If you're an aspiring purpose-driven entrepreneur looking to create a lifestyle startup, you've come to the right place.

Starting a business can be daunting, but with the right strategy, you can turn your vision into a profitable venture. In this blog post, we will break down the process into four crucial steps inspired by the wisdom of the most influential startup literature and our first 3 years being immersed in the startup ecosystem through our own journey and the journey of our clients. Let's dive in and learn how to start a business that not only fulfils your purpose and lifestyle goals but also generates your first €100,000 in sales.

‍

STEP 1: Find a Purpose-Driven Business Idea Direction

To start your journey as a purpose-driven entrepreneur it is key to understand the types of ideas that would fulfil you and your lifestyle goals whilst driving meaningful impact. You are not living to work but working to live and you're going to want to make sure that you think about your business like this from the start.

1.1 Understand Yourself:

The first step is to look look at this journey from an inside-out perspective. Build up your level of self-awareness to understand who you are at the core, what you want to stand for in life, and what are the kind of things that give you drive and motivation. You can do this by reading about "Ikigai" and doing introspective work yourself. A much more effective way is to hire a coach specialized in that field to support you with this critical first step as we often let our own logic and bias get in the way of confidently defining this.

1.2 Unfair Advantages:

It is then a great step to audit yourself to identify where you might have an edge over other aspiring entrepreneurs out there. Check out the MILES framework by Ash Ali and Hasan Kubba to learn more about how to do this. Essentially you want to map out where you, through your life experience, have created leverage in the areas of Money, Insights, Location, Education, and Status. These can all indicate potential industries and niches that could be interesting for you to serve.

1.3 Causes:

Entrepreneurs solve problems in unique ways. So lets figure out what are meaningful problems for you to solve. When we solve an issue that we have experienced ourselves or have witnessed in our environment, we have high levels of empathy for it and will derive a lot of meaning from solving them. So start with yourself and the most annoying or painful problems you have solved for yourself (or are still busy solving) over the past 3-5 years as a great starting point. Also listening your immediate communities and their problems that they continuously complain about are great to consider. Last but not least, consider the world on a wider scale, what are the things that when you. hear about them, they really get you angry? 

Summary:

Combining the insights from diving into the 3 above-mentioned areas will give you a vast variety of business options to explore that would all be deeply meaningful and have a good chance for success; you'll make it through dips if you have a deep why and building on your competitive advantages and personal life experience will maximise chances your hypotheses are close to the truth from the start and speed up progress to market. Hint hint.. MettaStartup Studio also offers this step for a great price and in a highly effective manner, just saying. If you're interested contact the team here.

‍

STEP 2: Customer Discovery & Customer Validation

In this phase, you move from assumptions to concrete evidence that your business idea resonates with your target audience. This step is all about testing and refining your business concept to fit market needs.

2.1 Define Your Target Audience:

Start by defining your ideal customer persona. Consider demographics, psychographics, and their unique challenges that your product or service can solve. Your own demographics just a few steps back can be a great starting point if your business idea is about solving something you've experienced yourself. Same goes for your community. Alternatively think about who is suffering the most from this problem and who you'd be most motivated helping. Also consider that almost any idea can be applied as a business-to-customer offering and/or a business-to-business offering. It's worthwhile exploring both avenues in the beginning.

2.2 Interview Your Target Audience:

It is still important to do more general market research about your industry, its trends, and key competitors. And at the same time the biggest amount of clarity and progress will come from talking to actual potential customers. Find those in your network (eg 1st & 2nd connections on LinkedIn). Ask at least 50-100 potential customers about their biggest pains and problems (people don't pay for something thats just a nice-to-have) in relation to your business niche. The key is NOT to give away what you're planning to offer as a solution here! Also inquire about what they wish existed. Last but not least get clear on their preferred formats, timings, and pricing as well. Stay unattached. This is cold research.

2.3 Validate Initial Interview Results:

Once you've identified your target audience and gathered initial general and interview market data, build a first raw prototype offering and go into a second round of validation with your target audience now showing them something more specific and ideally selling it to them already. Money spent on your prototype offering is a great sign of validation. Be prepared to pivot and adjust a few times here till selling starts to get easier. Then you are ready to build a more proper MVP & initial company setup.

Summary:

The early stages of market research are raw and basic and not always the most exciting. BUT they are critical and will save you a ton of time and money down the line. Magic side-effect: your market research candidates start to get warmed up to you and your business and are likely to generate you your first 10k EUR even during this stage of your journey already. This entire process should take you no longer than 2-3 months.

‍

STEP 3: Company Building

Now that you have experienced initial traction and got a validated idea and offering, it is time to build out the foundational elements that prepare you for stepping into the growth hacking and customer creation phase.

3.1 Define A First Business Plan & Register Your Company:

Don't overthink this but also don't underestimate this step either. Where do you want to be in 3y from today? What needs to happen in the next 12m to get there? What are financial milestones, marketing milestones, and how will you start stepping out of your company so that you become a true business owner with a scaleable business that can generate income even whilst you are on holiday? Also, this is a great time to ask a trusted startup tax advisor for guidance with regards to most suitable legal company form and tax setup and to register your company to allow you to step into broader commercial activity.

3.2 Create Your MVP:

Take your raw prototype offer and improve it in terms of design, user experience, and features. Stick to the core features that were mentioned in interviews and the key points brought up in early customer feedback during your first prototype offer experiences.

3.3 Branding & Digital Presence:

Create a holistic digital presence for your company and brand. Start with a Brand Identity and a simple Website as well as aligning social media profiles accordingly. Whilst functionality is key, a visually appealing user experience helps customers to look beyond some of initial functionality hiccups and makes it easier for them to share this with their friends.

Summary:

Use this step to get organized and prepared for a bigger marketing and sales push to come. You will still iterate a lot on the go so create a base but don't allow perfectionism to delay you from progressing for too long. Ideally you keep selling your prototype in the background for more initial cashflow and customer feedback whilst building out the MVP. This phase should take no longer than 1-2 months.

‍

STEP 4: Growth

Now that you have a validated concept, it's time to scale and focus on customer acquisition. Customer Creation involves building a robust marketing and sales strategy to reach a wider audience.

4.1 Define A Marketing & Sales Plan:

Develop a comprehensive marketing plan that includes digital marketing, content marketing, social media, SEO, and any other channels that align with your target audience. Create compelling content that showcases your expertise and addresses customer pain points and potential most typical objections. Especially in early days, you need to work hard to build customer belief in yourself and your product/service. Strategic partnerships that can give you authority early-on can help you out significantly here.

Your sales strategy should clearly outline how you'll convert leads into paying customers. This is all about building a lead generation - nurture - convert system that keeps building a database of potential customers whilst activating them with regular comms and offer-making mechanics to sell your services.

4.2 Growth Hacking:

Explore innovative ways to grow your customer base. Experiment with referral programs, paid ads, affiliate marketing, and other growth hacking techniques to accelerate your business's growth. Once again it is about experimentation here with the goal to land on a sales process that works and generates desired return on marketing investment. Think about marketing costs to acquire a customer versus this customers lifetime value for your company.

Once you have figured out a repeatable process with positive mechanics, you can scale your efforts and it might be a great time to look for investment that speeds up your traction.

4.3 Scaling Operations & Financial Management:

Invest in infrastructure and systems to handle increased demand efficiently. Hire additional staff, implement automation, and streamline processes to ensure your business can scale without losing quality.

Also set up structured KPI tracking processes and keep a close eye on your finances. Maintain a solid budget, track expenses, and reinvest profits wisely to sustain growth. Seek external funding if necessary, but do so strategically.

If you team grows as a side-effect of growth, hiring, culture, and ways of working will be key to look into as well for the first time.

‍

Congratulations

You've learned the essential steps of how to start a business from scratch and take it to the point where it generates your first €100,000 in sales and beyond.

Yet, all the knowledge in the world isn't going to transform anything in your life or the world overall. What will transform lives is taking real life actions in line with your vision. And if there is an own purpose-driven business in your vision, you now have no more excuse not to start - the above describes your steps forward. 

If you need a boost of motivation, ask yourself how it would be to live a life never taking this leap for another 5 years, 10 years, 20 years, 30 years. Would you feel better or worse, prouder or more regretful? Also, there's never a 'right' time just to make this clear too right away.

And if you want a team on your side that has practiced and optimized this process over and over again, then consider an application to one of the MettaStartup Studio Done-For-You or Rent-A-COfounder service offerings.