In this episode of The Marketing Nerdz podcast, CEO Karan Dharamsi shares the 2 things to remember before starting a business. Sharing his own experience from the time when he started his Fitness Coaching Business Online, here's what you need to know before you start your own Business. Dating back 4 years, Karan Dharamsi had planned to expand his fitness business and came up with an idea to launch the product online. The idea was to provide online coaching and have nutritionists to give personal counseling. With that concept and creating some buzz around, they launched a 30 days free trial lead magnet. Not just that, to make it a great experience for the members, they added all of the following: - Access to Facebook Private Group - Free 1-on-1 diet consultation - Free nutritionist coaching - Free 1-on-1 coaching with Karan Dharamsi And so much more... Now with an amazing membership offer like this for a Free trial for 30 days, it all started off with the Bang! From getting leads for about Rs 15 the group went from 0 to 6000 members in just the first 20 days. The whole community was creating a lot of buzz. People were also getting amazing results with people sharing their success stories in the group. Not to be mentioned, everybody was supremely happy. But here's an important thing I forgot, says CEO Karan Dharamsi: "Any business survives or thrives on profits! Money needs to flow in constantly." And here's the reality that rolled in after the end of the Free trial: When the 30th day came in, the end of the free trial, there was no one who wanted to upgrade from free to the paid trial of just Rs 6000. Inspite of getting great results, there was 0 response in terms of people wanting to convert. Having spent for the office, salary, creating content, providing consultation etc during the free trial, now was the time to recover. A day went by, nothing really happened. By that time, the project had caused a loss of almost 25 lacs in terms of the Office Space, Staff, Team members, Training Content, Coaching, and Consultation etc. There was no revenue and it didn't make sense to wait longer or keep burning money and hence had to shut things off, even though it was closely related to Karan Dharamsi's passion for fitness. Like he shares in one of his previous podcasts, sometimes, it is good to give up and move on, find the things which will help you achieve your bigger goals! When we start our company, we are most likely delusional about it. It's oka if you have investor cash but if it's your own money, you need to do this: 2 things to remember when you start your own business: 1) Know your numbers: Don't start your business based out of ideas but the actual numbers. 2) Test the Viability: Once you have the numbers, run a small test to get the proof of concept. Once you match these 2 elements, that's when you can go and run the business unless you want to risk your time and money without knowing the numbers and running a test. This gives you a deep understanding of your Customer Lifetime Value and Cost per Acquisition so that you launch your own business without risking your personal money. Hope this lesson, which was learnt the hard way helps you too as you set up your own business empire.