The Jasmine Star Show

Start Messy. Forget Perfection. Make Money.

• Jasmine Star

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If you’ve ever found yourself saying, “I’ll start when I have more time/money/clarity/confidence…” this episode is your permission slip to quit waiting and just start already. 🙌

While traveling with Amy Porterfield, I had a powerful conversation in the TSA line with a woman named Diana—an aspiring founder who had an amazing idea but hadn’t taken the first step. She was asking about investors and funding, and before she could finish her sentence, I interrupted her with one phrase that changed everything: "You invest in your business before anyone else will."

Y’all, this isn’t just for Diana. It’s for YOU.

Whether you’re 30 or 60, whether your idea is for a beauty brand, a coaching business, or a side hustle that lights you up—you don’t need perfection. You need proof of concept.

In this solo episode, I’m breaking down:

  • Why the “perfect time” is a myth
  • How to build trust in yourself when starting feels overwhelming
  • What proof of concept actually looks like
  • The difference between dreaming and doing

So if you’ve been thinking about starting something new, or you’re stuck in analysis paralysis, grab your headphones and let’s talk about the power of messy, scrappy, life-changing beginnings.

💥 Your idea matters. The market needs what you have. And it all starts… now.

Click play to hear all of this and:

[00:00] Why waiting for the “perfect time” is killing your dream
[00:56] The moment I met Diana in the TSA line and how she sparked this episode [02:57] Diana’s idea and what she asked me about funding (and what I told her instead)
[03:58] The ONE piece of advice I give to every dreamer: Just start
[04:51] How starting creates clarity—and what most people get wrong about this process
[06:00] The true meaning of “proof of concept” (and how YOU can prove yours) [07:30] What YOU need to do before anyone else will invest in your dream

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For full show notes, visit jasminestar.com/podcast/episode586

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If you’re ready to build a website that works FOR you—and not against you—head to JasmineStar.com/showit for a 14-day free trial + first month free when you subscribe!

Jasmine Star 00:00:00  You're going to start in your 60s or your 30s. You're going to start in October or May. You're going to start on a Tuesday, or you're going to start on a Friday. You're going to start scrappy. You're going to start messy. You're just going to start. This is for you. If you want to start a business, this is also for you. If you find yourself watching videos or listening to podcasts about starting a business, and this episode is for you if you want to get out of your own dang way. Welcome to the Jasmine Star show! My name is Jasmine Star and I am power business owners to scale from 7 to 8 figures. But today we're taking out a little bit of a brief place to talk about people wanting to start. Now, here's the beautiful thing. There's multitudes of starts in your life and your professional career. Every time I want to start something new, every time I've pivoted, I end up back at the same point. So the thing that I'm going to be talking about today is not just starting a business for the first time, although that's where most of the focus is going to be.

Jasmine Star 00:00:56  It's to really focus on starting. Oh, the lovely place of starting. It is beautiful and it is also agonizing. So many of us have this inner voice, this knowing that there is an entrepreneur inside of us. If you've made it to this point on The Jasmine Star Show, that voice is ever prevalent on the inside of you. So we're going to call a spade a spade. You are either an entrepreneur or you have aspirations of becoming an entrepreneur. So let's take a little bit of a side step. A few months ago, I was in Arizona. I was meeting with a group of eight figure founders, and Amy Porterfield and I were traveling from Phoenix, Arizona to Newport Beach. She was going to be speaking at my mastermind. And so very typical of our relationship. I was walking through the airport. I'm talking trash. She gets holed up at like at TSA. And so I get over to where we put down our luggage to go through the conveyor belt for our screening. And there is a woman standing in front of me, and I'm kind of like hollerin back at Amy talking trash because, like, TSA just loves giving her a hard time.

Jasmine Star 00:02:00  And the woman in front of me turns and looks, and then she sees Amy drop her suitcase right behind my suitcase. And she said, I listen to your podcast. And I said, oh, that's that's incredible. That's amazing. And she looks at Amy. She's like, I listen to both of your podcasts. And as we're going through TSA, we start chatting. And here's the part that Amy's going to hate me sharing is that Amy's luggage got pulled out of T, who say she had to go through an extra screening. So she walks away and I'm talking with this wonderful woman by the name of Diana, and she tells me that she listens to business podcasts, and she watches business videos. And she's been listening to my podcast for a while, and she has the desire to start a business, but she hasn't yet started. So we had this conversation around how she was really inspired by Latina founders, one of the reasons why she likes listening to my podcast, and she also mentioned two other Latina founders who she found inspiring, both of whom I know.

Jasmine Star 00:02:57  She had mentioned Julissa Prado of Resource Girls, and she also mentioned Sandra Velasquez of No Barletta, no Napoleon. If you're not familiar, it is an upscale Mexican beauty brand. I met Julissa as part of Inc. magazine's Small Business Challenge. Julissa was brought on as mentor and I was brought on a mentor, and I have done three years of the Small business challenge alongside Julissa, so we're very familiar. I am familiar with her business, so Rizzo's curls is sold at all, like major hair and beauty outlets also sold in target. And this is hair care for women with curly hair. And she realized that as a woman of Latina descent, she had a very specific type of hair texture that the other, you know, curl activators weren't actually addressing. So she created her own product, and it ended up getting featured nationwide and carried nationwide. Now Diana has a cool idea for the beauty space. I'm not going to get into the details of it because it's hers, and I love it. And I actually believe the market needs what it is you want to sell.

Jasmine Star 00:03:58  And I was like, I love this idea. This is incredible. And then she told me, you know, should I get funding? Should I secure funding, should I go for venture capital, should I get investors? And my first response was, okay, you're not going to finish your sentence. I'm sentence? I'm just going to jump in. I'm going to tell you a couple of things, and I want to take a moment and say that this advice just isn't for Diana, it's for you. It's for me. And that advice has always been just start. Start in October or May. Start in your 30s or your 60s. Start on a Tuesday. Start scrappy. Start today. Just start. We get so caught up in like the logistics and the details of how big this is going to be, that when we realize the vision of what we want and we compare it to where we are today, and then we notice the chasm on the in between and we're like, I don't know how I'm going to cross that chasm to get to where I want to go.

Jasmine Star 00:04:51  We get caught up when all I'm simply saying is like when you start, it leads to the next step. And once you get from step one to step two, you will understand how to get to step three. And then you're going to learn how to get to step four. But if you're wondering how you're going to get from step 1 to 212, you're going to feel very overwhelmed. Which is why I looked at Diana there at Phoenix Airport and I said, oh, just start. Diana, get a proof of concept. Before anybody is going to invest in your business. You need to invest in your business. And it's not just with money. It could just be with time knowledge, market understanding. So I want you to prove your concept. I want you to prove your market. I want you to prove demand. I want you to make money. That is what I want you to do. Because if you can get money and you could prove that you can make money because you understand your market and you have proof of concept, then game over.

Jasmine Star 00:05:43  Then we get to have different conversations. But you need to earn the right to have those conversations by proving that there is a demand for the thing that you want to sell. And how is that proven money? It's just money in if in the fact she decides to get venture capital, if in the future she decides to get investors, the best way to get terms that are favorable to a founder is to find a way that you can make your own money, prove that you've made that money. Then you come to the table with bargaining chips. So we look and Diana was looking at brands like Reese's Curls and Paoletta and thinking, okay, well, if my brand isn't in Nordstrom, if it isn't in Sephora or Ulta, well then it can't compete. And I'm like, no, quite the opposite. I have been very fortunate to sit across from Julissa and understand her backstory. I actually met Sandra Velazquez as part of the El Ben program, Latino Business Action Network. We enrolled in Stanford University, and this is for a program for Latino founders who are scaling.

Jasmine Star 00:06:41  So I met Sandra in my cohort. I can't say enough good things about Alban. If you are a Latino founder and you have a business that's doing over $1 million, please apply to this program. It's worth its weight in gold. So Sandra and I met, and I got to learn a lot about her backstory, and I got to learn a lot about Julia's backstory. And Julissa started resource girls in her family's home. She was actually getting her cousins to do the packaging for her products before she ever got featured in Nordstrom or any of these biggest retailers, she was doing it with her cousins, doing the packaging at her parent's home. When I talked to Sandra and I started understanding, she started Know Barletta during the pandemic and for people who are unfamiliar, know Barletta is a prickly pear. It's like a cactus. And the backstory of her creating her products was she wanted to create soap that with aloe vera, and she didn't have any aloe vera. And so she was at her mom's house in San Diego, and they had a cactus plant in the front of the house.

Jasmine Star 00:07:46  And she said it had that like, gel like quality. And so she started experimenting with what that ended up being. And there's a lot of medicinal properties, like Mexicans use cactus in a lot of varieties, specifically in like homemade remedies. So she thought to herself, how could I get this cactus? And how could I elevate it to create a luxury Mexican brand? And she was creating soaps. And when she started her business, she was $110,000 in debt. This is during a pandemic. She had lost her job. She was living in New York. She was in her 40s. She's a single mom, came out to the West Coast to be with her family, and she believed that she could create a premium Latina brand, and she did it on the back of payment plans for designers to create her branding. She did it on the back of working out of their homemade kitchen until they grew out, and then got a studio space. She has now scaled multi seven figure business and both of these women didn't start with venture capital.

Jasmine Star 00:08:45  Most of these women didn't start with investors. These women bootstrapped their business. They figured out that they could serve a very specific market in a very specific way. And they did it from their kitchen tables. They just started. And that's the thing I want people to think about is don't worry about step 200 when you're just trying to get to step number two, the next step reveals itself the minute you have the courage to take the next step. So they were completely bootstrapped and they decided I'm simply going to start. And that's the whole point of this entire Shorty episode. So do you have a product idea? Great. Sell it on Shopify. Make content. Get sales. Do you have a digital product or service? Amazing. Create your online storefront. Make content. Get sales. It's simple. It's not easy. And that's where people get stuck. It is simple. It is not easy. So let me cast a vision of your future. You will face challenges. You will feel frustrated, embarrassed and angry.

Jasmine Star 00:09:51  Oftentimes all on the same day. You will feel alone. You will feel misunderstood. You will feel like you are standing in the Parthenon with people staring at you, and you don't know the next best move. But you won't stop. You are going to face those challenges. You are going to figure out the next step while people watch, and you are going to push on because everything in you knows that that is what you're supposed to do. And if you don't do what you know you're supposed to do. You will realize you are living too small of a life, and you don't want to look back at someday in the future, at where you were today, and say you didn't take every opportunity to pursue the thing that you had wanted. So if you want me to tell you how to start a business, I am simply going to tell you to stop talking and start doing. Just start. Start in October or May. Start in your 30s or your 60s. Start on a Tuesday. Start scrappy.

Jasmine Star 00:11:00  Start messy. Start today. Just start. And I'm going to repeat the thing that I had said before. If you have a product great listed on Shopify, make content and get sales. If you have a digital. I'll stop there because you're like, I don't know how to do that. Great. So you're going to go to this tiny, little obscure website called YouTube and you're going to type in. How do I create my first listing on Shopify? Guess what? You're going to find hundreds, if not thousands of videos on how you're going to do that. So you're going to start at your proverbial kitchen table and you're going to create a listing and you are going to post it, and then you're going to make content, because if you are not talking about your business aspirations, nobody else will. Nobody knows your great product exists except for you. And what does content do? It makes you uncomfortable. It makes you feel embarrassed. It makes you feel angry, oftentimes all in the same day.

Jasmine Star 00:11:55  And then you feel like you're speaking into the void. Guess what? You're going to have to speak into the void until one person listens and buys. That's the game, friends. If you don't want to play the terms to that game, put the ball down. Ooh, did I come out sideways? I'm really just saying it with love. Let me just save you some time. I'm going to cast a vision. Your future. Are you going to count the cost? You count the cost. Let's go. If you would like to build a digital business. Digital products based on services. Find your online storefront, make content and get sales. Now, if you're not quite sure how to do that, well, send me a DM. Let's have a conversation. Let's figure out what it is you want to build. I will send you options of how we can work deeper. I can send you free resources. I could point you to other YouTube videos. I have hundreds and hundreds of podcasts talking about how to put together and offer, how to create content, and how to create sales.

Jasmine Star 00:12:42  I'd love to hear from you. I don't want you living a small life. I don't want you getting and staying at step one. How you're getting to step 200. When all I'm asking you to do is to get to step two. That is how you get started. So you are going to just start. You're going to start in your 60s or your 30s. You're going to start in October or May. You're going to start on a Tuesday, or you're going to start on a Friday. You're going to start scrappy, you're going to start messy. You're just going to start. That is what today is all about. If you are looking forward to getting started, send this to a friend or send me a DM. I just want to root you on. And this was me just showing up, reminding you that getting started is the hardest part, and it is also the most rewarding. When you could look back and say, I left everything out on the field. Thank you for watching and listening to The Jasmine Starship.