When is the Right Time to Start a Business?

Your mind is playing games with you because it resists change.

Many of us dream of starting a new business. Most people wonder what is the right time to start a business. In reality, there is no such thing as a right time. The best time to start a business was 5 years back. The next best time is today.

Starting a new business doesn't mean that you have to quit your job, make a huge capital investment, and hire employees. That's just your mind playing tricks on you so that you can keep dreaming about it and postpone starting something perpetually.

The real skill that will help you survive in your business is the skill of doing something small every day, even if it doesn't feel like you are doing much to grow the business. You have to start practicing that from today. It can be as simple as starting a blog and writing on it regularly.

I started DigitalDeepak blog in 2013. I wrote 2 posts a month for almost 4 years. I hardly had any traction in the beginning. But the momentum builds slowly. I did not push myself to do it. I wrote because I enjoyed writing and took pleasure in seeing something grow.

Writing is one of the best ways to start a business in the digital age because to run a business you need customers. To get customers you need people paying attention to you. And one of the best ways to get attention is to create content. And writing is the simplest way to create content.

You can create a blog for free on Medium or a blog with a newsletter for free on Substack like this one. If you are confused about what to write, create a personal blog in your name and write about anything that comes to your mind. It can be about health, wealth, relationships, art, or a personal story.

After writing a bunch of posts, you will see that you enjoy writing certain posts and your audience enjoys reading certain types of posts. Your initial audience will not be very large. It can be as low as 100 subscribers. They will come from your personal network. It could be your friends, co-workers, LinkedIn followers, and so on. You can even reach out to people who are in your network and ask them if it is ok to add them as a subscriber to your newsletter.

The best way to build trust with an audience is to provide value to them consistently over a period of time. You might trust me because you have gained value through my content frequently. Frequent value delivery builds trust.

A lot of marketers think that frequency builds trust. Frequency doesn't build trust, frequency of value delivery builds trust. Frequency alone builds awareness. You see the faces of politicians on hoardings frequently around the city. You might be aware of them, but that doesn't mean that you trust them.

Trust is built through conversations like what I am writing right now. You need to build that trust over a period of time through consistency and genuine intentions of wanting to share a good message with your audience.

You couldn't have done this 20 years before. There was no way for an individual to write something like a blog post and share it with the whole world. But today you have the technology to do it and that technology is free to use.

So take the first step. Invest 1 hour per day in building an audience and creating content for them. It will become the foundation for your future big business. There is nothing for you to lose apart from some time and effort. Skip watching TV or hanging out with friends for a few months. Or just reduce the amount of time you spend doing things that are not helping you grow.

A journey of 1000 miles starts with the first step. Take that first step today. That's how you start a business.

So are you going to start something today? Let me know in the comments.