From An Idea to a Six-Figure Business, with Nafisa Bakkar
From An Idea to a Six-Figure Business, with Nafisa Bakkar
💸 How do you make your first £100k? What do you need to do to get your idea to ‘take off’? Can you run an ethical, impactful business and still make money?
Nafisa Bakkar is the CEO and co-founder of award-winning media platform Amaliah, which seeks to amplify the voices of Muslim women. She just published her book How to make money: an honest guide to going from an idea to a six-figure business. With no network, no capital and no previous experience, Nafisa built her business from scratch and has helped hundreds of founders to do the same.
In this episode, Nafisa shares her tips on getting better at sales, understanding how to build a useful network and advice on being more efficient.
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You can listen (37 min) and subscribe here:
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“It’s really important to know how to articulate your value in the way that the industry is used to. ”
BUILDING A SPACE FOR MUSLIM WOMEN
Amalia started over seven years ago when Nafisa was fresh out of University. It was very much one of those things where she thought something needs to exist for Muslim women - an online space. Nafisa set out with her co-founder, who is her sister, to build a space for Muslim women that would become a media company. Even though they did not really have a background in media marketing, they managed to build something that Muslim women loved.
Their first client was eBay. That is how they started consulting companies in the first instance and then now their bread and butter is very much about a brand coming to them that wants to run a marketing campaign to their audience.
first hundred days of business
The idea is that whether you have a solution to a potential problem, a business idea, or there's a certain group of people you want to create something for — thinking about in the first a hundred days and what can you do that is the most efficient use of your time to figure out if you are onto something.
If you think about it as a series of experiments, so instead of going from idea to launch, think about it as a series of milestones. You've got an idea or you've got a problem that you know you want to solve. And your first step is you're coming up with a hypothesis.
It’s about truly trying to get inside the minds of the potential people that you are going to engage with.
Try to put in the smallest test you can - and figuring out if you’re onto something and what’s the quickest way of testing it out and getting results.
A big win is setting a money goal - it gives you a focus and what happens is you realize that sometimes you don't even have to learn anything new, you just have to double down on what was working.
Sometimes, especially when you're starting a community or especially when you're starting something from a place of passion rather than starting a business, you can think about money as ‘the money will come, just do what you love and the money will follow.’
There's another pathway of being a bit more intentional about going out to find the money and bringing the money in.
The second thing, in terms of a win, is setting your pricing at the higher end and then discounting if you need to because you can always go down, but it's harder to go up.
As you scale and as you get more team members, everyone's time needs to be budgeted for.
Ultimately a business is make or break depending on how much money it can bring in and whether it's sustainable.
It’s important to be very clear on who your customers are and the specific character that has money to pay for the service or product that you want to buy.
learning from mistakes
A common mistake is talking to the wrong people in a meeting.
Then, there is the issue of people not looking after their runway - thinking bigger than where they are in terms of their revenue and their costs and their income.
Being prudent with your money is important because when you think about a business, you're up against the time, and trying to prove that it's going to work and to try and make money from it so that it carries on as a sustainable venture.
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Resources and ways to connect with Nafisa:
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