fund, the service providing was really just a cash generator for you, so the next step is to use what you’re generating from providing the service, to fund your actual idea.

If this is the case, you never want to hire employees, stick to contractors, pay them what they charge, and then use the rest of the money to cover your bills and to reinvest in the idea you had originally.

Fund Your Next Idea

If you started the entrepreneurship journey with a very specific idea, then you want to be aggressive about self-funding it. Make sure you do not upgrade your lifestyle and be as lean as you possibly can. Every single dollar will count.

The good news is, because you decided to self-fund using a service model, you’ve now learned a bit about marketing, and hopefully about sales.

While you could fund yourself with a job, there is a very limited ceiling on how much you can make and you won’t get the valuable experience necessary to grow the next project.

From here you want to start investing in the product that you want to scale. Whether it’s a digital product, or one that requires sourcing of materials and manufacturers.

This is where you begin to do what’s called bootstrapping; building a business with your own resources.

This is a long path to scaling, but one where you don’t owe anyone money, you risk your own money, and you don’t give up any equity (ownership) in your company.

The other option is to get money from other people.

Raising Money

The other option you have to become an entrepreneur with no money is to raise money from other people.

This comes in the form of three paths:

Friends and Family – Borrowing money from friends and family to fund your venture. This is risky because you’re asking your loved ones to take the risk with you, and there is no certainty of payout. It puts you on the hook to owe a lot of money while also taking from them in the process. Assuming you’re reading this article, you’re probably not born with a silver spoon.

Banks – The other option is to take out credit or loans. Also risky because you’re risking your financial health. Many entrepreneurs, even those that made it big, have awful credit because they almost always overestimate the return they will be able to get with an initial investment and underestimate how much money it will take to get the return on investment.

Investors – The last way of raising money is to work with investors. These come in the form of angel investors or venture capitalists. To get money from these folks, you will have to have a somewhat developed idea and preferably business experience. Your chances of getting money from them increase if it’s a personal introduction, however, it’s possible to join accelerators and go to pitch events to try and raise funding. This is not for amateurs; you have to know your business if you’re going to survive a pitch. It’s like Shark Tank, but with much more due diligence taking place. Investors cross every T and dot every I, because they take the risk with you. If the company fails, you don’t owe the money, so they want to increase the chance that they get a return.

If you know enough about business, have a good product, and know enough about how to grow it, or at the very least build a team to grow it, then this is the way you want to go.

However, if you are completely new to business and how it works, you may want some skin in the game first before you start playing with other people’s money.

Sure, you can raise enough capital to hire the experts to do the work for you, but you have to know enough to know they are experts and be able to manage and guide them properly so that your vision isn’t derailed.

There is a third way though to become an entrepreneur with no money that doesn’t require you to start another business or to ask people for money, and that is organic marketing.

Enter Organic Marketing – The Best Way to Become an Entrepreneur With No Money

One of the things that the rise of the internet, specifically search engines and social media, has allowed, is the ability to grow your business with little to no money. All you have to do is really put in the effort.

Organic Marketing comes in the form of search engine optimization and social media marketing.

If you’re reading this article, then you likely found it in the search engine, and that is a result of the SEO work I did to get you here, to introduce you to myself, my coaching services, and my email newsletter. I didn’t run paid ads to get you here. To get you to learn about me, I didn’t do more than write this article and build my website’s “search authority.” That is just one of the ways that you can grow your business.

While that warrants a whole article of its own on how to do it effectively, you can learn more about specific strategies in “Breaking the Profit Plateau.”

In summary, what you will need is a website, you will need to write content relevant to your business model, and you will have to get links from other websites.

The links from other websites will signal to Google that you’re a resource for this information.

Your goal will be to write content on your website that is relevant to your product or service in a way that can lead to a purchase.

For example, if you sell fitness equipment, write reviews of competitors, exercises that incorporate your equipment, or any other queries that you see people are searching for that are relevant to your business.

You can use a tool like “Keywords Everywhere” which is a Chrome extension that allows you to see search volume for anything you type into Google.

Your mission here is to write value-driven content, that makes people want to do business with you.

Do a little bit of this every day and eventually, your website will start getting organic visitors because you’re ranking in Google.

This process takes time.

The other side of organic marketing is organic social.

Social media marketing is all about video creation. If you’re not a camera person, get over yourself. Get in front of the camera, be nervous, mess up your first 30 videos and throw them in the trash, and eventually, you’ll get good enough to create something worth of value.

What you want to do is to create video content around your business and niche. The best way to do this is through educational formats.

The biggest difference with social media, unlike SEO, is it doesn’t have to take a year, it can happen quicker, but it can also take longer. It’s all about how good you get at content creation.

You also have to create enough content for the platforms to figure out who your audience is and who to push you out to.

At the time of this writing, you want to focus on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. Make short-form content, and if you have the capacity to make longer-form content, clip it into smaller clips.

I started a channel in the boxing niche to promote a book and ended up getting north of 30k followers across multiple platforms in 2 short months.

It’s possible to grow fast on social media and promote your business to many people.

Some people underestimate what social media can do.

I had a client tell me they “only got 500 views on their first video.” Only?

If I packed 500 people in a room to watch you speak, you would not feel like you made little impact.

Every eyeball is one step closer to your next customer.

Press record.

The Good Old-Fashioned Way

What many people don’t realize today is that the good ol’ fashioned way works, which is through personal interactions.

This can be things like going to networking events, cold calling, going door to door, or just texting everyone you know and telling them about your new business and what you need help with.

If you’re going to be an entrepreneur who is broke and has no way to fund, you have to rid yourself of your bashfulness.

You have to have absolutely zero care in the world for what anyone thinks of you.

Get out there and tell everyone about your business one by one if you have to.

Parting Words

You’re reading this because you’re broke. When you’re broke you have to get over yourself and your limitations. You can’t make decisions based on what you decide your personality is.

You have to lock into your goals, and do whatever is necessary. Either that or give up on your dreams, and you’re not going to do that if you got to this point in the article.

For more detailed tips and tricks on success, please check out my books here, or sign up for the newsletter for a monthly dump of entrepreneurship wisdom.

If you want me to coach you one-on-one, contact me here.