Selbstständig machen? Die Idee eines Feel-Good-Unternehmen
Der YouTuber Ali Abdaal ist seit längerer Zeit eine große Inspiration für mich. Ich schaue gerade einige seiner Videos, weil ich über eine neue Struktur für mein kleines Medienunternehmen nachdenke. (In Wahrheit lese ich die Transkripte, die ich mir mit ChatGPT formattiere, aber das ist eine andere Sache.)
Abdaal hat 5,5 Millionen Subscriber auf YouTube und ein Unternehmen mit zehn Angestellten aufgebaut. Er nennt seine Firma ein “Feel good business”. So blicke ich auch auf das, was ich mir aufbaue.
Hier einige Ausschnitte aus einem Video, das ich am Ende verlinke.
So, when it comes to growth, the growth isn't really that important for a feel-good business. The main thing is to optimize for the fun, freedom, flexibility, and lifestyle of the owner and sometimes by extension the team. So often with a feel-good business, you might think, "I could work twice as hard to grow twice as much, but actually, if I could work half as much to keep my profits the same, I'd rather go for that."
Usually, a feel-good business doesn't have much of a capital requirement; often, you can start them off for bootstrapping; you can just fund them yourself. Work-life balance is absolutely prioritized with a feel-good business. And when it comes to the organizational structure, the objective is to keep the team to a very small and manageable size. There are some people that are just solopreneurs—it's just one person, maybe with a few virtual assistants and maybe a few contractors, but the key thing is to keep the organization as flat and as small as possible, which is not one of the priorities of these other two types of businesses.
Ein Feel-Good-Unternehmen dreht sich um eine Fähigkeit, die der Gründer hat:
Step One would be to figure out what is the skill that you're passionate about and trying your best to market validate the idea. So the key difference between a feel-good business and other kinds of businesses is that a feel-good business tends to be centered around a skill that you, as the owner or as the business creator, particularly enjoy. And that's one of the key things, because part of the feel-good business model is you want to create a business that gives you fun, freedom, and flexibility, and part of that fun is making sure that the work you're doing is actually intrinsically enjoyable for you.
Now, a service business is when you are providing a service in return for money. A product business is when you are using your skills to create a product, and then you are selling that product for money. And then a content business is when you are using your skills to create free content on the Internet, and then you're monetizing it through advertising on YouTube AdSense or Medium or whatever the format is, or you're able to then sell products and services to the audience that you build up over the long term.
Ständiges Evaluieren ist wichtig:
Now, when it comes to a business, like, it's too easy to—especially once you get success—to just keep on doubling down on that success. We had a big success a couple years ago with our course, the Part-Time YouTuber Academy; it was making millions every year, loads of people were signing up to it, but then I had this nagging feeling where I asked myself, "If I won the lottery, would I really want to continue running courses, teaching people how to be YouTubers?" And the answer was not really. And because I knew that I ultimately want to build a feel-good business, I decided to re-evaluate and pivot the business away from running live cohort courses, teaching people how to be YouTubers.
So in the end, we ended up turning that course into a pre-recorded, evergreen course that's available now. People can buy it at any point; in fact, every year, we're probably gonna make at least a million dollars less than if we had kept running it as a live cohort, but part of the feel-good business thing is that you make decisions for the sake of your lifestyle and for the sake of freedom, fun, and flexibility, rather than necessarily making every decision with growth and profit and revenue in mind.
Ich kenne das gut: Ich habe mir für 2023 vorgenommen, jedes Monat ein Live-Event und einen Podcast-Kurs zu halten. Und habe dann gemerkt: Das stresst mich viel mehr, als dass es mir Spaß oder Geld bringt.
Häufige Fehler von Feel-Good-Unterehmen laut Abdaal: Es reicht nicht, einfach nur Dinge zu tun, die einem Spaß machen. Man muss eine Nachfrage decken, damit einen Nutzen stiften:
I see a lot of people trying to build a business from a YouTube channel, for example, but they focus only on making videos that they enjoy making, and they completely neglect the fact that like, if there isn't a market for the thing, and people don't vibe with what you're making, then you can't really make a business out of it, because a hobby is something that you do for fun, for yourself, because it brings joy to you, but a business is something that you do for other people, to add value to other people, and to make money.
Now, feel-good business is somewhere in the middle, but there is sort of that overlap between the thing that you enjoy, but the thing also needs to have a market and be able to make money, because if you're not making money, then you can't build a sustainable business off the back of the thing.
Ein Feel-Good-Unternehmen wächst langsam:
Second big mistake that we definitely made, like, a year ago, is trying to scale too fast, too soon. It's too easy to think, "Oh my God, money's growing on trees, we've got product-market fit, this thing is going really well, let's just, like, double our team size," but actually, slow, sustainable growth is a much more relaxing and much more chill place to be, rather than rapid exponential growth.