How to increase revenue from 0 to $ 1,000,000 for two years

This is a translation of a new article from TechCrunch by James Altucher , an investor, programmer, author of articles, and a little entrepreneur. His latest books: I was blind, but now I see 40 alternatives to college.

A few weeks ago I published a post of 10 reasons why you would quit your job in 2013 . There I gave some reasons. And it was not an article in the style of "Hey, you must become an entrepreneur." Rather, the story was on the topic: bad shit is happening in the corporate world and sooner or later you will want to leave it.

Of course, many people asked the question: What's next? What should I do?

And I began to ask people who have already passed this way. What did they do? How did you manage to earn a million dollars after leaving your job [in corporation]?
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Not everyone is Mark Zuckerberg or Larry Page. Not everyone will drop college and create an iPhone or a time machine or a toilet that changes its size depending on who sits on it (although that would be cool).

Some people would simply have to leave their current job and live a pleasant life. Someone just wants to leave the company in which they are engaged and make a million dollars. In one film, the hero of Justin Bieber Timberlake says: Million is not cool. Billion - that's cool.

Truth be told, in most cases a million is very good. Not everyone is destined to become a specialist who has received one hundred million from investors. Sometimes it is very pleasant to be your own boss, earn a million and use this financial freedom to fly to the heights of success.

So I called Brian Johnson, who founded Braintree . Perhaps you have not heard of her, but you know her clients for sure. The company provides card processing and payment services to companies such as OpenTable, Uber, Airbnb, etc.

I've never talked to Brian before. And I am not a Braintree investor. And, as far as I know, I have not invested (unfortunately) in any of their clients. I like to call people who, in my opinion, can tell an interesting story. So I built my network of not only financial contacts, but also potential friends. I am shy and ugly, so I don’t have many friends.

But I knew that Brian could tell a good story about how he created Braintree and decided that it would be perfect as an answer to the question “what to do next?”

In 2007, Brian was a manager at Sears. He quit and two years later began to earn more than a million dollars a year. As a result, the company has grown significantly more and raised $ 70 million from Accel and others, but I was not interested in this.

“How did you do that?” I asked. “What were the first steps?” And he told me, and I share this with you.

“I hated my job,” he said. “And I never believed in the idea of ​​getting a fixed salary. I used to work as a sales manager in the bank card processing industry. I went from client to client and offered them to switch to accepting cards through our company. And it occurred to me that I could do the same thing, but work not for the company, but for myself. ”

Rule number 1: Eliminate the mediator. Instead of contacting the company where he worked, Brian went directly to the bank card process. He signed a reseller agreement with them and started doing the same thing that he had done earlier in his previous work at Sears.

Many people ask me: “Is it worth attracting investments at that moment while you are still working at the current place?”. NO, of course not! First you need to get a little hustle. Investors like to support people demonstrating the presence of balls. ( In the original - someone who shows a little oomph )

Rule number 2: Choose a boring business. Everyone rushes in search of "the next really cool story." The next really cool story is to find rare earth minerals on Mars. This is a REALLY HARD WORK. No need to take it! Brian chose a service that is interesting to almost any business in the world. He also understood that this was an explosive market. There is no need to develop a super-new-and-unique idea. Do the usual thing, but do it a little better than the rest. Being small and agile compared to hippos stuck in bureaucracy, you can often offer better service, sell better and keep in touch with your customers at a better high level. And they will reach out to you.

Rule number 3: Find customers! This is perhaps the most important rule for the entrepreneur. I already wrote a separate post about this earlier ( The Easiest Way to Succeed as an Entrepreneur ). People want to go [to success] in some magical way - to get investor money, quit work, make a product and then, suddenly, get a million customers. This NEVER works.

Brian found 10 clients (out of 12 for whom he made an offer) who agreed to switch acceptance of bank cards to his company. He calculated that he needed to earn at least $ 2,100 a month to leave work. The first 10 clients generated him a profit of $ 6,200 per month, so he was safe. He left work and suddenly found himself in business.

Rule number 4: Increase confidence in yourself while you sleep. Usually this phrase sounds like "Earn while you sleep." But Brian already earned from each transaction while he slept.

“I had no desire to walk down the street and look for clients,” he says. “I needed a way to attract online customers as companies. Someone advised me to blog. To blog you need to be completely transparent, otherwise nothing will come of it. So I began to write about what is actually happening in the industry, including cases of unprincipled behavior and customer manipulation schemes. I published my posts on top social sites: Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon and from time to time my posts got to the top and so much traffic came that my own site fell. ”

“All this made me a trusted source of information on the card processing market. Very quickly, many sites that had problems understanding the card-receiving industry began to switch card processing to me. ”

It follows a couple more things.

Rule number 5: Blogging does not make money. Blog creates trust. You will not sell advertising in a blog (with rare exceptions), you will not be able to sell it in the form of a book ( original. Get the big book deal ), but then you will receive trust, which will lead to many opportunities. In the case of Brian, the result was an incoming stream of customers, more than if he had walked and spud them himself. My own blog earned me zero cents, but created millions of opportunities.

“In general, once OpenTable called me and said that they want to develop software for storing bank card data in order to provide this service to restaurants, and, of course, to comply with the requirements of regulatory bodies. We signed a contract for 3 years, which allowed me to hire developers and create a solution. Now we have a wider range of services. ”

Rule # 6: Say YES! He began by associating vendors and a card processor. Then he was offered to develop software, although he had never done this before. And he answered YES! He hired developers, created a great product and increased his income 4 times or even more. All this led to the fact that his business has reached incredible heights. Word of mouth started and other companies started using Braintree services: Airbnb, Uber, etc. Investors started calling because all their customers said that Braintree provides them with a full range of payment services. It is not so easy for startups in the online business to organize payment acceptance.

“When I first started, we prepared a whole pile of documents with each client confirming that this seller could be trusted and that he would conduct a legitimate business.”

Therefore…

Rule number 7: Customer service. You should take every client, new or old, as a human being. “We had some feeling that we were not satisfied with the method of working with clients among competitors: the voice menu when calling the hotline, the long processing time for applications, poor problem solving indicators, etc. So we took care to there is less friction on the way from addressing to actually solving the problem. ”Small businesses have no excuse for poor customer service. Your best new customers are old customers. And there is no better way to endear oneself to them, except to quickly support them, at the moment when they need it. Good support is the most effective and reliable way to keep in touch with customers.

In the second year of work, Brian earned more than a million a year and this figure doubled annually. They did not have time to hire people.

In 2011, after four years in business, Braintree took the investment for the first time - $ 34 million in Round A. Now, according to TechCranch, they process transactions totaling $ 8 billion per year.

Not bad for someone who quit his job and just wanted to find a way to pay his bills.

- P.S. Edit the text offer through the LAN. Thank.