Gone are the days where you need tens or hundreds of thousands of followers to launch a business on the internet.

In fact, you don’t need any followers at all to start and you can still make it work.

In my case, I had around 1,000 from talking about my life but after I launched my new business… absolutely zero of them were interested in what I was talking about or selling.

Low views on my content.

No likes.

Unfollows.

I even questioned for a moment if I was doing the wrong thing.

But I remembered the mission and kept going anyway.

People started paying attention.

I started building connections.

My audience started growing.

My email list started growing.

And most important of all for a business, I started making money.

This led to 1,800 followers gained, a 400 subscriber email list, 150 digital product payments generated, and several clients for freelance work and consulting.

Here’s what this whole experience taught me:

In The Beginning, Trust Is At An All Time Low

When you first launch a business with a small (or no) audience, no one really knows who you are.

It doesn’t matter if you use your personal name or a brand name, the market doesn’t trust you yet.

Even a brand as big as Target had low trust when it first came in to the New England market in 1999, and a lot of people in my hometown would simply prefer to go to Kmart, Sears, Bradlees, or even Walmart…

And now they’re a household name.

That same reason led to my own solo-biz growing because I kept showing up every single day, making connections, and demonstrating value to my ideal customer in a moderately unique way.

But that’s not all, because if I didn’t have the next thing in place I would have failed miserably…

Don’t Treat Your Business Like A Content Charity

From day 1, I was selling something my ideal customer would benefit from, because a business with no revenue is not a business, it’s a hobby.

Nothing wrong with having a content creation hobby, but that’s not what we do ’round these parts.

Does that mean I was making sales right out of the gate?

Nope, definitely not.

But I always gave them the opportunity to buy.

Back to the Target example…

If they just opened locations to “share value” and “build an audience” because they didn’t want to be too salesy…

Well, they wouldn’t be in business anymore.

They had to move product and move it fast.

And for me, as I continued to build trust in the marketplace I went from making a sale a month, to a sale a week, to a sale a day, to multiple sales from a single post or email pretty quick.

The final thing I want to share is probably the only reason I kept going in the beginning…

You Don’t Need Motivation, You Need This

In the world of online biz, one of the most challenging things to pull off is continuing to show up when you have no motion, no engagement, and no sales.

There are days where you feel like quite literally talking to a brick wall would be more effective.

No amount of motivational speeches on YouTube can fix this either.

But you know what can?

Having a mission.

Not just in business, but for yourself as well.

For example, now my mission is to help 1,000 people make their first sale online so I can provide a better life for my growing family.

I don’t usually struggle to post content, run ads, or write emails every day these days, but it helped me a ton in the beginning to build momentum.

Having said all of that, if you combine all three of these while building your own business, there’s no reason you can’t succeed.

And if you want more insights on building your own digital product business on the internet whether you have a following already or not, then consider signing up for my daily emails.​

Talk soon,
-Gabe