What is entrepreneurship? A guide on how you can become an entrepreneur

Entrepreneurship is booming, with the number of new businesses, startups, and total businesses continuing to rise.

But what is entrepreneurship? And how do you join the rising number of entrepreneurs?

In this article, we’re going to examine the concept of entrepreneurship and look at the mind of the entrepreneur, then show you how you can dip your own toes into the waters of the unknown without needing to put it all on the line.

Entrepreneurship defined

Traditionally, entrepreneurship has been defined as starting a business with the objective of making a profit. Today, entrepreneurship can offer you an alternative career path, giving you the chance to skip the entirety of the corporate rat race by forging your own way forward.

Entrepreneurs also tend to wield considerable influence, and your own business and brand can be a platform for you to solve critical problems facing your area, community, or even humanity in general. 

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, for instance, is an example of an entrepreneur’s effort to contribute in a positive way, supporting a broad range of developments like the enhancement of healthcare and reduction of extreme poverty across the world—it’s hard to imagine Microsoft founder Gates as an entrepreneur today, but that’s exactly what he was back in 1975 when he developed the device marketed as Altair BASIC.

That being said, there are ways entrepreneurs can make positive change a central part of their day-to-day operations. We’ll look at this type of entrepreneurship as well as several other kinds later on in this article.

What is an entrepreneur?

If entrepreneurship is the act of starting a business with the goal of creating profit or positive change, then an entrepreneur is a person who sets out to do exactly that—they start businesses. Entrepreneurs can usually come up with some form of innovation in a particular niche, whether that’s a superior product to what’s out there, a greener alternative, or just bringing a product or service to a market that has an opening for it.

Take a walk down just about any old city street and you’ll probably see plenty of examples of entrepreneurship. The grocer on the corner, the butcher, the watch repair place—most independently owned businesses like these started off with their proprietor as an entrepreneur. The fast food joints or gas stations near you could qualify, too, since they’re mostly franchised by a local operator.

You’re also probably exposed to tons of online entrepreneurs on a daily basis. If you subscribe to any YouTubers or follow any TikTok or Instagram channels, well, those are all entrepreneurs, too. Their popularity determines how much money they make, but you can bet the big ones have all registered companies to operate under and pay themselves a salary.

The different types of entrepreneurship

1. Startup

This might be the most familiar type of entrepreneurship, given just how high-profile startups have been in recent years. The internet era has given rise to countless companies that have become household names as they’ve grown to take over their respective niche. Not every entrepreneur is going to establish the next “unicorn” but there are plenty of reasons to try. 

Generally, startups have a well-defined niche, a problem that they’re going to solve, or an innovative technology that they’re bringing to the market. This attracts significant investment from early-stage backers such as venture capitalists—this influx of wealth can make you a multimillionaire if your business idea, niche, or tech is considered especially promising.

Snowflake is an example of an extremely successful tech startup, having been founded back in 2012 by Benoit Dageville, Thierry Cruanes, and Marcin Zukowski. Taking on the world of data warehousing, the founders realized that scale, efficiency, and the cloud would be crucial to handle the rapid growth of demand for data and analytics.

2. Small business

The small business is where the vast majority of entrepreneurs find themselves, especially if they don’t seek too much in terms of seed capital from the likes of VCs who demand scale and massive returns. Small businesses are free to operate without such constraints, growing at their own speed and remaining sustainable, often taking on a handful of employees as the business scales and the entrepreneur behind it sees enough revenue to afford the help.

That said, not every small business is a mom-and-pop shop on a street corner. Running a small business is an art and can scale quickly to meet your own expectations, and there are plenty of grants and incentives on offer to take advantage of depending on where you live. A small business can also be a side gig that grows quickly—a YouTube channel could be a small business, for instance, taking on employees like editors, producers, and camera crew as channel revenue ramps up.

If you want to see successful examples of small businesses, visit a digital marketplace like Whop. Here, you’ll see how creators are able to monetize their skills and knowledge and translate those intangibles into small businesses that can meet their goals, empowered and supported by an entrepreneur-focused all-in-one platform.

3. Large company

Large companies can be entrepreneurial entities as well, especially if they have visionary leadership and are consistently on the cutting edge of their industry. It’s hard to argue that any of today’s top companies don’t show entrepreneurship in their own way, given how they are constantly growing their area of operations, increasing market capitalization, and expanding into other areas via significant investment or the purchase of other businesses.

Amazon is an excellent example of a large company that retains its entrepreneurial roots. Founder Jeff Bezos, now considered more oligarch than entrepreneur, had the luxury of a Wall Street background and significant seed capital to found the company; however, decades on, Amazon has worked its way into several industries. Despite being regarded as a consumer-facing brand, a lot of the company’s growth is thanks to the success of Amazon Web Services, a hosting platform launched by the one-time online bookstore way back in 2002.

4. Social entrepreneurship

Social entrepreneurship is a model that focuses less on profits or the achievement of financial goals and more on having a social or environmental impact. Some efforts can gain traction through social media and become viral, powerful movements, but it’s also possible for an entrepreneur to start a business and use that to both pay the bills and create positive change in the world.

One of the best examples of this is TOMS, a shoe outlet that launched with the pledge that for every pair of shoes a customer would buy, they’d donate a pair to a child in need. As the business has evolved, so have their methods of giving—TOMS now contributes a third of the profits toward positive change all across the world.

What skills do entrepreneurs need?

With the question of whether or not you want to embark on a journey of entrepreneurship now likely answered in your mind, it’s a good time to brush up on the different skills that entrepreneurs need. They are:

• Innovation: This means trying to be original and creative in the way you go about solving your core problem. Put your own personal stamp on your product, and you’ll stand out from the rest even in a congested market segment. If you happen to find an unaddressed gap or problem that needs fixing, do it creatively, and think about your branding—remember, competitors tend to pop out of the woodwork fast even in brand-new segments, so creativity is vital.
• Resilience: It’s commonly held that entrepreneurs often fail, sometimes in multiple instances, before they finally succeed. There’s truth to this, but it’s easy to not fear failure if you’ve got a trust fund at your back. If you’ve got mouths to feed and rent comes far too early every month, then it’s only natural to fear failure and that stack of unpaid bills. As such, it’s worth saving up a nest egg before you take the plunge, or start your entrepreneurial career slowly as a side gig before scaling it up. Be resilient, but also be realistic.
• Discipline: The thing about being an entrepreneur is that you’re suddenly going to work according to the schedule that you yourself set. It takes a lot of discipline for some people to follow the plans that they set and for other people not to overdo it and risk burnout. This, along with the ability to organize yourself, is crucial for keeping your new business ticking over.

10 businesses that entrepreneurs can start quickly

1. Online store

Ecommerce wasn’t always as easy as it is now, and there are a number of platforms that you can use to set up an online store extremely quickly. All there is to it is figuring out what you’re going to sell and how to best reach your target market—and once that’s decided, you’ll need to figure out production and fulfillment. Purely digital products are worth considering since take a lot of the complexity out of it, plus you can create them yourself and replicate them infinitely.

2. Dropshipping

Dropshipping isn’t new any longer, and if you’ve bought anything on Amazon recently, you’ve probably noticed that lots of your search hits are dropshipped—the vendor is local and speaks your lingo, but the item ships straight from China (and returns get pretty complicated).

As common as this business model is, it’s very possible to build a dropshipping business quickly and successfully if you’re able to pick the right products to sell. As a dropshipper, you’ll need a supplier lined up on the back end, while drawing up your product descriptions and planning out your marketing to appeal to the right customers in the right way. 

3. Print-on-demand

Print-on-demand (POD) is another effective model of ecommerce, and it’s more ubiquitous than you might think. Take your favorite content creators, for example. How many of them have launched their own merch?

Well, throwing a slogan or graphics on a tee shirt, hoodie, or mug is the usual way to go, and suppliers for these sorts of items are a dime a dozen. To really get ahead as a POD entrepreneur, you’ll want to take a quick look at our guide covering the ins and outs of POD as well as how to start a POD business today.

4. Online courses

The online course industry is expected to reach a tenth of a trillion dollars across 1 billion consumers in a few years, and there are both evergreen areas of demand as well as fields of mass interest popping up regularly—for example, trading and AI. If you’ve got skills to share in areas where you see demand, then creating online courses could become an extremely lucrative business model.

One of the many advantages is that a course only needs to be created once, then it can be taken by more and more people as time goes on, becoming a passive source of revenue while you create your next course.

5. Online coaching

This one’s very similar to online courses, and many creators who create online courses also offer online coaching. The fact of the matter is, some people prefer direct instruction over course content, and workshops, group lessons, or even 1-on-1s work better for them. Of course, these online coaching models don’t scale as well as online courses do, so you’ll need to price your time accordingly.

6. Ebooks

Ebooks are an example of disruptive technology that’s really become a success. This is mainly due to the convenience of being able to read on the go using gear you already have (your phone) or a device (ebook reader) that’s still a whole lot more portable than a pile of paperbacks.

As an author, ebooks are also easy to sell online and you don’t need to worry about how many copies to print since they’re digital. If you’ve got something to say, then your words could sell—ebooks also make a brilliant complementary revenue stream if you’re doing online courses or some other sort of content.

7. Content creation

Speaking of content, we’ve referenced content creators as entrepreneurs already in this article, and it’s important not to underestimate just how quickly and easily you can build a content creation business in the format of your choice. As long as you’re able to put out content that people want to consume and can game the algorithm to get eyes on your work, there’s endless potential across countless niches on several platforms such as TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram.

8. Video editing

When it comes to content, video is often regarded as king—and even if you don’t want to get into content creation yourself, the people who do often need help on the editing front. As creators take off, they find themselves with less and less time to edit their own work and usually hire editors of their own. Why not start a video editing business and take on creators as clients? 

9. Accountancy

Coming from content creation and ecommerce, accounting might not sound terribly glamorous, but when you think about it, every entrepreneur needs someone who keeps the books. Even sole proprietors can start to get lost in a sea of numbers as they try to work their finances out, and the pressure really builds up when tax season appears on the horizon.

If you’ve got a knack for it or some formal training, you can make a whole lot of money working as a freelance accountant or starting an accounting firm.

10. Consulting

If you’ve got significant amounts of experience in a certain field, you might consider coaching or courses…or keep doing what you're doing but at a far higher price. Consultants can write their own checks, be their own boss, and have skills that are worth paying for.

Consultancy is one of those things to consider when you realize that you’re indispensable in your job but aren’t quite getting the pay bumps or promotions you deserve—if there really isn’t anyone else who can solve the company’s problems, then they’ve got no choice but to dance to your tune.

Should you become an entrepreneur?

Let’s take a look at some of the considerations and benefits of becoming an entrepreneur.

Your situation

Back in the day, the most successful entrepreneurs very much had something in common—the right circumstances. Elon Musk used to be driven to school in a Rolls Royce and both he and his father Errol have said that Musk Senior owned shares in a Zambian emerald mining interest. Jeff Bezos spent years on Wall Street and gained the connections and know-how to go with it, and a lot of Amazon competitors have since been taken down in interesting ways.

Bill Gates went to private school and had computer access the vast majority of kids couldn’t even dream of, and his mother sat on a board with IBM CEO John Opel, who hired the fledgling firm Microsoft to build the OS for IBM’s first personal computer.

Today, though, entrepreneurship doesn’t rest purely on who your parents know or how much money you have to throw your ideas. The latter helps, but the world is far more connected than it’s ever been, and it’s easy to find the right niches and communities to share ideas and knowledge online. Steve Jobs met Steve Wozniak locally through a mutual friend in the Bay Area—but today, you can connect with just about anyone anywhere online.

Time is money

Many of the entrepreneurs we’ve discussed so far received large amounts of capital from contacts or family. But today, starting a business doesn’t need as much investment to develop and establish supporting infrastructure as it used to. We mentioned Whop earlier—it takes seconds to set up an online store on Whop. This gives you a landing page, functional and easy-to-use checkout for different digital products, payment processing, customer service, and much more. That’s a complete, functional online business, and all you need to bring to the table is the product.

Today, you can build and operate a business with minimal effort thanks to all the automation provided by different platforms and SaaS solutions. You still need to put plenty of time and energy into whatever it is you want to sell—whether that’s a product of some sort taking advantage of a gap in the market or your own knowledge, skills, expertise, or personality packaged into some form of content.

Become your own boss

When you decide to embark on an entrepreneurial journey, especially if you go all-in and leave your day job behind, you’re suddenly in a position where you’re your own boss. Whether this is a blessing or a curse very much depends on you.

Some people do quite enjoy the structured security of the 9-5. In many countries, an employment contract offers significant job security when coupled with robust labor laws—an employee can live with the peace of mind of having a guaranteed income into the foreseeable future, as long as they’re fulfilling the terms of their contract and their employer isn’t in any immediate danger of collapse. 

Then there’s the fact that you can technically switch off at the end of your shift, turn off your work phone, and simply forget about the rigors of your job at 5 pm. Again this one can vary a little from job to job and country to country, but as a general rule, if you’re going above and beyond the terms of your contract, you’re doing it voluntarily and for a reason.

Well, when you take up the mantle of entrepreneur and become your own boss, all of this changes. The needs of your business are wide in scope, and you’ll be challenging yourself to take on every area of business almost daily—you’re not just the founder but also likely wearing the hat of CEO, customer support, CFO, CMO, and more. This is one reason many entrepreneurs have partners, as the loads can be shared and skills can be complemented.

It’s also an extremely rewarding experience to go it alone, though. Plus, if you find yourself doing overtime and working on weekends? Well, you’re doing it for your benefit, not someone else’s.

How to become an entrepreneur in 10 steps

So, how exactly does one become an entrepreneur in today’s market? Here are ten simple steps to follow.

1. Assess your situation

We’ve mentioned the importance of your circumstances as an entrepreneur already, and this is critical to at least assess because it’s going to affect a lot of your decision-making going forward. Are you in a comfortable place financially, and do you have both time and money to play with? Or are you working paycheck to paycheck, with most of your spare time taken up by family or other responsibilities? 

Entrepreneurship will look very different depending on what your situation is—even if you don’t have much in the way of financial security to fall back on or time at your disposal, those are simply the constraints you know you’ll need to work with. This will then factor into what sort of business models you might pick, how involved you want to be, and your decision when it comes to the sort of platform you launch your business on.

2. Find your niche or market opportunity

Some people just have a knack for finding niches or gaps in the market, and ideas come easily to them. These visionaries often make the best entrepreneurs, since they can also see the potential of their ideas and how they might go about the execution of them.

That being said, you don’t need to be the second coming of Steve Jobs to find a business idea worth pursuing. Many entrepreneurs end up solving problems that they themselves face, discovering that there are a lot of people like them forming a decent segment. Look at your hobbies, your interests, and your lifestyle, and imagine what you’d like to have, to consume, to see.

You can take this approach by stepping into another person’s shoes, as well. Doing some customer behavior analysis can show you interesting market segments and niches, and trying to see the world from these people’s eyes might show you market opportunities.

3. Outline your unique solution

Once you’ve identified a gap in the market or a problem that needs solving, it’s time to figure out at least the basics of how you might go about solving it. Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos is an example of an entrepreneur who had a problem she wanted to solve (detailed and accurate test results while drawing a minimal amount of blood) but there was no workable solution. You’ll want to have at least the knowledge that your problem can indeed be solved.

Depending on the nature of your planned entrepreneurial endeavor, you may even be able to do a test run or two at this stage. Not every entrepreneur is in tech or engineering—you might be looking at teaching a course online or starting a community. These are endeavors you can start developing immediately.

4. Plan your path forward

Entrepreneurship isn’t about just winging it, so once you have your basic ideas in place, you can start to plan your approach based on the constraints you identified in step one. The amount of time you can dedicate to your business is going to be a big factor, and you may at this stage realize that your big business idea needs to start life as a side hustle before scaling up over a longer term.

5. Build your business infrastructure

Next, you’ll need to start putting the building blocks of your business in place. If you’re looking at a business that requires a physical location, this can be a pretty big step since you’ll be shopping around for a retail space and hoping to find one in a location that corresponds with your target market.

A business model like dropshipping might mean that you’ll be looking for suppliers, while digital-only businesses are easier—you just need to find the right digital fulfillment solution.

Remember to consider all of the angles, though. Whatever business you’re going to start, you’ll need a payment processor, a web host, a marketing strategy (meaning social media accounts), and much more.

6. Bring in the right partners

Remember the Steves, Jobs and Wozniak? One could argue that Apple wouldn’t be what it is today if just one of the two had embarked upon an entrepreneurial journey alone. Both geniuses in their own right, their skills complemented each other very well—Jobs the visionary, and Wozniak the inventor.

As such, you should very much consider bringing in a partner to do the stuff you’re not as skilled at. Entrepreneurship comprises a lot of different areas, and lacking in one can see your business fall flat—you could identify a great market opportunity and even create a brilliant product, but you’re sunk if you don’t know how to market it or pitch it to investors. 

7. Establish your brand identity

Branding is a big conversation, but a lot of entrepreneurs find out that it’s actually quite difficult to pivot in a branding sense once they’re in the midst of scaling. Sure, company names and logos often change along the way, but the identity that goes along with the business, the why and how they do things—that’s harder to change. Consistency becomes extremely important, especially in digital businesses or ecommerce. 

8. Get networking

Entrepreneurs and pitching, angels and VCs, even shows like Shark Tank—it’s hard to separate entrepreneurship from networking, and for good reason. Networking opens up opportunities when it comes to doing business, making partnerships, and even mentoring on top of the obvious possibility of funding. The power of connections can’t be understated, and networking can help you meet the right people and have the right conversations for your business.

9. Figure out your finances

We just mentioned that funding can come as a result of networking, and finances are a huge consideration now as your entrepreneurial career takes off. Some businesses can pay for themselves quite quickly, but traditional business models can take a while to start paying off—which is where seed funding and investors come in.

Especially for a more ambitious business model or one that requires significant investment before operations can commence (for example, starting a small factory), you’ll need to secure enough funding to see you through until your business becomes self-sustaining.

10. Scale up

As your business starts to bring in revenue, it’s important to stay right on top of things. Keep an eye on your analytics, figure out where your cash flows are going, and remember to breathe—as your business takes off, it’s easy to fall into the trap of working more and more and quickly being overwhelmed by the multifaceted demands of leading a growing company.

The truth is, however, that there are plenty of ways to optimize your workload. Investigate the different SaaS options on the market to see what elements of your business or product you can automate, and think about which business functions you can delegate. Is it worth bringing in a full-time or part-time employee or hiring a freelancer to take over certain tasks?

You’ll also want to consider investors even at this stage. A cash injection from investors or companies who consider your business promising can be a windfall in both a business and personal sense—selling a share of your company can set you up for life if you do it well while also allowing you to retain a majority and stay in control, working without financial stress. It can also give your business the funds it needs to take production, output, or content to the next level.

Benefits of digital business models for entrepreneurship

We’ve already mentioned that would-be entrepreneurs are often told that they need to be resilient and prepared to fail, and sometimes they have to fail fast and fail often before finally being able to crack the code. There are consequences to this that you may need to consider. Your lifestyle and perhaps that of your family is on the line, at least the ability to keep food on the table and a roof over your head.

As such, choosing a digital business means you can fail with much less liability than with, say, a retail business. Since you don’t need that much capital for a digital business model, you’re not losing lots of your own money or that of investors (or worse, friends or family) who then wouldn’t give you a second chance.

You can start a digital business quickly and, in many cases, the only thing you’ll lose when you fail is time and effort—and as valuable as these commodities are in the grand scheme of things, the learning experience will go far and nobody’s at any real risk.

Besides that, a digital business requires very few moving parts—generally no location needs to be rented, no stock needs to be bought, and no supplier needs to be lined up. At the most, you’ll need to link up with people who might have the skills that you don’t, such as graphic artists or video editors, but they could be freelancers to start.

Digital products are infinitely replicable, and all you really need to do is protect your creations from unauthorized duplication and distribution. Beyond that, it’s all about setting up a great online store, figuring out customer service, and marketing your product to your ideal customers.

Become an entrepreneur with Whop

If you do decide that digital entrepreneurship is for you, make sure you check out Whop. An all-in-one platform for the modern entrepreneur, Whop can get your new business set up in mere minutes.

Providing you with all of the supporting services you need—from payment processing and serving as your Merchant of Record to digital fulfillment and even customer service—Whop does it all for business owners like you.

And it's not just ecommerce features. Whop has apps that you can add to your whop to build a unique product offering, including private community access, forums, and direct website embedding.

So, whether you're slinging financial courses or building a health and fitness community, you can use Whop's apps to create your own entrepreneurial corner of the internet.

Alternatively, if you’d like to first learn more about entrepreneurship or get stuck into physical ecommerce business models like dropshipping, retail arbitrage, or even real estate, consider giving Whop’s marketplace a look.

There are experts in each niche to learn from as well as other entrepreneurs just like you, and there’s every chance that the Wozniak to your Jobs is already there waiting to be found.