Crawl before you walk! (And before you spend a ton of money!)

One of the cool things about writing an entrepreneurial blog and a column for Millionaire Blueprints Teen is I get to meet a lot of ambitious young entrepreneurs from around the country. I get emails with business plans all of the time.

I always get things like this: “Well, I figure once I have 10,000 users we will begin to make money”. Or, “Once my site is getting a ton of traffic we’ll have to hire people just to count our money.”

This isn’t a great business to start. What if you never get to where you want to be?

Your business has to work when it’s small in order to survive to the point where it gets big!

If your product or your service is going to be nothing but trouble until it reaches your ideal user base, I think it’s better to do something else. The way to go is to create something that is unique and likely to make customers happy long before you get to your ideal user base.

Every business I have ever started worked when I had one customer and in the coming weeks I will go through each of my past businesses including Dr. PetSit, Bingcoupons.com and MyUDC.com.

But this past year has been absolutely amazing for me. I came up with a totally unique concept based on my own experience, needs, lifelong passion and by recognizing a huge problem. And I was able to create a real business out of nothing.

I learned a lot and constantly tested and improved upon my service. I wish I could say I planned for my business to be the way it is right now but I can’t. No one can do that. It evolved immensely. Within three months (and since then) I am (and have been) fully convinced I have created what can (and should) be a huge company that helps millions of people.

The most important thing is that my program works! It works right now and I don’t need 100,000 members in order for it to work. I witness it every single morning. I have helped countless people change their life and I am 1000% convinced.

Now it’s time to invest some real money into my business.

Call me old fashioned but the best way to grow a sustainable business is starting small, making some money, getting a little bigger, and repeating.

Facebook, eBay, Google, and Microsoft are all rare businesses. Their best asset is that everyone wants to use the system that everyone is using.

But banking on building a business like that is like banking on becoming a rock star.

There are countless innovations that would make our world a better place. The problem with almost all of them is that getting from here to eBay status is almost impossible. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try, but it does mean you should count on failing.

Sure, every once in a while a Facebook happens. But for every business that reaches a tipping point there are thousands that fail.

That’s one reason you don’t want your kids to grow up to be rock stars trying to make Top 10 hits. It’s a great gig if you can get it, but you can’t count on getting it.