If I had $5000 to start my business, this is where I would spend it for maximum results

When starting your online digital business, it can be difficult to know where to start. There are so many new and shiny options like websites and logos and software platforms—but they all cost money. So, what's actually worth investing in from the get-go? In today's episode, I am sharing how to prioritise your money in those early few months, so that you can get the most bang for your limited buck.

– Why DIY visual branding can be a great way to keep things really simple
– How hiring a professional can help you to get really clear on your messaging, right from the start
– What software platforms are worth investing in and why
– The benefits of having support from the beginning

Episodes mentioned:
Episode #515: If I were starting over with no audience, no products and no biz… This is what I would do – https://listen.socialette.co/515?sid=
Episode #650: Copycats 101: How to protect yourself and what to do if someone copies you online with Riz Amin – https://listen.stephtaylor.co/650?sid=

 

Today I am talking about where I would spend my limited budget if I was starting my business again from scratch, right? If I had $5,000 to start a business, where would I spend it? Now, I want to say this episode is going to be mainly relevant to online businesses and personal brand-style businesses like mine, where I'm charging for my own services and my own digital products.

But this episode was really inspired by one of my most popular episodes of all time, which was an episode I shared in 2022, episode 515. If I was starting over with no audience, no products, and no business, this is what I would do. It has been one of the best. I've got the most feedback from it. It's also been one of the most listened two episodes. 

Okay, so where would I spend my money if I was starting from scratch? Well, I think visual branding and a website are probably one of the first places that most people will go and spend their money when they're starting out. 

And I think back to my first business, the very first, actually the second main investment, the first major investment I made in my first business, the one that made it all feel really real was when I spent I think, two and a half thousand dollars on postage satchels so I could go and send my orders out. And by buying them in bulk, I was saving a lot of money. So I bought them all upfront, and that was really scary. But then the second investment I made was in my website.

 

Why DIY visual branding can be a great way to keep things really simple

Now, I think in the personal brand world, in the online business world, I don't think visual branding is as important as it is if you are creating a physical product or an e-commerce business. I know I have a lot of designers who are listening to this right now, being like Steph, what are you talking about?

But honestly, I think you can get away with DIY branding for the first couple of years, as long as it's really simple, not a fancy logo, it's just your name in a nice font. Okay? Just that simple word mark. I think that is the technical term for it. And then once you have clients, once your business is a little bit more established, then go and invest in a designer to give you a really beautiful, consistent visual brand.

But keep it simple. One font for your logo. Two or three fonts at maximum for the rest of your brand and a couple of colours, and you can find ready-made colour palettes for branding online and go with that until you are ready to get a rebrand. Then as far as the website goes, I would probably set up a really simple DIY website on Kajabi.

So rather than going through the whole process of setting up a WordPress site or getting a beautiful Squarespace design, I would go with a really simple one on Kajabi. It's probably not going to be the prettiest, but it's easy for you to DIY and all it really is there for is to sell somebody on your services to get those first few clients in.

So the total cost of that is maybe $50 for your domain. And Kajabi, which we'll talk about in a minute. 

 

How hiring a professional can help you to get really clear on your messaging, right from the start

Then the one place that I would actually spend money on is a brand strategy and copy. So I would invest in working with somebody who is really good with brand strategy, and it might be two people — It might be a brand strategist and a copywriter. It might be somebody who does both. $5,000 won't get you the best of the best, that is for sure, but for maybe two to $3,000, you could get somebody who has that better understanding of brand strategy and copy than you do, and they'd be able to help you with it.

This is what the offers are going to be that you sell. This is how you're going to communicate it. This is what's going on in your ideal client's mind. So this is how we can write words that actually speak to them, and I would really invest in getting the copywriter to write the pages where you are going to be selling the pages where you need to convert.

So any sales pages, if you have a course, a services page because even though the homepage might not directly convert into your offers, as my friend Anita from Word 30 says the homepage is like your airport terminal, where somebody's coming onto there and they're wanting to get redirected to wherever they need to go.

So a homepage is still pretty important, but then I wouldn't invest in getting them to write all of the other pages that would then be on you to write. So working with that brand strategist would force you to get really clear on your messaging and it means that your brand communicates itself professionally from the start.

I think even though the visual brand is what looks really nice, I think it's the words that you use that really have that impact on whether somebody's going to buy from you or not. So let's say we'd spend maybe two and a half thousand dollars on that. 

 

What software platforms are worth investing in and why

Then the next would be software. 

So you could spend a lot of money on different tools and different apps. I would, personally just invest in Kajabi. And I would build my business from scratch just in that one place, right? I could use that to build my email list. It has a booking scheduling functionality, so it has checkout if somebody wants to book calls. So if somebody wants to pay me, they can pay me through that.

It has the functionality to host my courses. It has the functionality to keep notes on clients. It's a CRM, it has all of the things. Even if I wanted to start a podcast, I can host my podcast there, right? So, I would just invest in Kajabi and build it all from scratch there. It's about $200 a month.

So I would use that as the one place kind of like the hub for my business rather than picking and choosing lots of different pieces of software and you know, going with the ones that are the cheapest now, and then having to piece them all together and then potentially as you start to grow, they get more expensive. I would just start as I intend to continue with that one.

 

The benefits of having support from the beginning

Then the next one would be legal and compliance. Now, that's going to vary very much depending on what country you are in. In Australia, I forgot how much exactly, but I know company registration is roughly around $400. So I would include that in my budget as well. If I were registering a company, obviously always consult a lawyer, consult your accountant, and find out what is going to work best for your situation.

I am not giving you personal advice here. Trademarking, if you have a brand name that you don't want anyone to copy, then you might want to add a trademark into the budget as well. 

The next thing I would consider investing in from the start is a virtual assistant. Now, this sounds so counterintuitive, you know, like, oh, this isn't, this can't be essential when I don't have any income coming in yet.

You know, like surely I can't justify paying somebody else to support me. And this depends. So if you are a hundred percent full-time in your business, you have nothing else pulling you away. You're not side hustling. You are not at home with your kids or babies or anything like that. If you can be a hundred percent focused full-time on your business, then you can probably get away with just yourself at the start.

But if you are side hustling, then a virtual assistant can be a really great way to grow your business faster because the more that you can get done, the quicker you'll get your business off the ground and make more sales. So while it might not seem essential when you don't have any clients, you don't have any income coming in yet, having a virtual assistant to take care of those things that grow your audience and that can get you in front of the right people, that will help you to grow faster.

So things like pitching, podcast interviews on your behalf, pitching for collaborations, creating content, or you know, scheduling your content, repurposing the content that you are creating. All of those things, when you are limited on time, those things fall to the wayside, but those are the things that get you in front of the right people and will help you to grow faster.

Now, I will say that getting an offshore VA, so potentially one in the Philippines will be more cost-effective than one that is locally based most of the time.  When you're starting out, that is probably the option that I would look at. So if you budget, maybe say, a thousand of our $5,000 budget that we're playing with today for about two to three months worth of five hours of support each week, and as long as you know what that five hours, what they're going to do in that five hours, that can be five hours of growth tasks and you brief them really well, that's going to help you to grow a lot faster.

And then the last thing that I would invest in. So what is left? We've got about $450 left on our budget. I would probably spend this on Facebook ads to build my email list. This is controversial. I know, but I would most likely spend this on Facebook lead ads. I would create a really strong lead magnet that's going to attract the right people, right?

It's going to attract my ideal client. Maybe my virtual assistant would have helped me to create the PDF of it or edit the recordings if it's audio or video. And I would use these lead ads to get somebody to download my lead magnet and build my email list. And if we say it's costing about two to $3 per lead, that's 150 to 200 people on my email list now, which isn't insignificant if you are starting from scratch, and I would go into this knowing already, what is that sales process going to be when somebody downloads that lead magnet? What is the call to action at the end of that nurture sequence? 

So they're going to get the series of emails after they download the lead magnet. What is the call to action going to be at the end? Is it that they're going to book a discovery call with me and then we can explore how they could work with me? 

But if they're booking in a call, maybe we can convert two or three of those 150 to 200 people into a paying clients. And then I would also be regularly emailing my list. So once those 200 people are on that list, I would be regularly emailing them and I would make sure that I'm starting to nurture these people.

I definitely would not run Facebook ads directly to my offers at this stage because at this stage I probably wouldn't have the messaging nailed yet. I don't have much audience insight to work with yet, so at least with the leads, I'm attracting the right people because I've made sure that my lead magnet is strategic, it's the right one, and now they're on my email list so I can keep emailing them, I can keep reaching them for free, and I can use that email list to test any new offers that I want to make to my audience.

 

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