I stumbled upon an online course from Grow with Google today about how to build a business without debt, and there were several enlightening lessons I took away that made me start to look forward to forging a new path.

Here are a few snippets from what I learnt:

“Everything you want is outside your comfort zone – or else you would already have it”

Q: What is the #1 secret to starting a business?

A: Sell something to someone

If you were to tell family or friends about your business idea, most of them will be encouraging. However, that is not a good gauge to know if your idea is likely to succeed, so don’t be misled by it.

Instead, try this mini-experiment process to see if your business idea is viable:

The real test of whether something is a viable business idea is if someone is willing to pay you money for it.

Many of us believe that we need to have everything lined up before we can sell it. Hence, we may invest a lot of time and effort building something, only to find at the end that maybe no one really needed it in the first place. How do we prevent this from happening?

This is the answer:

“There is no need to create everything before selling! If a house can be sold before it is built, why can’t your idea be?”

If you are throwing money at a problem, you may not be thinking creatively about solving it.

5 ways to build a business without debt:

1. Get stuff for free
2. Borrow stuff
3. Barter for stuff
4. Sell your stuff (to raise money)
5. Sell your idea before you create (so you already have funds to pay for it before you build it)

In a nutshell, the way to get started is to dial back on the scale of your idea, start small, test and learn iteratively until you find something that works before going all in to develop the full version of it:

I encourage you to check out the full video if the above was interesting for you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rc9tR-Qtmyo