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SPI 856: Literally the Easiest Way to Start a Business in 2025

What’s the easiest way to launch a business in 2025? Building a website around your idea might be the first thing you think of, but that’s not it. There’s an easier path to revenue now, with no technical hurdles to overcome!

Listen in on this episode because I share an in-depth look at a tool changing the game for beginner and pro entrepreneurs alike. I’m talking about Stan, the all-in-one platform that enables you to set up a store for anything from coaching calls to courses. [affiliate link] With all the integrations you need, this can be the perfect link-in-bio page to help you start making money!

The days of online audiences being willing to click around confusing websites are over. Now, people often make purchasing decisions while scrolling through social media. That’s why having a simple way for your followers to buy from you is essential. Plus, Stan also saves you the time and trouble of building a website you might not even need.

So, tune in to learn about setting up your store and use our affiliate link at SmartPassiveIncome.com/stan to start with a free 30-day trial!

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SPI 856: Literally the Easiest Way to Start a Business in 2025

Pat Flynn: All right. I’m digging the feedback that I’m hearing about the new format of the podcast this year. I’m loving that. Thank you so much. It helps us on the team. And I’d love to see that feedback in the form of an Apple podcast review. If you have yet to do that, we’d love that. And we’d love it because we just want to hear your honest thoughts about it as well.

And it’s a new formatted show so that this will help other people who are just coming across the show for the first time, or maybe you’re just checking in, like, Hey, I’ve kind of moved away from Pat’s interviews and stuff. And I want to see how he’s doing. Oh my gosh, he must’ve changed the format. Cool. Look at these reviews.

So we would love to hear your feedback in a podcast review. I’ll read a few of them as we go along throughout the year. But today, I want to talk to you about literally the easiest way to start a business in 2025, and actually like technically how to set that up. We haven’t gone into technicalities yet here, and we’re going to do that today because here’s the truth.

You do not need to build a website. And yeah, I said it in order to start a business, you don’t need a website and I’ll tell you exactly what you need. And of course, before setting up anything, you want to know who it is that you’re targeting. We’ve talked about this in previous episodes here throughout the year.

We talked about different business models that you can choose. We talked about passive income and the fact that that’s like the last thing to happen after a string of actions that you have to take that do take some work from starting fast to marketing your message, building that audience, right? Own what you’ve grown.

So you’re building that email list, all those kinds of things. And you’re building this audience. Great. The T and smart, that’s an acronym, S M A R T. You get your time back with team and tools, but once you’re ready to start generating revenue, building that audience on social or whatever platform you choose.

In fact, next week, we’re going to go a deep dive into the different platforms that you have options to work on and then choosing one, maybe two, but in general, just choosing one is the best way to go. And we’re going to go deep into each of those next week. Everything from social to newsletter to all those things.

Where do you even write? Where do you even show up? Where do you create videos and where do you post them? All that’s coming next week. So make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss that. But No matter where you choose to set up your home base, it’s important to understand that home base has changed. What used to be the case was you would have to start a website, right?

After you pick an audience, and many people built a website even before understanding who it is that they were serving, but you built a website that was like step one. And I so remember so many cases where I was up till 3 a. m. debugging websites and CSS style sheets and HTML. This was way, way back in the early days, 2007, 2008, 2009.

I was using Dreamweaver to create websites. Anybody remember that? Today though, we’re going to explore how starting an online business has become radically simpler. Like the technicalities of it are no longer a barrier. And I want to produce this episode not just to tell you what you should do and what you shouldn’t do, but also just to encourage you.

Because there is really no excuse now. If you haven’t gotten started yet, you haven’t generated any revenue yet, the technical part of it is not something that should stop you anymore. It was, as I said in episode 852, it is the emotional and the psychological parts that are stopping you. But if you’re still like, okay, Pat, like step by step, what do I do?

Well, we’re going to get into that in this episode. Now, let me just backtrack a little bit more. I have to preface most of these episodes for beginners, especially. with the fact that you need to understand who it is that you’re targeting, number one. And so if you have yet to nail down an idea, you haven’t nailed your niche yet, then I would recommend taking our Smart From Scratch Course.

It’s completely free. All you have to do is go to smartpassiveincome.com/smart. If you have a million ideas, it’s going to help you narrow down to one to move forward with and decipher whether or not that’s actually a good business idea for you to work on. Not whether or not it’s profitable or not.

That’s a part of it, but whether or not it makes sense for you and your talents, your expertise and your excitement to actually work on it. Or if you have zero ideas, it’ll help you brainstorm and find one. So you need that one idea, you need to start understanding who you’re building for because revenue comes from you stepping forward to either a solve these people’s problems or show up enough in front of them that advertisers want to get in front of them, right, whether it’s YouTube ads or sponsors or, you know, brand partnerships, things like that. Now I’ve been doing business since 2008. And I’ve built dozens and dozens of websites, probably hundreds, especially in the niche site days.

I started a website to help people pass an architecture exam. This was in 2008. My next website after that was a failed website, but, and actually I haven’t told the story in a while. It was called ACoupleOfThoughts.Com. And it was a website where I had actually somebody, I hired somebody to build the styling of the website or the theme on top of WordPress. And it was a side by side blog. One side was my POV or point of view. The other side was my fiance, now wife, April. And we were going to every day pick a topic and you’d hear my perspective. And then you’d hear her perspective, right? The man’s perspective on this relationship and a woman’s perspective on this relationship, like two journals happening side by side.

Well, it never came about because we just started arguing about stuff even before we wrote anything down if we had only talked about these things first in these topics then we wouldn’t have wasted a thousand dollars to get those themes created, but that’s another story. We don’t need to get into that. We’re fine now. I’ve built a website to help Security guards pass their exams and their security credentials.

That is something that I’ve sold in 2020. I built that in 2010, sold it in 2020. I built the website to help people start food trucks and that was sold as well. And that was a wildly successful for a little experiment that we were running. I had built a website to help people create a clickable map that they can put onto their website.

I had built a website that is a personal website, which still exists at patflynn. com, where I got a lot of help to build that website. I couldn’t have done that myself, but all along, there was a lot of friction to make all of those web properties happen, but it was always the first step. Build a website, show up, start writing, understand search engine optimization, stay consistent, and then eventually at some point, some magical moment, people will find you through Google, they’ll start talking about you, then you can build your business. But it was just so frustrating. I remember a specific moment when I was building my first website for the LEED exam website. This is the architecture one that I was talking about.

I was so frustrated. And part of the problem was I was somebody who always wanted to do everything on my own, and if I didn’t know how to do it, I went deep to try to figure it out. So this is why. I was in the CSS style sheets. This is why I was trying to learn HTML on the go and I got HTML and websites for dummies from Barnes and Noble and just tried to figure it out on my own.

And I remember one time, April, my fiance at the time, again, now wife, she had seen me so frustrated about one little thing I was trying to do on my website. I was trying to move an image from one side to the other side, but every time I did that, it would like go in the wrong place. And she just called up a friend who was a web designer and he fixed it for me in like two minutes.

And he was like, this website isn’t really good like who coded this and I was like, yeah, that was me. We had to do it though and then thankfully over time WordPress came about and then a lot of different themes and different skins That one could either purchase as premium or just there was a lot more freedom to choose what a website would look like through WordPress and then there was Wix and Squarespace all these different options to build websites but you still needed a website, but there was a lot more to it than just like build a website, right?

You needed to get a domain name Okay, you need to get a domain name and then all the dot coms were taken. So which ones do you use instead? But then once you got your domain, you had to connect your website, which was on wordpress and there was all these security related things that were in there and then all the plugins that you needed to do all the things you wanted to do and then of course when you wanted to do a lot of other things like build an email list or sell an online course or create landing pages, you needed all these different tools. You needed lead pages and you needed opt in monster for your opt in forms connected to convert kit, which was then connected to teachable, which was like all these things.

And they all cost money. There was a lot. Let’s not even talk about the updates that WordPress would come out with, or these tools that would then break the whole system. It was just, it was not cool. I have nightmares about it. Thankfully, we don’t live in that time anymore. And if you’re starting a business by building a website first, I think there is an easier way.

You can get to revenue faster. Now, I’m not saying you should never create a website. I’m saying that it’s not the first step. Let’s reduce the friction to get started, which means, okay, what is the minimum thing we can do to show up and get revenue? Now, like I’ve mentioned before, it’s not just like you build it and they will come. That never happens. You have to Show up consistently, you have to build a relationship with your audience, you have to prove your expertise, your knowledge, you have to tell a story, you have to build awareness, or get awareness, earn awareness, I should say. But then where do you push people? If it’s not a website, where are you taking them?

Well, I want to introduce you to the idea that we want to help people also reduce the friction. We want to get people to what it is that we promise, or we can help them with sooner than later. And a website is very complicated, not just for somebody creating it, but it has become something that in many cases overwhelms people who visit those websites are too confusing to navigate if it’s not done very well. There are people who get paid tens of thousands of dollars to build websites in a way that gets people who use them to use them well, to way find through it. And if that’s not proof that that’s just not the best way, or the most economical way, then well, you’re in the right spot because I’m going to tell you the most economical way to get started.

And it relates to a company that I have been working with and have been using for the last couple months that I’ve kind of fallen in love with. I love everything they stand for and I emphasize stan when I say that because it’s Stan. That’s the name of it. Stan Store. And if you want to check out my Stan store now, in fact, it actually is number one optimized for mobile because most people who are clicking on things who are listening, like imagine you’re a podcaster. Instead of asking your audience to go to your website, and then it’s not necessarily optimized, and then to go to the landing page to get the thing that you’re just talking about, or the lead magnet. You can just pop it at the top of your Stan Store. People go there, and it’s optimized already. It’s on the device that they’re listening on already.

If you go to Stan.store/PatFlynn, you’ll see my Stan Store. And you’ll see at the very top. There’s a mention of the most important lead bank that we have, which is Smart From Scratch. You scroll down a little, there’s some other links. There’s some affiliate links in there as well for the important items that we share and recommend.

But there’s also a podcast player, which is pretty cool. So it actually is kind of a website. But it’s nowhere near as complicated to get started. And this partnership that we formed with Stan has been really incredible. John, the founder, has come in to our community to teach and to inspire, he’s built this incredible company that kind of started as a result of serving those who were on TikTok and on social media to help them reduce the overwhelm when it came to just building something that can help them generate revenue.

And what’s really amazing about this, I don’t want to turn this into just like an advertisement, but I’m happy to get behind this because it is something that already, a lot of the SPI community is getting behind as well. And there’s actually a 30 day free trial if you go through our link, SmartPassiveIncome.com/stan. But what’s beautiful about this is, remember all those tools I was talking about? You need a tool to create courses, you need a tool to book calls, and put a checkout page to do that so that they can consult with you, or people can hire you for coaching. If you want to sell a template or some digital product, you need this other tool, right?

There was all these tools. And you’d have to pay thousands of dollars to get access to all of them. Stan just costs 29 a month, yo. If you move forward past the one month trial, that again is exclusive here at SPI, SmartPassiveIncome.com/stan. One payment. That’s it. 29 a month. Doesn’t matter. How you use it, and it doesn’t matter how many things you sell.

They don’t take a percentage fee for those transactions. The Stripe may, but they don’t. It’s just 29 a month. They have tens of thousands of customers now. And it’s absolutely incredible. And many people are generating revenue for the first time because they’ve built an audience. They just didn’t know how to monetize.

My favorite feature, in fact, and this is something that I would have 100 percent used if back in the day I had access to something like this. I would have set up my stand store and I would have charged people a hundred bucks to get on a call with me so that I can teach them how to pass the LEED exam.

And then just give them free access to the resources. Oh my gosh, I would have made four times the revenue and it would have been so much fun to get paid to just talk to people who are doing something that I’ve already done. You can set that up and stand very easily. You can connect it to your Google calendar and actually have time blocks during the week where you can sell those spots and with a very small audience, you can already start generating revenue. If you wanted to sell a digital product, a checklist, a template of sorts, you just do it. It’s a very modular experience on Stan, and you don’t have to worry about, okay, let me sign up for this program, and then have to, you know, reconnect it there, and now it has to connect to everything.

Like, no, it’s all inclusive inside of Stan, and just at one low price. That’s it. It’s freaking amazing. The other cool thing about this is when you create these new products, these offerings, they just go on the stand store and you can reorder them and you can change the copy around them. It’s so easy to use.

No, you’re not able to design it exactly how a website might look, but that’s on purpose. You don’t need to get fancy. You just need to create your Stan Store, pop it on your socials. I have mine on Tik Tok on Instagram. I have it on Facebook and YouTube, and we’re getting hundreds of clicks a day. I’ve even used it for the Pokemon channel.

Now, if you actually go to Deep Pocket Monster official on Instagram, or you find a Deep Pocket Monster on Twitter, if you find the pocket monster, you’ll see the stand store. And in the stand store, we have a, yes, a lead magnet. I do have a digital product that I give away for free, but that’s done through Stan and I’m building an email list.

I built a list of 10,000 people and I was actually able to use this the other day because another company that I worked with, Vault X, which is a binder company that I’ve built a partnership with. Yes, they are linked to in the Stan store and I get paid for that. I actually share the coupon right there.

It’s very easy to add. They came out with a brand new product. So I was able to send an email to 10,000 people. And the open rate was like 65%. I had thousands of clicks through my affiliate link for this brand new product. That happened because I was able to build my list on Stan online on social so it sort of acts like a link tree which is pretty cool.

You can build your link tree you can link to other things that they don’t have to be paid and if you don’t even know what you want to charge for yet, then that’s okay You can just use it as sort of a directory if you will. Traditional websites are no longer necessary, right? Consumer behavior has changed a bit.

People aren’t consuming blogs like they once did. They’re not showing up on websites to spend time there. Oftentimes they’re spending time on websites to just look for something and then leave. So that’s number one. Purchasing decisions are made on social now. Not on a website. A website’s where just the end transaction happens.

And if you could remove the website and just have it happen from social to your Stan Store then even better. You’re removing the steps required. And it’s just all there and simple and, again, cheap. Direct purchasing through social platforms is happening more and more. People are used to doing this now.

They’re used to it from TikTok Shop, Google Shop, or Google Pay. Amazon, of course, you pay in the app online and they could pay you through your Stan Store. When you build trust on a social platform and then just say, hey, go get my thing and you point to the thing and it’s just easy to get. I mean, it’s just so easy now, right?

Social profiles are the main point of discovery. Social profiles are the main source of discovery, and that does include YouTube, in my opinion. When people find you on YouTube, they want to go deeper, you can link to your store or your products in the description. And it eliminates all the technical barriers.

The reason I’m going so deep into this and I’m selling this so hard is because A, I love the product. I haven’t gone this hard with a product since like Kit and Circle. But even then, Stan is like literally for beginners. And if you’re just getting started, set up your Stan store, get the free trial, SmartPassiveIncome.com/stan. It took me less than five minutes to set up everything. And if you want to see some incredible stories of people using Stan, you can just go to their page. Their page is just loaded with them. From people in the makeup space, to yoga, to fitness trainers. If you just have anything to sell, I mean, yes, even a small digital product can help you go a long way in this space and in the environment that we’re in today.

With the lower barrier to entry this should be table stakes, and then it’s about marketing, then it’s about how do you get in front of more people, then it’s about capturing attention on social, and really mastering those hooks, and then this stand store that is just there, just, just is there, it’s, people will naturally go to that, and if, of course, you mention it, and you have call to actions to it, So there’s a lot there.

You create courses, set up your calendar, offer digital products. You can host webinars. You can put other links in there. You can create a small little private community. Again, these things are nothing to the extent of like what kit has to offer for email or what circle has to offer for community. But those are once you start to grow, that’s like level two, this is level one and a website doesn’t even need to come into play.

Honestly, there are people generating thousands of dollars without even a website, you still get to own what you’ve grown, right? Cause these are your customers. You have that database. It is important to still build an email list because any one of these social platforms that you build a following on can change things overnight.

So it’s again, really important to own what you’ve grown. You shouldn’t have to grown G R O A n at creating coding, worrying about checkouts, how to do all this. So again. That’s all I’m going to say about Stan, but I’m a fan of, I’m a Stan of Stan, right? I am a Stan of Stan. Now, I do want to talk about the idea of what happens after this, right?

How do we scale up? And we’re going to talk about that, especially through the second quarter of this year. I know we’re in quarter one, a lot of the episodes, the one piece of feedback I imagine I could get easily, I haven’t heard this yet. But it may be something that some of you might be thinking is that, Pat, this is a little too beginner for me.

Well, we had to start somewhere and we wanted to start with people so that nobody got left behind, right? Ohana. Nobody gets left behind. Ohana means family. Nobody gets left behind. That’s from Lilo and Stitch in case you didn’t know or catch that reference, but. We need to start at the foundation, right? We started the year with why making money online is easy.

And I just taught you how technically easy it is to start, but mentally, psychologically, it’s hard. We address that no longer an issue. We went over the different kinds of business models that you could choose from, which ones may be right for you in the beginning stages versus some that you might want to wait till later for, like writing a book, for example, or building a community.

We talked about the framework, the smart framework, to be able to understand how to get to passive income because it doesn’t start that way and I needed to get be up front with all of you and tell you that yes, passive income is possible. No, it’s not possible when you just start out. In fact, it can potentially take years to get to the point where things are just finally working for you, but you got to invest that time and energy up front.

And then finally, we talked about, okay, last week, how do we go deep with who it is that our audience actually is and what are they struggling with and who are the people and the places that are serving this audience and what kinds of products are they being served with? We’re going through that.

Next week we’re going to talk about platforms, setting up shop there. And that way, if you haven’t noticed this whole year is sort of progressing from one step to the next. And once we get into March, once we get into April, you’re going to start to hear more about growth and strategies to get in front of more people and how to amplify the messages that you’re sharing, how to actually increase those conversion rates from social to email, from email to sales.

How do we actually sell something for the first time? What are the different mechanisms to actually drive more leads beyond just like posting on social there are so many strategies that I cannot wait to share with you but I have to share them with you in the right order.

So a little bit shorter of an episode today because I want you to take some action if you haven’t yet done so and you’re just starting out I would love for you to at least explore the idea of Stan over at SmartPassiveIncome.com/stan there is a 30 day trial there. And I’m a big fan of the company because they help make things so much easier for people. And that’s why we’re here. We’re here to relay those things to you. We don’t partner like this and get so behind companies very often.

Very, very few times we do this, but this was a special episode that I wanted to make sure got in front of you and I wanted to go hard on Stan because they are here to serve. And the people who are in our community using it already are loving it and already starting to generate some revenue, which is great.

And I can’t wait to hear the same kinds of stories from you. So to finish up, let me just give you some words of encouragement because this is the time in the process. Where you’re actually creating things. You’re actually starting to build a little bit. And again, Stan makes it very easy. But, it’s still gonna be psychologically and mentally hard.

And the reason is because it’s actually happening. What you are doing is actually coming true. True, what you’ve always wanted is starting now, and it feels weird, it feels different. I would take that energy you have, that nervous energy, that imposter syndrome feeling, and flip it on its head. The fact that you are nervous about this is exciting. In fact, the same parts of your brain fire up when you’re nervous and when you’re excited.

It’s just how you decide to react to those things that are firing in your brain. Are you going to tell yourself that it’s because you’re not good enough, because you’re scared, or are you going to tell yourself it’s because you’re excited about the possibilities, even though you might not know exactly which way to go or how it’s going to happen, but you’re doing it and you should be proud of that.

I would go with the latter, and especially if you’re showing up in service of others. This is what has helped me the most and has driven me to do things that I would normally not do, meaning I was too shy or too afraid to do. I was able to more easily step forward and help people and sell and show up online because I knew that people would benefit from the work.

I believe that. Wholeheartedly, and it wasn’t until I wholeheartedly believed that. Even before I knew exactly how I was going to do that, knowing that I was wholeheartedly showing up to help people helped me know that I was doing it for the right reasons. And if you’ve made it this far into the episode, I know you’re doing it for the right reasons too.

Yes, you want to generate revenue and support your family? It will happen. You can generate a lot of revenue. You can have an incredible life by helping people. In the niche that you’re serving and you don’t need that many people to make a drastic change in your life. So I just want to say, number one, you got this.

Number two, you are not alone in number three. If you’re still curious about, okay, literally Pat, I understand Stan, great. But like, where do I begin? Like what’s step one? How do I find this niche of mine? Go to smartpassiveincome.com/smart and go through that course. Even the first two lessons will help you.

Just go through the first two lessons. And then I promise you, you’re probably going to be motivated to do the rest because the lessons are pretty short, but they’re very, very actionable. And that’s what we’re all about here, taking action. So I’ve told you literally the easiest way to start a business today.

So, again, I’ve given you the fact that there is literally no excuse for you to get in your own way anymore, outside of you just self sabotaging yourself. And you don’t have to do that. You don’t have to do that anymore. Come back next week. We’re going to talk about various platforms. Everything from TikTok, Instagram, Reels, YouTube, podcast, blog, newsletter, public stage, virtual stage, the whole shebang.

So hit subscribe so you don’t miss out. And we’ll go deeper into each of those next week. Cheers, everybody. Thank you so much.

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Smart Passive Income Podcast

with Pat Flynn

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