You’re here because you’ve got the seed of an idea and fire in your belly. 

You want to start your own business. You want to become an entrepreneur. 

The only problem is you’ve got no money, experience, or contacts. 

Doubt is creeping in, and you wonder if the dream of running your own business is just that–a dream. 

I’m here to reassure you that it’s 100% possible to become an entrepreneur, even with no money and no experience. 

These 9 steps will help you make it happen. By the end of this article, you’ll be well on your way to taking decisive action and becoming your own boss. 

Originally published on March 26th, 2019, this post was updated and republished on April 25th, 2024.

9 Steps To Become An Entrepreneur

1. Cultivate an Entrepreneurial Mindset

The road to building a successful business is never a smooth or straight line. There will be ups and downs, successes and failures–moments where you wonder if you should throw the towel in. 

Great entrepreneurs understand this and work hard to overcome self-doubt and failure by cultivating an entrepreneurial mindset.

As Brian Smith, Founder of UGG Boots, said when he appeared on the Hack The Entrepreneur podcast: 

“You don’t climb straight from nothing to something big. You hit an obstacle, climb over it and reach the next level of the plateau. You cross the line again, cross another obstacle, and climb to the next level again.”

“The more you do that, the more you will look back and realize how far you’ve come. It is all about overcoming each obstacle as it hits, and not giving up.”
Brian Smith, Founder UGG Boots

That’s the thing about successful entrepreneurs. They stick with their vision through the ups and downs, from one project to another. Their mentality enables action, growth, and quick recovery from setbacks. 

To cultivate a powerful entrepreneurial mindset, focus on developing these key characteristics:

Decisiveness: It’s easy to put off making decisions under the guise of learning more while we’re actually just spinning in circles. Entrepreneurs avoid this pitfall through decisiveness, both in starting a business and in daily operations.

Confidence: Entrepreneurs realize that they build confidence by doing the things that scare and challenge them. If you’re not feeling confident, that’s not a good reason to stop. It’s a reason to keep going. Your confidence will naturally improve as you stretch your capacity and learn new things. 

Accountability: Forget blaming the system or others for your situation. As an entrepreneur, you need to take accountability. That means showing up and doing the work, knowing you can only rely on yourself.

Resilience: All entrepreneurs fail, but the successful ones don’t give up when they do. That’s the essence of resilience: learning from your mistakes and bouncing back stronger and better than before. 

Humility: Humility means becoming a learn-it-all instead of a know-it-all. Great entrepreneurs are comfortable with not knowing the answer, asking for help, and realizing they need to change tactics. This vulnerability enables them–and their business–to stay agile and relevant. 

2. Act Like an Entrepreneur

Once you start thinking like an entrepreneur, it’s important to transform your thoughts into action. Emulating the above characteristics will help you change your old mindset.

Emulate to Become: Practice decision-making confidently and quickly in everyday scenarios–whether choosing a restaurant for dinner or asking for a raise at work.

Exit Your Comfort Zone: When you don’t know how to do something, seek out information and learn how. Many people struggle with a fixed mindset and believe they aren’t natural salespeople, or that technology is beyond them. Whether writing a sales page or taking your business online, you can learn how to do it.

Embrace Accountability: When you catch yourself blaming someone else for your lack of progress, stop. Practice accountability by finding ways to move forward, instead of fixating on what’s keeping you stuck.

Discover Your Resilience Resource: When you face a setback, resist the urge to give in. Instead, think of whatever it is as an opportunity to strengthen your resilience muscle. Learn from the mistake, shake it off, and try again. 

Cultivate Humility Through Learning: To act with humility, address your weak spots. Ask for help, take a mindset course, or find a mentor to point you in the right direction on your entrepreneurial journey.

All of these things will help you prepare to start your first business. But nothing happens if you’re not taking action on your ideas.

That’s why the first principle of successful entrepreneurs is:

None of this works without action.

So, take the first steps.

Let’s say you’ve thoroughly researched your business and know the ins and outs of your market. If someone woke you up at 5 a.m. and asked you to recite your business plan, you’d nail it.

But if your plan is still on paper – you don’t have a business.

Nothing’s happening. Things just seem like they could work out.

So, how can you become an entrepreneur?

By taking action. 

Taking action is the only way to know if you’re right. As James Altucher says, “Without action, your business is still a dream.”

Building a successful business is a process of testing your ideas in the real world, and adjusting course as you go.

3. Identifying Your Niche: Market Research and Selection Strategies

Once you’re thinking and acting like an entrepreneur, it’s time to put your entrepreneurial mindset to good use. It’s time to start a business and become an entrepreneur.

But you don’t want to just start any business. For lasting success, you need to uncover the convergence between your skills, passions, and the market’s needs.

Here’s how: 

Find the Sweet Spot Between Your Skills and Interests: Being an entrepreneur is hard work, so you need to love what you do. Consider your skills, knowledge, and passions. What can you give to the world? What would you love to share?

Market research: Next, it’s essential to see if your idea is in demand. Even if your passion is crocheting, you can become a freelancer or turn it into a business. For example, people spend money to learn craft-making skills like crochet. They buy supplies, pattern books, and classes. Looking at existing businesses is a clue – it shows you if the market for your skills exists, no matter how unusual it may be.

Evaluate your Unique Selling Point (USP): Now, you need to decode your competitive advantage. Find something that differentiates you from everyone else in your niche. Maybe it’s personality or style, a unique set of skills or lived experience. Confidence in your uniqueness will help your marketing, branding, and sales efforts. 

4. Look for Problems to Solve

As an entrepreneur, customer research should be your priority.

Once you’ve identified the people you want to help (your target market), you should find out what problems they have.

For example, if you want to get into the web development business, think beyond obvious needs, such as not having a website.

Think about the finer aspects of your prospects’ needs.

Maybe they don’t fully understand that they need your services, or their budgets are tight, or they just want to work with someone who’ll understand them – even if they can’t tell the difference between a sidebar and a landing page.

Or if you wanted to teach people how to start a podcast, you would need to think beyond what kind of mic they need.

You can find out all of this (and more) by performing customer research:

Take to social media. Explore your key terms and see what people need (and if they need what you can offer)

Create and share a survey

Check out competitors’ customer research

Research in your area, talk to your friends and neighbors. What problems do they have? How could you help?

Be a Painkiller, Not a Vitamin

People who have their needs mostly satisfied aren’t very motivated to buy.

On the other hand, people with glaring problems are very motivated and seek immediate help.

They’re most likely to buy a product or service if it promises to ease their pain.

To help you generate business ideas in your market, think about what’s causing pain.

I’m not talking about profiting from people in physical pain. Being a painkiller also means solving an inconvenience, frustration, or simply removing an obstacle.

Successful entrepreneurs lean towards creating painkiller products – delivering immediate solutions to alleviate customers’ pain.

They can become vitamins later with upsells and extra services, but being the painkiller – the immediate solution to pressing problems – is a priority.

5. Decide What Business to Start

The next step in becoming an entrepreneur is to answer the big question:

What business should I start?

If you already have a promising business idea, that’s great. Congratulations!

If you don’t have the answer yet – don’t worry.

You can find the best business idea for you with the information you uncovered in Steps 3 and 4.

Basically, you need clarity on these three things:

Who are you helping? Identify your ideal customer.

How will you help them? What product or service will you provide to solve their problem?

What makes your business different? Give people reasons to choose your business over the competition.

Your best business idea will leverage your skills and interests, and match them with a problem or need in your market.

6. Put Your Business Idea Into Action

Remember: none of this works if you don’t take action.

You’ve already done your research by the time you reach this step. You understand your market and audience and know what your competition is doing.

Now, It’s time to start creating fearlessly. Depending on your business’ niche, that could mean: 

Launching Your Online Presence: Boost your professionalism and inform prospects about your service by creating a website and crafting content that resonates with your target audience. 

Accelerating Product Development: If you’re a product-based business, focus on creating a minimum viable product (MVP) that addresses your customer’s core needs.

Finalizing Your Branding: Choose a business name that reflects your brand’s identity and values. Then, finalize your brand’s tone of voice, color palette, and logo. 

No matter what you do, getting started is key. 

Once you have, check out our Online Business Checklist. This indispensable tool outlines the essential steps every entrepreneur should take when launching a new venture.

The Essence of Entrepreneurship: Creation

Why do people want to become entrepreneurs? Often, it’s out of a desire to create.

Entrepreneurs take ideas and turn them into communities of people making a change in the world. They take business plans jotted down on napkins and turn them into profits and delight.

Whether it’s a more fulfilling life, a thriving business, or selling online courses, entrepreneurship is about creating.

That means entrepreneurs experience all of the ups and downs that come with creative work. Anxiety, fear of failure, and imposter syndrome are par for the course.

What if it’s a terrible idea? What if nobody likes it? What if I’m not cut out for running a business?

If you want to be an entrepreneur, put aside all that creative angst and just do the work.

Vision-Driven Entrepreneurship: Avoiding Scope Creep

Keep your end goal in mind at all times. If you’re looking to start online, you need to choose an online business model before starting – and stick to it.

Many businesses don’t get off the ground because the project’s scope keeps growing.

For example, the cooking blog you want to start turns into an idea for a recipe app. Then you decide the recipe app has to include shopping lists and video tutorials, plus you can’t think of the perfect lead magnet to build your email list.

All of this before you’ve finished building the initial idea – learning how to start a blog.

If you keep the end in mind, you’ll avoid scope creep – uncontrolled growth or demands of your project.

Scope creep can derail your entire vision, so it’s important to keep your end goal in mind for each stage of building your business.

Don’t be afraid of blank space –the nothingness. Your job as an entrepreneur is to make things happen in that space.

More importantly, don’t be afraid to launch.

7. Launch and Learn

Launching and learning is one of the most critical steps to becoming an entrepreneur.

Most successful entrepreneurs have projects behind them that turned out less than stellar. But they don’t consider their early attempts to be failures.

Why?

Because every project that doesn’t turn out right is not a failure – it’s a lesson.

If you aren’t embarrassed by your first version, you waited too long to launch.

The first version of any project or product is rarely perfect, but it has to be out there to become better.

Once there’s an existing version that customers can interact with, you have a chance to learn. You’ll find out what your market needs and doesn’t need.

Without that first imperfect version, you’d still be speculating. You might invest even more time (and money) on products or features that aren’t needed. Instead, you’ll get customer feedback, which will lead to a better product.

Entrepreneurs take action and launch before they’re ready, not because they’re risk-takers. They do it because they know that no research can replace the first-hand experience.

Your Business Will Never Be Worse Than it Is Today

Your project can’t get any worse by launching a version. It can only get better.

The same is true for you, as an entrepreneur. You’ll only get better at all of these steps by doing them. If your first idea doesn’t work out as planned, you’ll know more about choosing your next one.

Launch and iterate.

That’s when you really start growing.

8. Start Small, but Think Big

Customers today want to interact on a personal level with businesses.

Big corporations spend a lot of money trying to appear small and friendly.

Why?

Well, think about visiting your local small business. The owner knows you by name. They may even know some details of your life. They certainly know your order.

It’s such a delight to buy from them because they value each and every customer.

Then think about a big chain supermarket. It has low prices but is impersonal. It feels more like a warehouse than a family-owned shop.

If another big chain has lower prices, you’ll go there instead.

Small and personal is irreplaceable. Small and personal makes an impact and adds value.

Just look at coffee subscription box company, MistoBox. They’ve built their success on a highly personalized customer experience–or “Netflix for coffee,” as company co-founder Connor Riley put it when he came on the Hack The Entrepreneur podcast:

“Based on your coffee profile, we know exactly what types of coffee you like, and how much coffee you’re consuming on a daily or weekly basis. You just go online and just tell us what you like and how frequently you want it and the rest is up to us. It’s almost like “putting your coffee on auto-pilot,” is what we call it.”
Connor Riley, Co-founder MistoBox

So, instead of worrying about looking bigger than the competition, think about how to use your small size to your advantage by building amazing customer relationships.

Sure, entrepreneurs have a reputation as visionaries, and yes, we do make outrageous goals. But conserving the essence of being small will help you get there.

9. Develop the Habits of Successful Entrepreneurs

I’m bringing you full circle, back to Steps 1 and 2 with this final, essential step.

That’s right, I’m talking about thinking and acting like an entrepreneur, by learning some next-level mindset hacks.

Here’s the truth: Being an entrepreneur is hard.

When you have no boss, you decide how much you want to work. The flip side is that you have to motivate yourself, and your team, even when you’re not feeling it.

Now that you’re an entrepreneur, you can define what success looks like and set your own goals. But you also have to decide where to focus your efforts each day for the biggest impact. 

Here’s what helps:

Embrace Lifelong Learning: I’ve interviewed more than 400 entrepreneurs on my podcast. They come from all kinds of backgrounds. Some have business degrees, and some never graduated high school. The common thread is entrepreneurs tend to be lifelong learners. They read business books, listen to podcasts, and take courses. They seek out mentors and hire business coaches.

Stay Physically and Mentally Healthy: Entrepreneurs (and people, in general!) perform much better when they look after their bodies. That means getting enough sleep, sticking to your exercise routine, and nourishing your body with healthy food. 

Nurture Your Support Network: Running a business can be lonely, especially in the early days when it’s just you. To beat feelings of isolation, surround yourself with like-minded people. You could, for example, start a mastermind group, or even join a few forums where you can talk to other entrepreneurs going through similar struggles.

How to Be an Entrepreneur: Your Next Steps

Now you know how entrepreneurs are made. Contrary to popular belief, you don’t have to be a risk-taker or have a ground-breaking idea.

Just follow the steps to change your mindset, clarify your business idea, and keep growing – and you’ll be your own boss in no time. 

Ready to take the leap? Fortify your entrepreneurial mindset with our in-depth course, How to Think (and Act) Like an Entrepreneur.

It’ll give you everything you need to recalibrate your beliefs, launch a winning business, and say goodbye to the 9-to-5 for good.