Six mistakes I made with my first online educational business with Irene Yu
Today I want to talk about my mistakes when I started my first online business.
Background Story
Before I start to tell you about the business mistakes I've made in the past, I need to give you some backstory on my road to entrepreneurship. I quit my full-time job as a Director at a startup in 2015. I really wasn't sure about what I wanted to do next and I didn't have too much of a backup plan or savings. I did know that I wanted to start my own business, and since I had worked in tech, I was able to find a tech co-founder, start to pitch around, and eventually get into the incubator, but after a couple of months, I knew this was not the kind of life I wanted to have.
I grew a community to support my tech startup, therefore, I decided to monetize this community as my next step. This became my first online business.
I started this online business because I like the community that I had built, but I did not know where I want to bring this company or what my vision was. I had some strategies and plans, but I did not have a clear vision, so I never knew if I was on the right track or not. Where I felt I could make a profit, where I went, but this is apparently not the right way to grow a business.
Now with enough background stories, we can start to talk about my mistakes.
I had no idea where I wanted to bring this company to. I started this online business because I like the community that I had built, but I did not know where I want to bring this company or what my vision was. I had some strategies and plans, but I did not have a clear vision, so I never knew if I was on the right track or not. Where I felt I could make a profit is where I went, but I learned that this is not the right way to grow a business.
I was not consistent. I started list building right from the beginning but gave up after the first big conference ended. If you run a community business whether online/offline, you should never stop list building. I stopped right after the conference because I was burnt out from a lot of work during the conference time. Probably because I also had no vision, so I just could not keep going.
I changed my strategy every time things weren't working. Our first conference did not make loads of money, but we did manage to make a 200% profit. I didn't continue this because I neglected the power of consistency. I simply chose another easier model, which was running educational workshops, and involved fewer people and charged more since data scientists would come to learn to code. It worked the first time, and we profited more, but it was not as successful as before.
I neglected the power of online content. The business model was a bit like B2B2C, so we needed to sell to the companies that wanted to offer training programs. We spent quite some effort learning how to approach companies to sell our training. However, we could have built valuable content through a newsletter and attracted more of a range of people. I neglected the power of building content, instead, I chose to do a hard sell, which was not what I was good at nor what made me comfortable.
I did not hire a team to support me. I did hire some freelancers, but it was to do the work that I could not do such as filming courses and conferences. I should have instead focused on hiring people with different skill sets to help delegate my work.
Do not waste your time making the same mistakes.
Here are the six mistakes that I have learned this year after I started FEM to coach Female Entrepreneurs.
I saw what actually worked at FEM, I finally understood what went wrong and why I felt so burned out and unmotivated all the time for my first online business. I simply did it the wrong way.
Do not waste the time to make the same mistakes that I made.
Sum up of my six mistakes
To conclude
I had no idea where I wanted to bring this company to.
I was not being consistent.
Did not learn from other experts
I changed my strategy every time when I saw something that did not work.
I neglected the power of online content.
Did not hire the team to support me
Let me know which mistakes you have made ….and what lesson you have learned.
Read More: 45. Why did I start English Content Recently?
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