‘Million Dollar Weekend’

1. ‘How to Launch a Million Dollar Business in a Weekend
2. Getting Started:
3. Advice to Consider as You Get Started:
4. Ideas & Resources for Improving Your Sales Skills/Starting a Business:
5. Practices for Optimizing Your Business:
6. Negotiating:
7. General Bites of Wisdom:

‘How to Launch a Million Dollar Business in a Weekend

As an entrepreneur who loves building and creating, I thought it necessary to share a condensed version of the incredible interview Tim Ferriss did with Noah Kagan at the end of last year. It is jam packed with juicy insight & ideation for someone who’s hungry and looking to create something for themselves. The world needs more entrepreneurs. I hope this can create a spark for taking action!

Getting Started:

1. IDEA GENERATION—what’s on your to do list that you keep putting off or are avoiding? Is there a potential business there?
2. IDEA GENERATION—go through your days/weeks start to finish—is there friction or opportunity anywhere to remove a pain point?
3. ASK YOURSELF + CHOOSING A DIRECTION:
   • What do I find easy that others find difficult or what are problems you like?
   • What am I uniquely suited to do? (this might just mean it’s something you love doing and you have infinity endurance doing it, which is a HUGE competitive advantage)
   • Do something within your zone of influence & expertise—what groups of influence do you have?
4. THREE W’s:
   • What is the problem you’re solving for?
   • Who’s it for?
   • Where are they?
5. “NOW NOT HOW”: Do the smallest possible thing to get started, don’t hide behind grandiose ideas that block you from taking action (aka excuses)
6. MODELING: Build a very simple model—potential revenue minus expenses = profit:
   • How many sales do I need to make to earn a $1MM?
   • Use trends.google.com to identify the size of the market and how many people do this activity or have this problem and how much money they spend on it
7. TESTING THE MARKET: you can create a sample product that doesn’t actually exist and test on existing marketplaces like facebook, amazon, etsy, ebay, etc. and even do an ad to see if gains any traction
8. PRESELLING
   • Create a visual for your offering
   • Create your “dream 10 list” of people to call and test your idea
   • Ask for feedback
   • Have a clear ask after you introduce the business idea: “Will you make a deposit of $100 (refundable/non-refundable) right now for _________ (product, service, idea, etc.) in the future?”
   • A promise of a deposit or anything less than a deposit on the spot is the same as a NO and that’s good feedback
   • Get people to tell the truth with their wallet
   • This is a great test to determine if this business is actually something you want to do because you will be able to tell if you have the endurance to keep working through the rejections  
9. FEEDBACK & REJECTION MINDSET: “I just want to learn. Can you please share with me why you said no so I can learn and improve?”

Advice to Consider as You Get Started:

1. A gentle touch > assumptive aggressive touch
2. Don’t rush—if you’re rushing, you’re entrenched in a scarcity mindset and this is a queue to STOP because you’re doing something that a lot of other people are or could do; try to remember that the number of fat pitches over the plate are endless (seek the category of 1)
3. The best creativity often comes with constraints
4. SCALING: don’t worry about scaling until you have a proven model with consistent revenue and don’t get distracted by the monkey mind, keep it as simple as possible (early mantra at AirBnB—“do things that don’t scale” (ie: direct contact with every customer to ensure a wow experience))

Ideas & Resources for Improving Your Sales Skills/Starting a Business:

1. Compliment Challenge—every time you see someone wearing/using something you like, tell them, ask them where they got it and strike up a conversation
2. READ: The Ultimate Sales Machine
3. READ: 1,000 True Fans by Kevin Kelly
4. READ: Blue Ocean Strategy
5. READ: The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing (Chapter 2: The Law of Category)

Practices for Optimizing Your Business:

1. Create a #1 goal and track it every day (ie: revenues, client satisfaction, new clients, new sales, etc.)
   • Determine the 3 Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) that will lead to the completion of the goal
   • Post them company-wide every day, week or month
   • Software for tracking: zapier, snowflake, or a self-managed google sheet (Generally try to avoid google for privacy & big tech dependency reasons)  
2. Weekly Check-in (for yourself and team members)
   • How was my week & why (1-10)?
   • How consistent was I (1-10)?
   • What are my top 3 objectives for the next week & does my calendar reflect those?
3. Experimentation
   • Run 1-4 week experiments to test your idea and learn about the market
   • Provides feedback on what works & what doesn’t
   • Allows a softening of receiving rejection because the sole purpose of the experiment is to seek information and better understand what direction to take your business
4. Think “teammates” > “employees”
   • Use contractors where possible and outsource as much of the low-level work as you can

Negotiating:

1. Don’t guilt people into doing things
2. Get off the emotions and onto the results
3. Seek solutions where everyone can get at least a good chunk of what they want
4. Stay positive through the discussions, even as the intensity rises
5. Make sure you have a clear understanding of what the value and comps are that you’re negotiating around
6. Silence is your best friend—give your offer and shut up

General Bites of Wisdom:

1. Life punishes the vague wish & rewards the specific ask
2. Always ask for a discount (I have done this 2x in the last 10 days and both times got a pretty significant discount, saved over $500 for taking 30 seconds to simply ask)
3. There’s no limit on effort, there’s only a limit on time
4. Most billionaires got rich from just doing one thing and the majority are all experts in SALES
5. The heart & soul of entrepreneurship is making something from nothing and seeing how resourceful you can be
6. Nostalgia is a liar
7. What game are you playing? What does winning look like? Are you sure this is a game you want to win?
8. What is old that is being neglected and might become new again?
9. Take time to look back and celebrate your wins…learn to look forward to looking back
10. “Free Work”—Create value for nothing in return and then make an ask after you’ve creating meaningful & measurable value; this can often be the first step in the door for an opportunity where there was otherwise no way in