[Music] word Echo presents the million dooll weekend welcome to word Echo where dreams meet action in the million-dollar weekend Noah Kagan reveals how to create a seven figure business in just 48 Hours get ready to turn your vision into reality hit subscribe and let's get started dedicated to everyone willing to take a chance on themselves contents frequently made excuses start here part one start it ReDiscover your Creator's courage one just Start begin before you are ready two the unlimited upside of asking get a gold medal in rejection part two build it launch your business with the million-dollar weekend process three finding million dooll ideas simple exercises to generate profitable business ideas four the one minute business model shape your idea into a million doll opportunity five the 48h hour money challenge validate your business by getting paid part three grow it make money while you sleep six social media is for growth build an audience who will support you for life seven email is for profit use email to make a fank ton of money eight the growth machine my battle tested growth Playbook nine 52 chances this year use systems and routines to design the business and life you want start again acknowledgements notes frequently made excuses welcome to a book that will help you start a million our business in a weekend we tend to think that we are never ready but you are the fact is Ordinary People start profitable businesses every single day you don't have to be rich brilliant or super experienced but you do have excuses that have held you back in the past never again here are the 10 most common and the exact chapters where we demolish them one I don't have any good ideas but you do have problems and so do your friends and every other person in this world that's all you need to generate million dooll business ideas after you learn the customer first approach in chapter 3 you'll have more business ideas than you'll know what to do with two I have too many ideas choose the three you think will be the most fun to work with in chapter 4 you'll learn how to use market research and a one minute business model to determine which of your three ideas has the most potential three starting a business is risky I'm nervous about quitting my job risky is spending your life at a job you hate with people you don't like working on problems you don't care about don't quit your day job Leverage The Million dooll weekend process chapter 5 in the early mornings evenings and weekends once you validated an idea and you're pulling in enough to cover your minimum monthly expenses aka the freedom number then you can quit I've done that twice four I've started a few different businesses they do okay and then I lose interest D any one of those businesses could have been what you wanted not starting and not finishing both come from a similar set of fears covered in chapter 1 you will also learn the law of 100 to help you push past resistance when you feel like quitting five but how will it scale this phrase stops you from getting your first customer keep it simple and easy for yourself don't think about scaling focus on starting then we'll discuss scaling your business in the chapters in part three grow it six I don't have enough time to create a business look for the processes you can automate or document parts of the business so you can hire someone to help my productivity system chapter 9 allows me to run an 8figure business a YouTube channel and a Blog while working out daily traveling and so on if it's a priority we can make the time seven I need to read more books do more research and be totally prepared before I can really start you will never feel 100% ready to start you just need to start don't buy another book or watch another video until you've worked through this process and started your million-dollar business I got you action Time chapter 1 8 I'm broke as at sha I've spent so much money and have made 0 in profit don't spend another dime until you've made your first dollar the million dooll weekend process chapter 5 requires no upfront spending nine I'm not good at marketing marketing is easy when you have a product people want chapter 3 shows you stepbystep how to find ideas people are excited to give you money for then chapters 6 7 and 8 give you the same marketing methods that I use to help mint reach 1 million users in 6 months and tidy cal.com to reach 10,000 paying customers in 6 months 10 I need a technical co-founder to implement AI VR AR the latest technology no you need to make money first your customers don't want more software they just want Solutions chapter 3 focus on that there are affordable ways of validating a Biz without any code start here after starting $8 million businesses myself kickflip Gambit King Sumo senf Fox Sumo tidy call monthly 1K app Sumo I wanted to prove I could teach others to do the same in trying to share the process I realized that it cons consists of just a few core steps I call these three steps the million dooll weekend process one find a problem people are having that you can solve two craft an irresistible solution whose million dooll plus potential is backed by simple market research three spend no money to quickly validate whether your idea is the real deal or Not by pre-selling it before you build it I knew I was on to something because early on everyone who followed the process eventually launched a profit a side hustle or business people like Michael Osborne who used the three steps to turn his interest in real estate into an $83,000 a month Consulting business or Jennifer Jones who launched a $20,000 a year sidehustle cookie business chocolate chip for me or Daniel renberger who turned working at the Apple Store into a $250,000 a year business tutoring people in how to use technology the problem was for every Michael Jennifer and Daniel there were a thousand wantrepreneurs in my social media feeds who could never get started it was a big mystery to me if all the information you need to start a business is freely available if the million dooll weekend process works if you just commit to it why is it so hard to do for so many people in 2013 I set out to solve that mystery and launched a course called how to make a $1,000 a month business I started with a group of five beta testers a programmer a horse trainer and three people with ordinary day jobs all of whom had everything they needed to start their own business 2 weeks after we started I was shocked to discover the entire group practically made zero progress to understand what had happened I got everyone in a room together and did some entrepreneurial group therapy breaking down what was holding them back it turns out it wasn't a lack of skill desire or intelligence the whole group was derailed by the same two fears one fear of starting at some point people are told entrepreneurship is a huge risk and you believed it you figured more preparation more planning and more talking to friends would help you overcome your insecurities but that inaction only breeds more doubt and fear in actuality the best way to learn what we need to know and become who we want to be is by just getting started small experiments repeated over time are the recipe for transformation in business and life two fear of asking soon after starting the fear of rejection emerges you have some impressive skills an amazing product every advantage in the world and you'll never sell a thing if you can't face another person and ask for what you want whether you want them to buy what you're selling or help in another way you have to be able to ask in order to get once you reframe rejection as something desirable the the act of asking becomes a power all its own I helped that early group and thousands since then to overcome these blocks and if you stick with me through this book I will help you overcome these fears and start your million-dollar business from now on everything you do in this book and after should be viewed as an experiment this has been a profound shift for people who worry that starting a business is this big daunting thing experiments are opposed to fail and should they fail you just take what you've learned and try again a little bit differently take me and any of the super successful entrepreneurs and side hustle Champions I've met over the years it's uncanny but the one commonality nearly all of us share is the crazy number of seemingly random things we've tried to launch stretching back to our childhoods online courses self-published books Consulting airbnbs affiliate marketing YouTube channels a college dating site and many more and for all of us almost all of these projects failed so what's the connection between all these random failures and the success we ultimately achieved it's clearly not our expertise no it's because of our willingness to run small experiments that we eventually succeeded is a byproduct of the fact that we just try more things period That's What I Call creators courage I believe everyone is born with this courage and for those who have lost it this book will help you ReDiscover the ability to come up with ideas starting and have the courage to try them out asking looking back on the early years of your life it's easy to think of scary things that became not so scary as soon as you tried them remember the first time you tried to ride a bike hold your breath underwater climb a tree walk the messiness of such trial and error may seem uncomfortable now but the days when we weren't afraid to LEAP into the mud and dirty up our hands were when we learned the fastest and had the most fun leaping is all that matters the most courageous creators just leap more in spite of their fear and successful creation eventually follows if you trace back every big company to its beginning it all started with a leap into the unknown and a tiny little experiment Apple started as two guys who tried to build a computer that you can carry Facebook started as a weekend project similar to Hot or Not for college students Tesla started as a prototype of an electric car to convince car companies to go electric Google started off as a research project Airbnb started off in a weekend as a place to crash in someone's living room during conferences Con Academy started off as a set of 10-minute videos Salon created for his cousin's app Sumo started as a way to get a deal on software I liked most people never pick up the phone most people never ask and that's what separates sometimes the people that do things from the people just dream about them you got to act and you got to be willing to fail Steve Jobs business is just a never-ending cycle of starting and trying new things asking whether people will pay for those things and then trying it again based on what you've learned if you're afraid to start or ask you can't experiment and if you can't experiment you can't do business this isn't about willpower or self-discipline no one is going to nag scold or intimidate you into starting a business my personal favorite way to approach starting a business is to have fun people do all kinds of scary things in the name of fun entrepreneurship is no exception make it fun and you'll overcome the fear so let's have some fun business is an amazing opportunity to learn about yourself play with ideas solve your own problems help other people and get paid all the while approaching it this way will free fre up your imagination make you less judgy and critical of yourself and allow you to open yourself up to the kind of playful experimentation I want you to practice this will be the most fun most productive weekend you've had in years why just a weekend no time to chicken out I found from thousands of students that limiting time to a weekend which everyone has forces you to become inventive focuses your attention only on the things that matter and shows you how much more can do with limitations you have only 48 hours each chapter contains tried and tested challenges I've developed to get entrepreneurs out of their comfort zones and into the end zone as You Follow My instructions tackle these challenges and overcome your fears you'll also be growing your million dooll business step by step here's how your million-dollar weekend journey is structured part one start it you'll work your way through part one in the three to 4 days leading up to the weekend these chapters will rekindle your Creator's courage preparing you to hit the ground running at the weekend in chapter 1 I'll show you how to apply the now not how mindset that's critical to experimentation and then calculate your freedom number so it's clear what you are working toward in Chapter 2 you'll learn about rejection goals to help develop your ask muscle you'll do the life-changing coffee challenge that will show how Fearless you are and practice the skill of asking that will Empower you to build a million-dollar business part two build it this is it your million-dollar weekend here I'll walk you step by step through the million-dollar weekend process where you will Design verify and launch your MDW business in chapters 3 4 and 5 AKA Friday Saturday and Sunday you'll go from 0er to $1 and land your first three customers to get there you will learn techniques to generate profitable business ideas determine which ideas have million dooll opportunities and then take the 48-hour challenge to get your first paying customers I want you to work fast and stay laser focused on going from idea to First customer can't get any real customers to give you money awesome we'll celebrate your Victorious failure that cost little time and no money and look to quickly validate your next idea remember a weekend is all you need part three grow it what gets you to your first $1 will get you to your first $1,000 it's the leap to $100,000 and then to $1 million that requires you to create a growth machine the most powerful growth tool today for solopreneurs is a system of content creation audience building and email marketing we'll set up this system in chapters 6 and seven at the heart of each chapter is a challenge that delivers a concrete asset for your business in chapter 8 that asset is the experiment-based marketing approach that helped me grow mint.com from zero to 1 million users in just 6 months it worked so well for mint I now use experiment-based marketing for every new product service or company I launch chapter 9 shifts the attention from the business back to your own personal development now that you're an entrepreneur you're responsible for your productivity your training your growth and your time you'll need a different approach and different system to organize your days one that optimizes for your overall happiness above all else or why do any of it right this the final chapter is about building not just a business but a life that you'll love challenge million dooll weekend contract those people who found success from this material do one thing they commit to the process and they follow it exactly I want you to be successful and create a contract promising yourself to to do the steps listed out in the book this is your time to create your dream life this contract will get you excited for the future and provide the necessary motivation in times of need contract with yourself I your name commit to working toward my dream having fun throughout the experience facing my fears and following every challenge in this book my dream outcome after reading million dooll weekend is signature date free MDW Journal Scripts templat and more if you want your very own journal to document your million-dollar weekend go to million dooll weekend.com and download the journal template one scribble in these notes could potentially be your million dooll business the most successful students use their journals to write down their progress to stay focused and absorb the ideas I also included templates scripts and video tutorials of everything in this book you can also scan the QR code if you don't like typing it's absolutely free enjoy part one start it ReDiscover your Creator's courage there are two mistakes one can make along the road to truth not going all the way and not starting Buddha chapter 1 just things start begin before you are ready Noah today's your last day that June day in 2006 was just like any other I woke up at the Facebook house where I lived with the other guys who worked in Mark Zuckerberg's dream world that morning we all drove to the Facebook offices in paloalto I sat down and began playing around with some modifications to a new feature I had helped invent called status updates suddenly the guy who'd hired me who's now worth 500 plus million said hey let's go to the coffee shop across the street to talk about work it had been 9 months 8 days and about 2 hours since I was hired as Facebook's 30th employee I was just 24 years old and here I was among the smartest collection of people I'd ever been around led by a Manchild who seemed even then like he was the smartest of them all Ivy leakers big brains coders and entrepreneurial savants all of us doing what we believe to be the most important impactful work in the world I got .1% of Facebook in stock which in 2022 would have been worth about $1 billion it was Heaven life moves fast in a matter of seconds I went from living my best life ever to a Feeling of deep shame and embarrassment Matt kler early Facebook LinkedIn and a general partner at Benchmark called me a liability a word I've heard echoing in my nightmares ever since most notable while I was partying with colleagues at Coachella I leaked Facebook's plans to expand Beyond college students to a prominent tech journalist I was self-promoting using my role and experiences at Facebook to throw startup Gatherings at the office and write blog posts on my personal website S as the company Grew From baby to Behemoth The talents that allowed me to thrive and start up chaos became well liabilities in the structure of a corporation is there anything I can do to stay anything at all I pleaded Matt just shook his head in 20 minutes it was done I spent the next 8 months wallowing in grief on a friend's couch dissecting every bit of what had happened it was a defining moment a before and after part of me had had expected something like this from the moment I'd been hired at Facebook surrounded by these super nerds always talking about changing the world it made me insecure about who I was and what I had to offer I was not a member of the same Club those guys came from a bitter fact died swallowed years earlier in high school I was born and raised in California grew up in San Jose my father was an immigrant from Israel and didn't speak English at least not well he sold copers and I knew I didn't want to do that lugging around a copier is heavy sweaty hard work my mom worked the night shift at the hospital as a nurse and she hated it I didn't want to do that either it was pure luck that I ended up going to Linbrook High one of the top 100 high schools in the United States I was an average kid in a competitive Bay Area School full of the Sons and Daughters of America's Tech Elite my best friend Marty would go on to work as a senior developer at Google another of my best friends Boris was number 20 at LIF other guys sold companies to Zinga for Millions being around these people in school opened my eyes and elevated me but it didn't make me one of them to get into Berkeley I had to sneak in the side door I got into Berkeley spring semester doofus class they called it extension solely because another freshman dropped out and their spot opened up worse during my freshman year I a native born American was placed in ESL English as a second language because I tested so poorly in English on the SAT honestly I don't know how Berkeley let me in the early years of my career were filled with almost successes I got an internship with Microsoft my junior year normally anyone who gets an internship with Microsoft gets a job I was rejected because I performed poorly on interviews then I had a job offer at Google preo Google rescinded my offer because I couldn't do long division long division and then of course Mark Zuckerberg fired me at that point in my life I felt like I was not worthy of success I was not good enough it felt like I'd already lost the game and that everyone around me was better than me I still struggle with those feelings at times and yet even then I knew I had something a spark or really the ability to create Sparks but my gift was rough messy a talent that wasn't yet a skill I had this incredible knack for choosing great opportunities but I kept failing on that couch after my Facebook firing I tossed and turned under a blanket of shame I couldn't imagine anything worse happening to me the rest of my life I'd been just 3 months away from being partially vested don't remind me my confidence was shot maybe they were right they said I was worthless incompetent inferior they being the voices in my head though I couldn't have told you this then the best thing that emerged out of that period was a realization I have got to figure out how to do entrepreneurship my own way and share those experiences along the way and so I no longer hid anything I told everyone about my failure years later it even became a calling card the guy who was fired by Facebook and people loved it my fears about what other people thought of me were totally overblown deep down I felt liberated by my failure not liberated to keep getting fired and lose billions of dollars obviously ly but liberated from the fear of doing things my own way liberated to play and experiment to find my own path and as a result it lit a fire under my ass to get going on my own experimenting show me an experimenter and over the long run I'll show you a future winner Shan Puri and so I started again the next few years I tackled every business opportunity no matter how random that came my way daydreaming about some big splashy score that would redeem deem myself worth and more important allow me to show Mark Zuckerberg what a mistake he'd made I was young stupid and Reckless but I was also learning fast to the Montage Music I'd quickly start an online sports betting site realize I hated Sports and then find myself suddenly traveling South America and Southeast Asia for a stretch it was an endless experiment of launching side hustles website ideas and Adventures in lifestyle design I taught student online marketing on juu island in Korea consulted for startups like scanr and speed date set up a startup versus Venture Capital dodgeball tournament series blogged for my site okay dor and launched freecalls to.com to cover the emerging internet phone call industry launched people reminder.com a personal CRM website started entrepreneur2 7.org happy hours and local events like chess meetups created a conference business called Community next that started pulling in 50 ,000 per event doing what I would have done for free bringing together emerging business stars like Keith raboy Max Levin David Sachs and Tim Ferris it was during this time that the variables to the million dooll weekend formula came together and not just for starting a business but for creating a life that felt free and fulfilling thanks to entrepreneurship each day a new experiment a new lesson learned living for The Rush that only possibility can bring until one day a friend showed me a product in development from an unknown company that was then called my mint the founder Aaron patzer had created a tool to help people manage their finances and the Prototype he built blew me away at the time I was blogging on my site okay dork about personal finance and I immediately saw that this could be huge I was so excited about mint that I told Aaron that I wanted to be his director of marketing the only problem was as he pointed out that I hadn't done marketing before so I did what I've always done I just started I hustled and with no experience I created a marketing plan that got 100,000 registered users before the site even launched and 1 million users 6 months later which got me a full-time offer 1% of the company and a $100,000 job marketing is easy when you have a great product mint's product was so good that less than 2 years after it started Inuit bought it for $170 million there was however no $1.7 million Payday for me it was the math that set me packing I had figured that the company would sell for $200 million at most which would cap my 1% share at $2 million pre-tax question was could I make close to that over the four years it would take for the stock to vest could I create more money joy and insight than I could by clocking four years in middle management I bet yeah yes I believed I could because while I was working at mint I was also creating the formula for starting businesses that you're going to learn in this book I spent my mornings lunch breaks nights and weekends creating kickflip a company that developed apps for Facebook which then morphed into Gambit a payment system for social games in less than two years Gambit was generating more than $15 million in Revenue the value plunged later because of another guy who keeps appearing in the story thanks Mark Zuckerberg more on that later my bet had been right using the principles that would evolve into the million-dollar weekend process always staying alert to problems as opportunities always starting experiments to find Solutions and always asking for the sale I was beginning to see that to live well as an entrepreneur I just needed to stop thinking so much and go get busy that meant starting small starting fast and not worrying about what I didn't know I became an expert at taking leaps being unafraid to start new things meant that unlike most people I was constantly conducting experiments in my personal and professional lives in both big and small ways new Industries new hobbies new technologies new roles new people new side hustles that's where I found my superpower which taught me a lesson I want to pass on to you focus above all else on being a starter an experimenter a learner Pro tip don't base your happiness or your self-worth on being the smartest the most successful the richest being so focused on the end result sets you up for a major fall because there's always going to be someone who's smarter more successful or richer and every time you see that you've fallen short it will eat away at your motivation defining Yourself by the things you do each day the process will get you to where you want to be quicker and more joyfully than measuring yourself against others that's the wonderful thing about experimentation every experiment has within it the potential of unforeseen rewards that can change your life but first you've got to start challenge the dollar challenge ask someone you know for a dollar investment in you and your future business one measly dollar this is your spark once you do this you realize the power of starting and the Simplicity of business starting asking iterating I've seen f thousands of lives changed by this simple and Powerful exercise tell them in exchange they'll get regular updates and a front row seat to the process of building a business from scratch warts and all like a member of your personal board of directors sure it's an insignificant amount yet jumping right in and asking for it from family friends colleagues is an oh starting and asking experience that will get your heart racing this is the script I've seen work best hey I'm reading this book million dooll weekend and they told me I need to get $1 from someone you're the first person I thought of and it would mean a lot to have your support can you send me $1 right now oh no I'm on the hook for this you'll think good feel that fear and do it anyway as my guy Ralph Waldo Emerson likes to say do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain every day people in my audience post pictures of their first dollar with pride it's a symbolic game Cher for anyone who's been sitting on the sidelines wishing they had their own business and while you're at it ask me too here's my Veno app at no aagan or PayPal dor.com I may even say yes post and tag me at Noah Kagan the dollar challenge I may repost you people like you who've done the dollar challenge the magic of now not how starting experimenting really that's a superpower if you buy all the hype about Silicon Valley everyone wears Patagonia jackets can code with just one hand and are all Geniuses I didn't get the coding skills or business genius part but I can start a lot of stuff without overthinking it I can eat a crazy number of tacos boy ve it seemed downright unfair for the longest time but as I got older and started to experience some success all sorts of people began seeking me out for advice on this thing I did which never occurred to me as being a thing at all of course they didn't come to to me to ask about starting or at least not knowingly the people who came always talked about their dreams of running a business about hating their job or wanting Freedom or feeling trapped the problem in nearly every instance was the same they hadn't started only now do I understand what a problem that is and how life-changing it can be to get someone to fully Embrace what I call the now not how habit why lifechanging when most people decide they want to start a business business their first intuition is to learn more read a book take a course seek out advice and then take action after having carefully considered all the facts after all there are a ton of top rated MBA programs $10 udemy courses free YouTube videos and Entrepreneurship how-to books so why wouldn't you learn all you could that's got to be a whole lot safer and it probably makes you a lot less likely to fail right wrong overthinking seems like the smart way to Launch but it's far less effective super successful people do the opposite they take action first get real feedback and learn from that which is a million times more valuable than any book or course and quicker most people overthink First Act later every successful entrepreneur ACT first figure it out later any analysis ahead of action is purely speculation you really do not understand something until you've done it rather than trying to plan your way into the confidence to act just start acting so how do you instill this habit if it doesn't come naturally use the motto now not how protip next time you are overthinking and not taking action tell yourself to prioritize taking action now and don't worry about the how after you do this once you quickly get momentum and it becomes easier and more natural every moment of every day I push myself and everyone around me to live up to now not how when I want to achieve something and there's a version I can do in minutes I just do it here's an example recently an ad agency was pitching our appsumo team on a new Facebook advertising campaign my now not how thought was followed by the dreaded promise of an email recap of everything we'd have to get started stuff like passwords adding the agency to our Facebook account new content needed and so on no no let's do all of that right now I said which took 5 minutes saving us 24 hours of waiting I know your in negotiator may be saying that sounds great but my idea needs more time stop power comes when you automatically Implement now not how in everything you do so no more negotiating with yourself you're just a doer say it to yourself now not how challenge now not how challenge ask one person you respect for a business idea this is a quick way to get a business idea you're going to do it for yourself and realize the power of starting now you'll realize by acting in the moment you feel great about yourself and build momentum toward your dream life I'm even going to provide a script to cut off your inner skeptic this won't even take you 2 minutes but it will create your first Spark and your second and third so type this up in email no better yet because it's faster use text and send it to one of your friends now hey I'm trying to come up with some business ideas right now you know me well so I was wondering what kind of business you think I'd be good at don't be afraid to act be afraid of living a life that seems more like a resume than an adventure and I promise starting new things and following your fear makes life seem magical you thought this was just about building a big beautiful business sure it's about that too but it's also about using entrepreneurship as a way to renew and reinvent your life the freedom number will set you free I found a simple mission to hit a monthly Revenue number is the most effective form of early motivation I've never harbored any change the world/ become a mega billionaire dreams no big hairy audacious goals which sounds gross anyway my dreams were of freedom to make that dream come true you first need to choose your freedom number from my 18th birthday until I turned 30 my monthly Freedom number was $3,000 why $3,000 because adding up what I paid for rent the cost of the tacos and steak and wine I like to eat and drink and the plane tickets that would let me work from Argentina or Korea or Thailand alog together that came to a little less than $3,000 a month at the time that's what my living expenses were roughly speaking $11,000 for housing $1,000 for food and travel $1,000 for savings and investment my freedom number $3,000 activities amount housing $11,000 food and travel $1,000 savings and investment $11,000 total $33,000 I calculated I could work from wherever with people I love for a long period of time on $3,000 a month without ever having to do a single thing I didn't want for $3,000 a month I could have my freedom for a long time I kept my number quiet thinking it was an odd silly little trick I played on myself in my 20s to make me feel better about having accomplished so little but the first time I mentioned it some years ago to a successful entrepreneur I was talking with they blurred it out holy no way my number was $1,500 it turns out many of the entrepreneurs I know use the same trick at some point for some it's a smaller number like $100 meaning they've earned extra income for a nice meal and feel a sense of empowerment for others where the cost of Freedom might mean alimony or a mortgage AG the freedom number is higher for all of us remarkably our freedom number distills the story We Tell ourselves of why and how we succeed into a simple clarifying goal why is this tiny trick setting one recurring monthly Revenue figure so effective first it's doable I didn't know it then but my idea of the freedom number hit on the precisely right ingredients for motivating a Serial starter my number was 100% attainable and the value I attached to reaching it Freedom was infinite a relationship that was so motivating to me it always gave me confidence and served as an anchor in times of uncertainty second it's concrete and it's urgent $3,000 is not some kind of doll a doll 20 million in net worth by age 40 dream that you can put off for tomorrow it's a monthly number you can work on today even better it can be super low you could say I want to keep my day job for now but I want to make $500 a month on my own that's just as valid my side hustles were all small numbers but they served as vital practice that trained the spark making muscles that let me eventually leave the job behind finally my goal had a very specific number attached and that focuses your mind on what matters in business which are the things most likely to bring you customers many struggle to make their first dollar because they are so focused on how to make their first million focusing on an attainable freedom number even better just dollar number one will change the way you think what can you do in your business to make money this week today right now you may not need a grand purpose to start though if you have one awesome but it's also true that if you commit to nothing you'll be distracted by everything the freedom number helps us not get lost in abstraction or complexity it reminds us the mechanics of business are simple challenge choosing your freedom number start by choosing a short-term monthly Revenue goal your freedom number and make it a number that doesn't scare you write it down in your journal and here in this book right next to these words my freedom number is this chapter can be summarized in one sentence successful people just start I promise you who you are what you have and what you know right now are more than enough to get going chapter 2 the unlimited upside of asking get gold medal in rejection as my dad and I entered the 10th local shop that afternoon I felt my muscles go tight with a full body cringe he just asked to speak to the manager in an Israeli accent as thick as hummus sounding identical to Arnold Schwarzenegger I don't get it his voice boomed enthusiastically after he was introduced to the store's boss you live in greatest country in world and you have greatest business in sector but you still have a crappy copier why I must help you you here I gave much better let me show his pitch would be met with a rejection and then another rejection countless rejections rinse and repeat every damn day but then invariably inevitably a hard one success this particular day was glorious though absolutely glorious he sold two copers in one day so Dad said let's go celebrate and grab some burritos why You Look so Sad Noah he said as we sat down to eat although I should have been riding on the adrenaline of my dad's glorious day something felt wrong despite his ultimate success the process of getting there felt demoralizing and pointless I shook my head so many NOS no no no no all day doesn't it make you want to quit I asked my dad replied with something that would change my life love rejections collect them like treasure set rejection goals I shoot for 100 rejections each week because if you work that hard to get so many NOS my little Noel in them you will find a few yes is too maybe that's why he named me Noah to remind me of this daily to keep going love rejections set rejection goals my dad reframed rejection as something desirable so you feel good when you get it he was saying aim for Rejection it was suddenly clear to me why my dad was never afraid to ask anyone anything and why he pushed for a hundred rejections a week the upside of asking is unlimited and the downside is minimal and he was right what's the worst that can happen he'd say whenever I cringed at someone turning him down so they said no who cares and the upside of making sales is unlimited asking isn't so scary if it's leading you toward where you want to go The Ultimate Sales hack the one that lets you live your dreams has nothing to do with finding the perfect way to ask the act of asking is a power all its own case in point Kyle McDonald turned a red paper clip into a house with a series of just four 14 asks at that moment when it all clicked I sort of felt like my dad was a genius here was this guy with no MBA no sales training no self-help books no command of the English language an immigrant with nothing but always a large wad of cash in his pocket put him anywhere and give him a week and he'd figure it out how did my dad who would ultimately lose everything to drug addiction do it the secret to my father's Mastery of selling in a language he barely spoke is one word chutzpa it's the yish word for Moxy nerve audacity it's a determined give no Fox approach to life when Israelis say you have chuts Spa they mean you know what you want and go for it they mean you have endless tenacity they mean you'll do what it takes my mom knew this all too well she always told me the squeaky wheel gets the grease and let's just say she taught me how to squeak I mean this is a woman who tried to return her wedding present silverware 30 years later just to see if she could she knew a little something about chutzpa herself that skill having the chut Spa to ask for what you want despite the fear is the entrepreneur's ultimate and most necessary quality the thing is most people don't ask for what they want they wish for it they make suggestions and drop hints they hope but the simple fact of business is that only by asking do you receive what you want no ask no get that applies to every part of life seriously every part having this ability to ask is the reason so many immigrants or children of immigrants fare well in business like my father they aren't worried about the social consequences of doing something they aren't supposed to do because they don't know what they're not supposed to do that means they can be naive and ask for anything which is a business superpower you can't truly understand that power until you use it for yourself something I was lucky enough to experience in the fourth grade just a few months after my father's life-changing advice I came across one of those magazine cataloges that sent kids door Todo selling discounted subscriptions like $8 for a year of Popular Mechanics I saw that the company offered a pizza party for the kid who sold the most magazines now my ears were open as a chunky kid I loved pizza so I hit the streets I went door Todo around San Jose in my jnco baggy shorts with a highly irresist resistible offer to buy magazines I would Point them to the magazines I liked best and ask them to buy one I got rejected a lot but you know what one after another said yes the success was intoxicating for fourth grade Noah my grades were mediocre and I wasn't great at sports but I won the magazine pizza party challenge by a blowout from that point forward I became an asking machine and it's the thing that's produced more of My Success than anything else that's why in this chapter you're going to learn to stare down the fear of rejection that keeps most people from developing that ever crucial ask muscle develop your ask muscle embracing risk fear and rejection gives you the power to transform your life it's just that simple I've helped 10,000 plus people via my monthly 1K Business course and the number one thing that held people back from business success was not a lack of strategy but ask avoidance getting money is not a matter of literally getting it it's a matter of receiving it which can happen only after one asks for it the illusion of eventual pain that you associate with taking that risk what if you're judged or look foolish or it doesn't work is a straight jacket on your potential removing the jacket stepping forward into the uncertainty with that first ask is the game-changing skill that starts your million-dollar business and redesigns your life let me say it again because it's that important intentionally developing your ask muscle is a requirement for entrepreneurial success the question of course is how you do it now I'm not superhuman I know you're thinking no one must be Fearless in the face of rejection but no I get scared every single time I face rejection and I get sad when it happens every day I feel the sting of rejection and because of that I succeed just a few months ago I was trying to hire a designer I was cold emailing people and this is no joke 6 to 8 hours a day this is basically getting rejected all day long it feels like being trapped in a bar where every woman I approach laughs in my face and walks off one email I got from an amazing designer I was trying to hire was so harsh I wanted to cry hahaa you really think I would leave Google for your shitty company that hype and it always will so how do I get through the fear and the sadness for one thing and I do this often I myself I'm going to die eventually and none of this really matters seriously and on top of that would any of these people come to my funeral no which is a pretty effective way to lessen the impact their rejection has on my emotions then I remind myself of rejection goals this is going to suck let me aim to get at least 25 rejections that alone helps me accept that I will get rejected and turn it more into a game versus a blow to my selfworth I've trained TR myself to associate anything hard with growth playing the same little reframing trick my father used on rejection and it's not just my father that set me up for success in this way when she was growing up the father of span's founder Sarah Blakeley would ask her and her brother nightly what did you guys fail at this week it was this early conditioning to embrace failure that Blakeley says helped her persist through seven years of almost daily humiliation selling fax machines door Todo persist after nearly every hosy factory in America declined to manufacture her first product and finally persists through a seemingly endless Litany of nose before finally convincing a dallas-based Neiman Marcus buyer on a cold call to put her bodyshaping panty hose in a handful of stores the average person faces one rejection and gives up Blakeley didn't and at age 41 became the youngest self-made female billionaire in the United States now that's rejection resume my father would appreciate remember you could be 11 NOS away from making your first million but if you stop at the 10th rejection you will have failed the trick is to desensitize yourself to the Pain by repeatedly exposing yourself to it embrace the discomfort actively seeking it out and use it as your compass always be asking who is the type of person that starts a million-dollar business the type of person who asks for what they want if you want a new job at a new company you have to ask for it if you want more money from your boss you have to ask for the raise if you are selling something you have to ask the customer to buy it even at home if you want your spouse or kids to treat you better you have to ask them everything that signifies a growing profitable and fulfilling Venture a supportive Network flourishing sales engaged employees a healthy balance of work and play and so forth all requires a willingness to ask over and over again so let's get started with a few tips Pro tip be persistent I want you to believe that almost every no you get can eventually become a yes persistence will reveal that most NOS are actually a not now my dream when I was in high school was to work at Microsoft I wanted that more than anything and so during my junior year at UC Berkeley I found a recruiter on campus looking for developers and I said to her I'm not an engineer but I'm in business is there any type of internship I could do to work at Microsoft for the summer she said there wasn't but I followed up with her and kept asking squeak squeak squeak and after the 12th followup she gave in actually we have an internship for business people I don't know if it was created for me or not but I like to think it was it did lead to a fun lunch at Bill Gates's house a story for another time Pro tip follow up follow up follow followup studies show that if you initially get a no your follow-up ask is twice as likely to get a yes at appsumo doccom almost 50% of our sales come from our follow-up emails think about that what a great example that follow-ups are as powerful as your first touch Point followup on the things you really want I use followup.cc for email and Siri very often too remember follow-ups you can also use the snooze feature in Google or just write it down Pro tip sell selling is helping if you believe your product or service improves the lives of your customers sales is just education you're helping people out reframing selling asking as helping makes it exciting to offer your consulting or window washing services or provide someone with delicious cookies once you accept that truth asking becomes loads easier and feels much more like a communal gift than a selfish desire if you believe your product or service can fulfill a true need it's your moral obligation to sell it Zig Ziggler at UC Berkeley I created a consulting company hfg Consulting for local businesses on how they could Market to college students I saw a problem where many freshmen didn't have internships so they would jump at the chance to work for me and many local companies were struggling at marketing to college students we grew to a small army of 20 people doing this Consulting then one day my intern Kenny suggested we do a student discount card my first thought was well really that's because there are five cliche student businesses selling student discount cards credit cards t-shirts tutoring and something with booze discount cards are what business college kids often try and fail at conventional wisdom said don't bother trying and most people would have just accepted that reality but growing up with my crazy salesman dad had taught me never to take conventional wisdom at face value my dad taught me to always test things out for myself basically I figured it wouldn't cost me a penny or much time to see whether local businesses would be interested so right then and there I told Kenny come on let's go to town and ask a few shopkeepers if they'd be willing to participate and offer discounts Kenny paused you mean like right now just walk the streets and ask whoever we find in my head a thought balloon popped upow not how yes now I responded we went business to business and basically said this is going to get your name in front of hundreds if not thousands of students we just talked about how it would help them as it turns out local businesses are always happy to get more customers for free and pretty soon we had about 20 businesses signed up enough we hoped to entice students to Pony up $10 for the cards which cost us0 50 to print we found that giving the discount cards to student groups and fraternities as fundraisers in tools was our best method to sell them we helped others make money and split the proceeds from the $10 cards 50/50 again we just had to educate people about how it helped them pretty soon we expanded to multiple campuses wash rinse repeat and generated $55,000 within a year not bad for some freshman interns right now it's your turn challenge the coffee challenge go to any coffee shop or any place in person make a simple purchase and ask for $10 % off don't say anything else the whole point is for you to feel uncomfortable commit to doing this today every single person who completes this challenge always posts how beneficial it is for their lives I want that to be the same for you you'd think asking for a discount on your cup of coffee is no big deal but for those that have done it and gone on to discuss its surprising power in countless podcast hours and blog posts and Twitter threads its impact is undeniable this will be a piece of cake said my brother Seth as we walked into the Panera Bread Bakery I'd like a club sandwich and a water he said and then uh Miss ex excuse me can I get 10% off this order Seth asked the room went silent to the spotlight on my brother and the cashier I don't think we can do that sorry she said okay thanks said Seth and then we proceeded to take our food to the table the shocking part was that my brother thought it' be so easy but more important he did it and felt proud of himself afterwards this is the most powerful tool I've ever seen for improving your ask muscle and over 10,000 people have done it here's an exact script you can use youi how's it going great what would you like you I'd like a skinny low-fat vanilla latte my fave drink or substitute your own sure that'll be $3.50 can I get 10% off this is key make the statement clear with a smile and don't say anything afterwards what's this for I'm taking a business course and this is one of the assignments a lot of you will try to make an excuse to avoid engaging with this challenge oh that's just too basic I don't want to be that guy I don't want to put the Barista in an awkward position I've already done sales for 5 years that's the whole point of this challenge to practice asking and getting rejected rather than talking yourself out of it the worst case scenario is really trivial the Barista says no and gives you a weird look the people behind you roll their eyes it's just a little bit of discomfort but the upside is is you feel strong about yourself and realize how much more capable you are than you realized here are a few people and their results after completing the coffee challenge I felt a lot more confident facing rejection and it empowered me to successfully ask for sponsorship money on my bike riding side hustle it was scary and I was not looking forward to it but I did it and grew honestly I'm insanely shy so having to do things out of my comfort zone has helped me in all areas of my life and has made me a better person overall not only did I learn that rejection doesn't end your life but I also learned to enjoy being outside my comfort zone just do it no overthinking just action ask for 10% off your coffee as I've seen in those that have done it getting that hit of Creator's courage will help you hit your rejection goals and unlock askings unlimited upside asking is a muscle and this challenge is the gem learning to ask is just like building any new habit start small and increase slowly the best way to overcome your fear in the long term is with short-term games of rejection remember this challenge is designed for you to get rejected the point is to experience failure and get past it once you start getting a few rejections you'll realize it's not as bad as you think this is a powerful step in you creating your million-dollar business enjoy the fear ask I just told you about the importance of asking well to get my book into the hands of the people who need it most I need your help if my book has been helpful can you take 30 seconds right now and leave a short review think back to why you decided to pick pick up this book and give it a chance maybe it's because a five-star review on Amazon or Goodreads caught your eye leave a review and give someone else the opportunity to start their million dooll weekend before I started writing this book I met Matt who works security at the Austin Airport he has the same dream as you to create a business so he can change his life but he may never hear about this book your review means the world to me and it could change the world of someone else like Matt feel good about yourself knowing your Brief Review can change someone's life forever the review costs you no money my favorite price and only takes 30 seconds you can go to the books page on the Amazon app or desktop site or wherever you bought it and leave a review there on Kindle or an e-reader scroll to the last page of the book on Audible go to your library page and click write a review BTW I read every single review and when your review happens an alarm goes off in my office my mom tells me about it and our entire team celebrates like we just won the Super Bowl now back to your million-dollar weekend love you forever Noah part two build it launch your business with the million weekend process in the first two chapters we covered the two foundational habits that will become your entrepreneurial ignition the endless cycle of starting and the unlimited upside of asking now it's Friday and your million dooll weekend is about to begin in these next three chapters over the next 48 hours you'll execute the simple but effective three-step million dooll weekend process for entrepreneurial experimentation that will be the engine to create your dream business finding million dooll ideas how to find profitable business ideas the one minute business model how to see if those opportunities can be $1 million businesses and Beyond the 48h hour money challenge how to test those opportunities without wasting time or money it will all add up to a reliable method for generating promising business ideas that lead to profitable businesses in just a weekend let's dive in this is where your taking action will pay off chapter three finding million-dollar ideas simple exercises to generate profitable business ideas I didn't watch sports and I don't like gambling but I could spot a trend fantasy sports was getting huge and so was sports betting so my partners at the time and I decided to put together a fantasy sports betting site bet arcade we had all these sports game players on our Facebook app and we thought we could push them toward a sports betting site easy money after 6 months of paying programmers to build the site about $100,000 not to mention another $10,000 for lawyers to tell us that gambling online was legal we launched it was absolutely beautiful amazing Graphics worked great great and no one came crickets now we were truly screwed and money was running out then at our lowest point we were broke and my desperation kicked in what was our biggest problem and did others share it was there a solution we were capable of creating quickly we were constantly complaining about how much we were being charged by offer palal the payments provider for our successful games they were charging 50% for every transaction and ignored every upgrade suggestion we made We disliked Them strongly you know we could offer people a better margin if we just did it ourselves I discussed with my business partner Andrew so I asked immediately I called a few friends who owned Facebook games to see if they would switch to a different payment software if it offered lower commissions turns out it was an easy sell in a weekend we put together a beta version of the site and within 2 weeks after that we had the service called Ambit running we instantly made our friends 20% more money by charging lower commissions and listening to them in the first year we ended up making more than $15 million in Topline Revenue it was insane the immediate success of this payments business that came from a moment of desperation and in the wake of the failure of bed arcade forced us to reckon with one of the most useful lessons of business creation it is deadly to build a business without first verifying that there are paying customers customers want Solutions not ideas customers don't care about your ideas they care about whether you can solve their problems and you should not build your idea into a business if you don't know with 100% certainty that it's a solution your customers will pay for trust me I've done that after Disney verbally agreed to use an expanded version of our payment software for their social gaming of course we'd want something like that I was so certain of my brilliant idea that I went ahead and built it except 6 months later and $100,000 spent they looked at what we delivered said that however great it was they didn't need it right away and started ghosting me that's why when it comes to generating business ideas customers come first before the product or service even before the idea to build a business you need someone to sell to I can't tell you how many times someone has emailed me saying what do you think of this business idea my auto reply have you asked what the customer thinks Steve Jobs said you have to start with the customer experience and work backwards Jeff Bezos too insists everyone at Amazon use a customer first approach to generate ideas and decide which to develop the first of his 16 leadership principles customer Obsession starts by saying leaders start with the customer and work backwards working backwards prioritizes access to a group of customers a group you probably belong to and focuses on an aspect of a customer's life that doesn't work if you do it this way you're assured of nailing the three W's of business right from the start who you are selling to what problem you're solving where they are your goals in this chapter are to use the customer first approach to narrow in on three markets that you'll Target to use your knowledge and experience of these markets to generate lots of ideas and then to choose the three you think are the most likely to succeed it's the first step in the three-part million dooll weekend process in which you'll learn to sell ideas to a small early adopter group before you've built the product or spent a scent in order to validate that there is a market that will pay repeat fast and cheap until it hits experiment experiment experiment boom start with what you know or how I made $100 million by building Groupon for geeks when I started appsumo a decade ago I was a solo preneur living in a basement apartment in the hate Ashbury Neighborhood of San Francisco by day I was Consulting for an online dating site called speed date at night I would rack my brain for business ideas problem was I'd had a series of businesses like payments for social games that had long sales processes that were hard to negotiate and my company was a commodity I wanted to move up the value chain to a place where people can't live without my product the problem I was most interested in solving was how do I get more customers everyone in business is interested in more customers I didn't want to do another business where my product was a nice to have a vitamin I wanted to be a musthave a painkiller and getting more customers is the most essential business need one night I was thinking about a company called Mac Heist that was offering bundles of Mac software at a steep discount this was a great way for Mac users to get several useful apps at one really low price and while I love a good deal I couldn't stop thinking about how Mac Heist had solved the problem of providing companies with customers every time Mac Heist bundled software and marketed the bundle it was solving a need of those software companies customers and in turn those software companies were doing everything they could in terms of marketing and blogging to make sure the Mac Heist bundle was a success could I do what Mac Heist was doing but for non-mac software Pro tip look for something working in one category and bring it to another one of the largest drivers of appsumo email list was giveaways we realized this only after seeing a giveaway in a women's fashion online site and trying it out ourselves sign up for and observe companies outside of your target market for inspiration as an entrepreneur I'd come to rely on some of the flashy new web-based apps out there like MailChimp newsletters Dropbox storing files and fresh books accounting with web-based software it didn't matter what kind of computer you used as long as you had an internet connection but no one was offering discounted non-mac bundles not yet I was super excited to get my favorite tools at a discount there were other startup Founders like me tons now I had to find out the truth of whether people would pay me Pro tip when in doubt solve your own problems if you are willing to pay for a solution it's likely others are too and at least you'll have one happy customer yourself I have always been active on Reddit and I understood the community really well I knew what its users liked and how they interacted with the site working backwards I zeroed in on something all redditors love sharing images at the time more and more were relying on a new site called imer to host their viral meme images on reddit's front page every other post featured an image hosted on imer while anyone could use imer for free the company offered a pro subscription tier would these redditors pay if I offered the pro tier at a deep discount at this point I went to my mentor from my Facebook days Doug Hirsch who later founded good RX to ask what he thought about the idea he said it wouldn't work that he didn't think there was enough software to make this a viable long-term business don't let doubt from another dissuade you from finding out the truth the only opinion that matters is your customers your job as a customer first entrepreneur is to listen to the problem your customers want solved create a solution to it and validate that they'll pay for it no one else's with that realization I jumped into million dooll weekend validation mode using the ask muscle I cold emailed imer creat Alan Schoff who turned out to be a college student in Ohio and asked him if he'd let me Market Pro subscriptions at a discount and pay me for what I sold here's exactly what I sent him subject promoting imer on Reddit to Alan scha from Noah Kagan hey Alan huge fan of imer and love using your product all the time we are launching a deal site and wanted to promote your imer pro think we can sell 200 plus of it for you at no cost or work for you you free Friday to chat on aim at 5:00 p.m. PT Noah Kagan he jumped at the idea because well I promised him money at no cost I had the three WS of the business figured out who found an audience of potential customers people on Reddit what worked backwards to find a problem they wanted solved imer pro at a discount where time for me to flex the ask muscle and Pitch some redditors game on then I cold emailed Chris slow reddit's founding engineer and asked him to breakfast after explaining what I plan to do over bacon people love bacon I asked Chris for free advertising not advice not a discount free ads here's exactly what I said subject hey Chris friends with Chris smoke to Chris slow from Noah Kagan hey Chris talked with Chris smoke and he says hi I love what you've built with Reddit huge user wanted to treat you to a breakfast at Pork Store Cafe to give you some suggestions on the site and run by a cool promotion I'm working on with imer you free this wet at 9:00 a.m. be epic Noah Kagan why not Chris replied our users love imer they'll be thrilled to get a discount now creating a fully functional site for the deal would have cost money and time so here's where it gets interesting I found a $12 an hour developer from Pakistan to help me add a PayPal button to a web page that was 4 hours of work and I did everything else on my own total time to build appsumo sumo.com $50 at the time I had no idea if the business would work my goal was to zero in on the one thing that matters would people pay for discounted software if they didn't the minimal investment I made would allow me to easily move on to the next experiment my ads went up on Reddit promoting the website I just built and holy crap my first sale arrived within minutes the first dollar is always the sweetest its momentum its possibility it's fear getting its ass kicked Pro tip Focus on0 to $1 get that first dollar that will create your momentum and build your belief in what you're working on every company I started began with just one customer scaling comes later before I knew it I'd sold the 200 licenses I set as my goal who could have known this would lead to a company doing over $65 million just 10 years later no Biz plan required you might be familiar with the concept of the minimum viable product or MVP instead of trying to develop something perfect and then unveiling it like Steve Jobs at macworld you create the simplest possible version of what you're offering and start selling it right away that way instead of endlessly refining something in a vacuum he use feedback from actual customers to incrementally develop an offering people absolutely want to buy in the real world MVP is an important idea but it leaves out something crucial the customer who are you actually going to sell your minimum viable product to and what if they don't want the minimum what if they're willing to try something only from a full-fledged company with a name brand good luck iterating on your MVP without customers the problem with MVPs and older entrepreneurial approaches is we get so fixated on what we want to make that we lose sight of the people who want it I call this the founder first mentality in which entrepreneurs focus on their own experience yay I get to build something instead of customer first old school you focus on business model planning and obsessing about the product at this stage new school you're going to focus on the conversation with the customers a dynamic back and forth that will help you iterate your product in terms of what the customer wants before you make or spend a thing one more example to make sure this is totally clear okay you have an idea for a dog walking app how would you go about doing it here's the way most people most wantrepreneurs would do it one spend hours at home thinking about the app and coming up with clever names for it two spend $100 hiring their cousin to draw a cool logo three set up an LLC four watch YouTube videos about apps and programming and business and dogs five consider signing up for a developer boot camp and quickly realize coding is hard six buy the domain name for the snazzy website they're going to build seven seven look into hiring a developer on upwork and quickly realize it's prohibitively expensive eight give up again does that sound familiar that's founder first okay now we are going to use a customer first approach to explore our idea for a dog walking app one call or texts three people right now who have dogs and ask them to pay you to walk their dog two turns out none of these dog owners have problems walking their dog you discover their real problem is finding dog dog sitters when they're traveling three ask for their next travel dates and have them pay you a deposit they pay jackpot pretty quickly you found out the opportunity was dog sitting not dog walking and now you have real customers paying you to solve a real problem with real revenue flowing in before writing a line of code or spending any money on Freelancers that same framework applies across all Industries and sectors at sumo.com we were having problems growing our email list we contacted potential customers like Tim Ferris and Pat Flynn and it turns out they also found it challenging once we convinced a few customers to sign on we built a suite of email collection tools for us and them or take Jennifer Jones a Dallas Elementary School teacher who was part of my monthly 1K class everyone liked her cookies so she posted on Facebook saying she's making cookie baskets for the holidays did anyone want some turns out they really did and she now has $1,000 per month cookie business Jennifer posting to her Facebook page seeing if anyone is interested anybody who has a skill in something like that homemade cakes pickles candles you name it can send an email to friends family co-workers and Church community members asking if they'd be interested in buying whatever it is include a PayPal link then fill all the orders you receive voila a zero risk business venture no hiring no website no cooking school no commercial kitchen that stuff can come later if at all just use the money you bring in to buy enough ingredients to fill the orders bake the cakes put them in boxes and deliver them in each of these examples the launch is not based on perfecting a business plan but on talking to potential customers and finding out what they're excited to give you money for but where do you find those customers now where do you find customers when novice on entrepreneurs search for opportunities they too often look beyond their zone of influence they think the action is happening somewhere else in some other location or industry but seasoned entrepreneurs almost always find and create opportunities within the context of who they are what they know and especially who they know in each of the examples above the business validation process begins with potential customers in the entrepreneurs orbit actual people with names tribes you belong to or are interested in most of whom are already self-organized online people you know how to reach today though it's rarely a part of their official Origins Stories the biggest companies in the world even the viral apps now worth billions started through personal networks and real human connections Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook in a weekend by emailing friends to use it version one did well validating it and Microsoft started with Bill Gates building software for for a guy in Albuquerque he had a customer first in the beginning Founders should reach out to their friends their former colleagues their communities you may think your business is unique but trust me it's not every successful business can start this way for example anahita loves her dogs and wanted healthier snacks for them she started taking her homemade organic dog treats to her local dog park she would sell out every time a year later she now has a called the barkery a Dog Bakery before you even think about picking a business idea make sure you have easy access to the people you want to help an easy way to do this is to think about where you have easy access to a targeted group of people whom you really want to help like say new moms in Austin cyclists freelance writers and taco obsessives like me challenge top three groups let's write out your top three groups to Target who do you have easy access to that you'd be excited to help this can be your neighbors colleagues religious Friends golf buddies cooking friends Etc the better you understand your target group the better you can speak to them the more specifically you can speak to their problems the better and easier you can sell or test products note how this process prioritizes communication with people through starting taking the first iteration of your Solutions straight to customers and asking engaging them in a conversation to determine how your solution can best fix their problem business creation should always be a conversation nearly every impulse we have is to be tight with our ideas by doing more research going off alone to build the perfect product anything and everything to avoid the discomfort of asking for money this is the validation shortcut you have to learn to fight through this impulse it won't be easy but it'll be worth it become a problem Seeker the best on entrepreneurs are the most dissatisfied they're always thinking of how things can be better your frustrations and the frustrations of others are your business opportunities great ideas come from being a problem Seeker analyze frustrations in your day including the things that bother you at home waste your time on your commute to work or online here's a list of things that bother me what to make for breakfast that's quick healthy and full of caffeine how to find a Rel viable house cleaner where to go to dinner with my partner how to find my next therapist what kind of investment to make with some extra cash I received and these are just the problems I've encountered today I could go on and on and that's the point the number of things that can be better are endless which is a gold mine for newbie entrepreneurs The crucial first step toward entrepreneurship is to study your own unhappiness and to think of solutions AKA business opportunity ities for you to sell look at this email my friend Boris corsky sent when he was validating a private Chef service he doesn't even know how to cook subject helping you help me with food hey friends one thing I realized is that I'm busy all the time and I don't have time to cook a quality meal I wanted to invite a few close friends to test a business idea with me consider yourself the lucky Chosen Few convenient and home-cooked meals on February 9th for $20 there will be a personal chef making us food and delivering it to you conveniently and deliciously if this is something you're seriously interested in please PayPal $20 open to all and any feedback cheers Boris PS please let me know if you have any dietary restrictions or any particular preferences I promise the dinner will be delish Boris got five plus sales from this email and an opportunity was born notice how Boris framed this as helping solve the problem of people like himself who didn't have time to cook smart boy that Boris I built app Sumo because I couldn't find great discounts on the best business apps our team built Sumo me because we needed a tool to grow our email list we launched tidy cal.com because we were tired of monthly subscriptions of competitors and there's more other businesses I built all started with a frustration not being able to find a good Community to talk about social networks in the Bay Area Community next next or a good in-game payment service Gambit or waits for my home gym during the co pandemic solving my own problems built a business that generates literally $65 million per year I'm not saying that to brag even though it does feel good to say but to keep reminding you how simple yet effective this process can be you can do this the idea generators so let's open the net wide and get down to generating ideas I mean problems here's what the process of coming up with a million dooll business idea does not look like getting on Tik Tok or YouTube and mindlessly copying whatever the influencers say is working for them getting struck with the perfect vision for a genius new product meditating following your passion and brainstorming following any other woow woo method that promises inspiration in a box here's what the actual process looks like one what's the most painful AKA valuable problem you can solve for people people two that you also have passion for Andor unique expertise in three for the largest Niche possible that you belong to and understand simple enough but take some light and fun brain work remember to focus on your zone of influence here your existing Community the 150 followers you have on Tik Tok the 200 in your local Taco aicad group the 300 in the WhatsApp group for your mountain biking Club not to mention the 143,000 in the sub subreddit r/ mountainbiking your job as a problem Seeker is to go to a community of yours you can access all the idea challenges and more examples at million weekend.com now it's your turn use the following four challenges to come up with at least 10 potentially profitable ideas one solve your own problems take entrepreneur Shane Heath a dude who loved coffee but hated that it made him anxious and jittery everyone around him kept saying I want to cut down on coffee too but no one was quitting coffee because there was nothing better to drink then Shane went to India and discovered Masala chai Shane loved it it tasted great and gave him a small caffeine kick but it didn't make him feel like a vibrating wreck like coffee did so Shane invented mud du his mud is a masala chai coffee replacement with other ingredients for added health benefits when he walked around with his mug of mud people wanted to know what he was drinking so he made some for his friends and it got them hooked that tiny problem of his is now making over $60 million per year when you intentionally practice problem spotting eventually it becomes something your mind just does automatically it's become a game to me a profitable one still stuck here are four questions to get you going one what is one thing this morning that irritated me two what is one thing on my to-do list that's been there over a week three what is one thing that I regularly fail to do well four what is one thing I wanted to buy recently only to find out that no one made it I make it a habit to always keep a notebook close by and jot down things that bother me below are three of my most recent business opportunities find me an ex how I thought of it I spent a ton of time trying to buy a car about a year I know online research visiting car dealerships test drives on and on anyway I would have paid a pretty penny for someone to hear all my thoughts and preferences do the research and conversations for me and produce a short document with the three best choices idea you can pick a vertical where people can give you requirements and you find whatever they are looking for cheap and remote interior design for young single guys how I thought of it until I was 30 I never had my own place so my furniture has always been a weird collection of Ikea items really easy having a cool place when you're loaded not so easy but possible when your budget is tight idea interior designers are for rich people this business would be much simpler and less expensive I send someone a photo of my place giving my preferences and they put together a Pinterest page of suggestions for me friend activity Matchmaker how I thought of it I love doing padle boarding and going to the gym but my friends aren't always available idea Meetup is good for groups but it'd be nice if some person or website could connect me with individuals to join me on these activities lately I've been wanting new activity partners for things I'm doing the website or service would be similar to Meetup but more on the individual level challenge solve your own problems use the questions to find three ideas write those down in your MDW Journal two best sellers are your best friends what products are already selling a crap ton iPads iPhones Etc basically any product you'd find on Amazon's bestseller list would work here how can you accessorize the product for example stickers for an iPhone or sell a service to those people teaching someone how to use an iPhone it's easier to sell to a large group of people who've already spent money on a product or service some ideas could be one customizing Nike shoes two video game tutorial for an Xbox game three teaching computer novices how to use a Macbook challenge bestsellers are your best friends write down two accessorizing ideas in your MDW Journal P.S don't worry if this method doesn't inspire you to idea Glory remember this is just an exercise that means anything goes you have my blessing to write down all the bad crazy and nonsense ideas that come into your mind do not edit yourself do not think but how could that work just write as many down as you can we'll Whittle them down later three marketplaces one of my favorite ways way to find ideas is by studying the marketplaces where people are trying to spend money your potential customers are everywhere already asking in public for Solutions on message boards in Facebook posts in Tweets in church groups on and on marketplaces on Craigslist Etsy or Facebook have millions of people each day wanting to pay to have their problems solved so look for frequent requests on Craigslist gigs from people actively searching for someone to give their money to in exchange for particular Services check completed listings on eBay this allows you to see how well certain products are selling it's also an easy way to measure the sale prices of items and gauge the overall percentage of the market that's receiving bids a recent Craigslist search and all the opportunities challenge marketplaces visit a Marketplace like Etsy Facebook Marketplace Craigslist or eBay and write at least one idea for a product or service in your MDW Journal room four search engine queries it's much easier to sell something when people already want it there are 3 billion Google searches every day giving you a direct line to customers thoughts and needs to access these thoughts you'll want to work backwards from a problem people want solved a query toward a solution they may be willing to pay for done right this method is so effective that there are now search listening tools that make this even easier like answerthepublic.com which which will find the most Googled questions around whatever keyword you input try searching for certain questions how do I train my cat to use a toilet best places to travel with a family where can I rent a bike in Barcelona evaluate the most popular questions or lack thereof and see if you can create a product or service around those requests to figure out which questions are more likely to result in a successful business ask yourself is the potential solution of vitamin A nice to have or a painkiller a musthave I also use reddit.com as a gold mine for business ideas it is one of the largest message boards online go to the r/ somebody make this subreddit where people are actively offering up ideas and look for the first two things that interest you an example from a Google search for all the cat lovers out there challenge search engine queries use search engine questions and Reddit forums to find two more ideas write them in your md Journal you should now have a list of 10 ideas if not many more you can also use the business idea you asked a friend for in chapter 1 use the four challenges solve your own problems best sellers marketplaces and search engine queries write your 10 ideas one 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 now you've got to pick the three best ideas from the 10 plus you've come up with there's never a perfect idea for instance appsumo started out selling bundles of web web tools and 3 years later evolve to individual deals our own custom software and our own courses your idea will evolve over time just as all businesses do so here's what you're going to do take your list of 10 plus ideas and eliminate the ones that you're not excited about if the top three ideas are screaming me me me your work is done if you can't decide choose the ones you believe will be easiest to implement and that you and ideally other customers would be thrilled to spend money on that's it don't worry if you think your ideas suck or are too hard the real value is learning to create assess and validate ideas in the next chapter you'll learn how to determine whether you have a million dooll opportunity on your hands chapter 4 the one minute business model shape your idea into a million dooll opportunity fine I said watch me do it my monthly 1K students were worrying because none of them had actually made their first $1,000 yet they would get excited to start but chicken out when it came time to actually sell their product I wanted to show you that it didn't have to be scary I'll come up with an idea and make $1,000 in profit this week I told them I saw them laughing and scoffing Marco the one who I'd pegged as the leader turned to me we really respect you Noah he said but a week's a long time that sounds too easy for a guy like you how about 24 hours and we get to choose your idea the others nodded I had to laugh the cojon on these people Fine Man game on so we came to an agreement I could pick any of the businesses suggested by my students but I couldn't use my app Sumo networks and mailing lists to promote it I had to do this like anybody who didn't have a big social media following 5 minutes later a flood of ideas came in the three most interesting business ideas my students suggested were lemonade salsa and beef jerky now I like lemonade I really like salsa but I love jerky more important I know jerky I already was spending about $50 a month on the stuff and figured at least some of my healthc conscious friends were spending that amount too I assumed they were struggling like me to find different flavors and different brands even with the dozens of new jerky Artisans popping up every month to try to satisfy our needs it was likely a growing multi-million Doll Market still I was nervous would I be able to make ,000 in 24 hours without using my existing resources the pressure was on I'll walk you through the jerky experiment over the next two chapters to show how everything I'm about to teach you help me create a business in one day that we sold for $120,000 2 years later if we had kept going it could have hit seven figures but I wanted to move on and keep experimenting in this chapter you'll go through a three-part process to verify that your startup has the potential to be a million-dollar business including my process for pivoting your business model as I had to an hour 12 of The Jerky experiment if something's not working quite right here's what you'll learn one is this a million dooll opportunity you'll research the market to find out two what's my model you'll create a simple budget by sketching out Revenue cost and profit so you know how many units you'll need to sell and for how much to make $1 million three what if it turns out it's not going to work you'll pivot and evolve you'll use customer feedback to adjust the variables of the business pricing model offer category all that into something bigger and better you have limited resources to pursue the ideas you believe are winners and if you're going to work hard either way might as well work on the idea with the most upside so think of this chapter as a tactical approach to finding winners you're going to narrow down your three ideas from the last chapter into one one that's got a solid business model and a market full of growth potential step one find $1 million worth of customers you dear reader are a surfer what you're selling the product or service is your surfboard the market is the wave and the wave is what matters most even if you're a great Surfer with an amazing board you will still fail if you don't have a good wave to ride a tidal wave would be ideal but any good big wave is just fine now don't think that finding a great wave means you have to be in hot new tech you can find awesome waves everywhere if you in the midst of a big underserved Lawn Care market then Landscaping is a big wave business seriously take New York City's professional line sitter Robert Samuel after getting fired from his customer service job at AT&T he noticed the frenzy created by every new iPhone release so he put an ad on Craigslist in 2012 to validate whether anyone would pay for him to wait in line when he was paid $325 for his first 15-hour stint he knew he had a wave today his business Same Old Line dudes sold employs 30 dudes and Duets charging a $50 minimum up to 2 hours and $25 for each additional hour to wait in line for everything from hot new sneakers to the DMV to the newest iPhone release and Robert himself takes home $80,000 a year there are countless waves you can ride that have nothing to do with tech Cody Sanchez has gained over 1 million followers on social media because she teaches people how to own and operate boring businesses like vending machines and RV rentals a good wave isn't about being cool it's about having customers what I'm saying here is that your job is not to create demand for something that that seems exciting it's to find existing demand and satisfy it you can have the absolute best idea in the world or something that seems like it and end up not selling one single thing if there's no demand you don't want to be convincing people that they need your product you don't want to be begging them to buy what you want when you're opening a taco restaurant is a starving crowd when I look back over my life being involved in tidal wave markets big and growing and with massive momentum has been a huge part of my success and it's something I now prioritize when I think about new businesses Facebook huge adoption of college students in the world wanting to connect online mint huge Market of people wanting a free finance tool to save and make more money kickflip Facebook and iPhone opened up their platforms for apps and games leading to a huge surge for game developers Gambit with all the games that were launched everyone needed payment options and I launched appsumo just as the world decided to be entrepreneurs and needed software to make it possible when I started appsumo docomo tools we could promote but over the next 10 years the market of people buying and making software exploded that gave me a much easier opportunity to create a $65 million Revenue business now it won't always be that easy not a lot of private businesses publish their sales dat data but there are plenty of other ways to make sure you're surfing a good wave the rule here in order to have a million-dollar business you need a million dooll opportunity it's that simple thing is how do you prove you have one too often aspiring entrepreneurs think they need spreadsheets and extensive research to figure this out these are just a distraction let me show you a better way here's a market opportunity exercise say you have a beard or love someone who does the problem beards are itchy before you spend months of tinkering to create the world's greatest beard oil let's figure out if you can really make a million dollars from this idea see if there's a business here there are two key questions to answer to make sure it's a million dooll opportunity one is the overall Market dying flat or growing you want flat or ideally growing two is this a million dooll opportunity to figure that out we have to know the number of potential customers and the price of your product first I would check to see if there are enough customers who'd want to buy your beard oil Market size is the single most important variable to quickly understanding the potential of any project I use Google Trends and Facebook ads to answer those questions they're great tools that help me evaluate the size and growth potential of my target market it's possible that the tools will change but the idea is to uncover the data that shows how big and growing your Market is by answering the following questions one is the market growing or dying search Google trends for the terms beard and beard grooming and compare their search popularity to similar terms for example haircuts razors and how that's changed over the last few months and years with Google Trends you are just looking to see how the graphs are trending ideally up and to the right number two how many potential customers are there I'd highly recommend using Facebook ads to research your Market size Facebook is pretty much the entire world and what's phenomenal is that they actually let you type in the keyword of whatever business category you're thinking about and see the approximate audience size you can also use the Facebook ads library to see every single active ad running on Facebook for your keyword and location which is super helpful for uncovering competitors and getting ideas for your own marketing efforts to see videos of me doing this analysis go to million dooll weekend.com searching beards shows us the number of people interested in beards on Facebook in the United States equals 16 to 19 million not bad not bad and for beard oil something like 2.5 million people score now you can also use these tools to focus on even more specific angles for instance take some other groups you could think of targeting locals beard owners and local cities more Niche narrow interest groups like ingrown facial hair demographics based African-American beard owners step two is this a million-dollar opportunity when I was starting my ninja discount card at UC Berkeley there were only 25,000 plus students on campus and I was confident I could sell my discount card for $10 at best this could be a $250,000 business only if I was perfect if I expanded to all the major college campuses and California I could reach a student Market of 1 million it was clear this could easily create a million dooll business here are the major things you're looking for pick a price point you think will be ideal for your customer multiply that by the number of Ideal customers does that equal at least a million dollar yes or no simple now let's evaluate that on our beard oil idea Google Trends flat with some growth size of Market 2 500,000 people cost of your product $50 total value $125,000 million dooll idea yes look this is a super simple way to evaluate a million doll opportunity don't be a entrepreneur and waste time calculating Revenue to the exact Cent or dollar idea super fast let's do some other examples setting up people's home offices idea Google Trends significantly up size of Market 50,000 people cost of your product $500 total value $ 25,00 ,000 million dooll idea yes in the words of the great DJ khed another one but that's not always the case monthly Vietnamese faux broth subscription idea little interest and no growth size of Market 1,000 people cost of your product $20 total value $20,000 million doll idea no I'm sorry if you love making faux broth and want to deliver it but I wouldn't touch this business idea because I don't don't see enough demand for it it could be a fun passion project but it's not a million dooll business here are four examples to compare data business idea home office setup non-alcoholic drink subscriptions juicy ASO broth crypto taxes Google Trends significantly up significantly up up rocket ship size of Market 50,000 50,000 150,000 House cost $500 225 Market opportunity $2 5,000 10 a doll 20,000 12, 500,000 worth pursuing yes yes no yes see 10 plus more step-by-step examples for business ideas ATM million weekend.com all you want is to know if the business idea is worth pursuing now that we know it's worth it let's confirm how exactly you're going to get your million dollars to do that we'll use the one minute business model step three the one minute business model many people have asked me to review their business plan I always give the same advice your plan is to make money realistically you're not going to get 5 or 10% of this Market but now let's see what it would take to generate your own $1 million in profit Revenue cost equals profit these determine if you can make your first million dollar Revenue all the money you make cost how much it costs to make it equals profit what you get to take home this is obviously extremely basic but that's the point it's all you need to calculate in order to assess whether you can get to $1 million let's plug in some numbers to see how it works continuing with our beard oil example our beard oil sells for $50 costs to make package and ship 3750 profit per unit sold $12.50 you may be worrying about advertising costs optimal pricing manufacturers what happens when all your customers beards look so gorgeous I know this is the fear in you worrying about too many things what we are looking for are rough estimates momentum is your friend and we can sweat the details later for now let's focus on the highlevel stuff to see the potential in your business if you're able to earn $12.50 in profit for every unit sold then it's easy to calculate how many you'll need to sell to make $1,000,000 you just divide your target profit by The Profit Target profit 1 $1,000,000 profit per unit sold $ 122.50 total sales needed 80,000 okay obviously selling 880,000 units sounds hard AF but consider the following this is only the number of people we see via Facebook this is for only one beard product if you find success with beard oil you can easily repeat the process many times with other grooming products this is only the first sale to these customers it's far easier to sell to an existing customer than it is to acquire new ones so once we've built up a decent customer base we can make even more products to sell to them plus you can likely sell a subscription to increase the amount you sell per customer by all measures it appears that we have a million dooll idea on our hands actually I know for a fact that it is my good friend who founded beardbrand.com has a multi-million dollar company doing the above it's not always so simple sometimes you'll be playing with the numbers and realize you'll need to rethink some aspects of the business as I did early on in The Jerky Challenge after accepting The Challenge from my business students and spending around 3 minutes deciding to call it Sumo jerky after everybody vetto noasa jerk.com I was on the StairMaster at the gym talking to my colleague Anton discussing how easy this would be when I started the next morning dude this is going to be C jerky is is healthy and it's really popular I said but a few hours later in bed around midnight I got swamped by a wave of anxiety and thought I've got only 24 hours if I fail this is going to be really embarrassing I jumped out of bed to rerun the numbers the one minute business model saved my ass by showing me I needed to Pivot my business I'd been planning to sell a month of jerky for $20 because that seemed like a reasonable price I'd personally be willing to pay from a few searches online I found I could Source jerky at about $10 per order and it would cost around $5 to ship each order one bag of jerky $20 cost to acquire package and $15 profit $5 uh-oh that meant Target profit $11,000 profit per unit sold $5 total sales needed 200 200 bags of jerky in 24 hours o too many sales and too little time after I realized that I'd never make my Sumo jerky go selling one-off deliveries I went back to the drawing board that got me thinking of other businesses I launched like my conference series Community next back when I was in the conference business I started by selling individual tickets which worked but required tons of effort that stumped me until I thought oh I can make a lot more money just selling package sponsorships to companies who can then hand out tickets to employees or customers that in turn got me thinking about the equivalent of sponsorships in the jerky world how do I do bigger deals per Transaction what about a subscription service if I could sell subscriptions I could dramatically cut the number of sales I needed to make if they were all 3month subscriptions I'd need to sell only 67 and 6 month only 33 I also realized that if I sold to offices that offered snacks it would be easier to find customers with larger disposable budgets Plus I figured I had a lot of close friends at companies who could buy for their employees or refer me to their office managers Pro tip when you're launching a business always ask yourself is this going to be a one-off purchase something customers buy here and there when they want to consume it or can you make it a monthly recurring sale it's always better to be in the reorder business John Paul Jones deoria founder of Paul Mitchell and Patron Spirits with the clock ticking on my 24-hour challenge let's see what happened next step four pivot and evolve your Revenue dials almost every successful business had to Pivot or change course along the way maybe you chose the wrong Market to begin with or maybe one feature of your offer turns out to be the thing people want just keep your eyes open for adjacent opportunities the easiest way for me to reach my goal was to increase the average order value by selling longer term subscriptions to businesses my one minute business model changed to this 6mon subscription $120 product cost $60 shipping $30 profit $30 now I needed to make only 33 sales $11,000 Target profit $30 profit to make this happen way more doable than the target of 200 by tweaking the revenue dials I could potentially make Sumo jerky work here are the six Revenue dials you can use one average order value increase the amount someone purchases two frequency increase how often someone will buy your service three price point increase or decrease your price point to affect total sales four customer type approach a more lucrative wealthier customer segment five product line add additional products to make the business more attractive to start six add-on Services if you're selling a product like cookies can you offer a service like setting up birthday parties or cooking at the person's home examples of pivots appsumo started as bundle software for Silicon Valley startups but moved to selling individual deals to marketing agencies Gambit started out making sports games on Facebook but found the real opportunity in payments for social games instead Sam pars the hustle.co went from throwing Live Events to focusing just on the newsletter they used to promote the events fun fact that newsletter business sold to HubSpot for a high eight figures the million dooll opportunity challenge for the challenge of this chapter we're going to see whether your idea is a million doll opportunity now which business idea to pick the first one on your list the hard part is not choosing Which business idea the hard part is getting customers and that's where you'll Focus first the real goal here is less which idea is golden and more putting in the Reps of checking Market size before we validate later if your first idea passes the million doll opportunity test perfect proceed to the next chapter if not then move on to your next idea and run it through the same assessment don't get in your own way wondering which idea is best one pick one business idea two make sure it's a million-- dooll opportunity three confirm your business idea is profitable if you're still stuck on how to do this and don't just want to choose the first idea on the list then start with the problem that is most exciting for you to solve yourself the idea you're going to do let's check the market size data business idea home office setup your idea Google Trends significantly up size of market via Facebook ads 50,000 cost $500 Market opportunity $25,000 worth pursuing yes if your idea is worth pursuing now we have to make sure it's profitable calculate your profit home office setup your idea price $500 cost $25 $ profit $475 then let's see if you can make a million dollar doing this business home office set up your idea your target profit $1,000,000 profit per unit sold $475 total sales needed $2,105 see a video walkthrough of the entire process at million weekend.com 2,15 home office sales seem like a lot maybe not if you have a huge following about home offices if you're just getting started you may want to to Pivot your idea or consider a new one this process saves you the time from working on ideas with little potential feel free to use this on a few of your ideas to compare the opportunities your dream may not be making a million dollar this exercise helps you recognize your likelihood of succeeding to whatever Freedom number you want with 12 hours left before the clock ran out on sumojerky it was time to talk to customers and see if I could really generate $1,000 in profit let let's go get some customers for your business chapter 5 the 48 hour money challenge validate your business by getting paid yes jerky no you're not a jerk I'm literally selling jerky three six and 12month packages to companies just like yours which one do you want amazing you're in for a 12-month at srid I love you can you PayPal me right now at PayPal dor.com cool expect your office mates to worship you when I ship it out in the next few weeks this was me all day long slinging Jerky like I had a 24-hour challenge cuz I did here's also an example of an email I sent to Zach who was one of the first purchasers note the time it was sent subject question for today 2 1 a.m. 2 Zack from Noah Kagan I'm testing out a new Venture figured you'd like it monthly jerky service $40 a month is enough for healthy jerky every single mother freaking day about $142 day for Del ious snackage trying to sell blocks of three 20 or six in 40 months you in limiting to 20ish people today so I can place a bulk order for next week PayPal atok dor.com Exon NOA PS no any offices who buy snacks I should chat it up with it was a long day and after working my ass off here are the final Sumo jerky numbers $ 4,40 in total revenue $135 in profit not bad for a guy who got fired from Facebook and was in English as a second language one thing you may be wondering is how I got the jerky when you have money from customers fulfillment is easy be worried when it's the other way around I searched and contacted people via Google and Instagram to sell me their jerky at the prices I had listed now at this point you have successfully verified that your own idea has million dooll potential now it's time to test whether people will actually spend money on your product this step is CR t i a l a lot of your ideas will seem great in theory but you'll never know if they can go from idea to business until you actually test your target Market's willingness to pay for instance when I was launching appsumo I wasn't 100% convinced people wanted to buy software deals online similar to Groupon so I had to validate app sumo's business model by seeing if I could get paying customers validation is finding three customers in 48 hours who will give you money for your idea the app Sumo validation worked really well and since I discovered the power of validating when founding app Sumo I've used the validation process for every business venture I've started including Sumo jerky what I discovered using the validation process was that once you understand it you can apply it to any and every business idea no matter how small or trivial every potential business idea can be instantly verified like your own magic wand the benefits of validation are immediate and critical one you don't waste time two you save money three you find out if you can actually get customers for your idea four you get money up front five you light a fire under your butt to get moving and by saving time and money validation will ultimately allow you to test as many of your ideas as possible theoretically you can test 52 ideas per year comfortably but that's not necessary because because this method will likely take you only 3 to five weekends at most before you strike gold the golden rule of validation much like the validation process my monthly 1K students made me use for Sumo jerky to validate I turned to the golden rule of validation find three customers in 48 hours who will give you money for your idea success means moving quickly and spending no money and that's what makes the golden rule of validation so effective here's why it works so well you're allowed only 48 Hours limitations breed creativity having a tight time limit will cut off the doubting wantrepreneur inside you and force you to iterate fast and be creative until you find something that works get your first three customers your first customer is a friend the second customer is someone in your family but your Third customer is hard you think this is easy then get three customers don't worry about building a business we are only validating your idea and if it's this hard now it'll only get harder collect money UPF front the promise of payment is not validation that's polite rejection getting customers to hand over their dollars makes it real but you need to get real money from real people services like PayPal stripe cash app and venmo make collecting it easy these days the point is if you can get someone to give you money quickly just by describing a product or solution you're good you're not trying to invent demand and you're trying to see how excited people are about what you're helping them with three methods to validate any business idea one direct pre-selling my favorite way to validate the market for a product is to make real contact with real people tell them what I'm selling ask for money and see how they react actively pre-selling your first few customers is the best way for entrepreneurs to launch a business my friend Eric booked $8,000 of business in 2 weeks by knocking on doors and handing people a flyer saying hey how's it going I'm Eric with Foothills painting I noticed you had some peeling paint up here on your house so I wanted to give you a free estimate that two- sentence pitch built him a $750,000 a year business or take what happened to Dana a typical wantrepreneur who enrolled in my monthly 1K course to start a horse industry business she turned away from building a costly app and used the pre-selling method to quickly and cheaply validate instead here's the exact conversation that changed her perspective Dana I am doing a horses business we are launching in 4 months going to do this thing with horses and trainers and then I have a guy who's a professional okay yeah so we are looking for a developer and funding to build our prototype okay so what is the actual problem you are solving well I've taken a ton of skillshare classes I'm doing customer research and we are working with a developer to get the site launched in 4 months again what is the actual problem you are solving we want to help teach people how to take care of horses yes now we are getting somewhere so what do people do today and what's wrong with it the YouTube videos are crappy horse people have tons of money and don't have access to Great knowledge snaps so how can you prove that people will actually pay to have this problem solved I can message people in my horse groups and friends to see if they'll give me money for that expert knowledge now we are talking Dana officially made her first dollar actually $11,000 the first week she went live with her test by messaging friends and people in her horse group she didn't need a full-blown website or application to start the business heck she didn't even have a company bank account or an LLC Corporation just a PayPal or venmo or cash app or real dollars for the first few months your dream 10 list for pre-selling you learned about the customer first approach in chapter 3 Now using that knowledge we are going to create the first 10 people you're going to contact for pre-selling your aim is to determine which ones are likely to be the easiest to be your ideal customers with them you'll get the fastest 0 to $1 to start I create a spreadsheet with 10 rows PR these are going to be your dream 10 Prospects ideal people you want to validate your business idea with here are the columns to use name company phone email when contacted when to follow up notes you can grab a free dream 10 spreadsheet at million dooll weekend.com make it easy start with your best friends who might be interested your zone of influence too often people make it hard by going outside their spheres they do this to avoid rejection when in reality your network wants to help you succeed check out your Facebook friend list your Facebook groups your favorites on contacts LinkedIn connections former colleagues past clients text message lists people from your church or synagogue your Twitter followers and others who fit your ideal customer for my sumojerky validation I wrote down friends who are health conscious ones who work in an office and service providers I pay who work in offices by the time you've done this you should have filled out at least 10 lines your dream 10 but if you're thinking dang I don't know 10 people who can buy this then M AB you should consider a different business idea hoping and praying that a thousand people in the world will magically buy it is living in la la land as my father would put it go after markets and businesses where you have influence so it's easier to succeed now it's time to turn that list into money scripts for pre selling your idea my buddy Daniel renberger sprung his first successful idea out of his day job at a local Apple Store where he taught Baby Boomers and little old ladies how to use computers every day his customers would ask him can I just take you home with me he thought the little old ladies were making a pass at him until he realized what they really wanted inhome technology training Daniel was always helping friends and family with their technology so to validate his in home tech training idea he asked them for referrals and had three paying customers within a week he made a profit with his first client doing the work manually and still hasn't spent a dime on his business outside of mileage his only equipment is a phone and his personal email address today his technology Consulting business is doing $20,000 a month let's take a closer look at the scripts to use and conversations Daniel had validation is a convers ation not a sales pitch but a chat to learn about the customer see if you can help them and if they'll actually pay you for this reason with your dream 10 I really recommend you turn the ask into an exploratory conversation to allow for more learning these people really know you and they'll be happy to give you time so use it to extract what most excites them about your product or not so you can tweak it the process to validate Your solution with your dream 10 can be broken down to to a three-part framework one listen two options three transition first listen in this listen step your job is to get customers talking about their problem here are three questions that will help you in this process what's the most frustrating thing about what's currently going on how would having X make your life better what do you think that X should cost finish with summarizing what the person said for example Daniel would say so you want an easier way to learn how to use your computer Pro tip use what or how questions to encourage a more open dialogue versus why or yes no questions which can limit your learning it's crucial to really listen and write down their problems because you're looking for the pain they're feeling and how valuable it would be for them to give you money the bigger the pain the bigger the opportunity next options now that you've uncovered the problem it's time to suggest options that can solve their problems and what they'd pay for it here are some examples from Daniel I'll sell you a digital course on how to fix your computer what if I came over and fixed your computer myself you're looking for excitement and a willingness to pay eye rolls and lower energy from your prospective customer are indicators of low interest now transition you know their problem and you know an option to fix it that they are excited about now it's time to transition to the sell so you like the idea of me coming over and fixing your computer problem for $50 I can do it today sound good if they pay you that's validation success if you get rejected I'll show you how to handle that in a moment often you can distill your offer down to three parts Price Plus benefit plus time strung together they form an offer sentence other examples for $25 I will teach you how to save an hour a day on your Mac in just 20 minutes for $69 I will teach you how to write better in 2 hours for $10 I will send you a PDF with 10 mind hacks that will change the way you think in 10 minutes for $180 I will provide 6 months of tasty jerky to your office this week Pro tip presenting your offer as a comparison can make it easier for your customer to understand we are like X but y for example we are like your competitor but twice as cheap research shows we better understand the world when something is presented as a contrast with something else asking for money there's a big difference between what people say and what people do everyone's interested until they have to pay that's why you don't ask would you be interested when you're validating I've had a lot of people say they're interested and then not pay no you ask for money and ask people to pay immediately now a warning when you validate you have to get comfortable with potentially selling a product before you've actually made it clearly explain when it will be delivered because people are fine with giving you money in advance as long as you set clear expectations here's my favorite way to ask for money sign up now while it's still at a discounted price x% of yll and you'll be grandfathered in at that price forever this offer is only good today Pro tip always follow up by sending an email to your first customers asking for feedback feedback is a gift you can continually use to improve yourself and your business dealing with rejection of course success won't always be so immediate when you use direct pre-selling to validate in fact you'll get rejected a whole lot and this is another instance where the technique shines that's because every rejection is an opportunity you can use it to take a deep dive into customer problems remember the rejection goals from chapter 2 rejections are treasure when I get shot down while validating I have a simple four question script that flips the no into new knowledge new ideas and maybe even new customers one why not it's really easy to get scared from attacking this one headon because what happens if their criticism is right but that's exactly what you want to know two who is one person you know who would really like this always always always ask for a referral be specific about what kind of referral and use a number this makes it highly effective three what would make this a no-brainer for you if they don't want your product maybe they'd want something related to it if they don't want to pay for your dog care app what about dog walking a dog Hotel dog dating four what would you pay for that one of the hardest things in a startup is setting prices getting potential customers to say what they pay is pure gold here's a quick story about how I turned rejection into a sale while validating there's a limit Edition movie poster company called Mondo that gets local artists to redesign movie posters and produce a limited number of the reinvented posters for sale Mondo tweets when a new poster becomes available and sells out within a few minutes so here was my idea limited edition posters of tacos from local restaurants instant million-dollar business idea right I always consider which color Ferrari I'll buy when I have these ideas this was going to be easy Mond was already doing a similar idea plus I knew artists and restaurants would promote the taco posters to their fan base and within minutes everything would be sold out you can probably see where this is going then I reached out to some good friends who I know love tacos and Pitch them the idea of a taco poster for $25 the responses I got uh so you want me to buy a print for $25 of a taco I'll pass yeah not my thing Noah no one loves tacos as much as you do obviously I was disappointed not even my close friends would buy a limited edition Taco print every time I got rejected I'd asked the person my four questions one why not two who is one person you know who would really like this three what would make this a no-brainer for you four what would you pay for that the answers in order were things like because I don't want a taco poster no one well I do like that taco shirt you have I'd be interested in that like what does a shirt like that cost $20 $30 that was the one thing that kept coming up a specific Taco shirt of mine that always got me an insane amount of attention from everyone time for validation experiment numero do I texted the same friends and called others and asked you know that taco shirt I wear would you want one here are the responses I got hell yeah hook it up give me now show me the tacos next I posted a picture of me in the shirt on Facebook and posted a price of $25 per shirt after I got 15 orders via Paypal no e-commerce no website people just sent me the money I closed off sales and started looking for a manufacturer and the taco shirt was born did it become a big splashy business no the big takeaway is this almost every business idea is guaranteed to fail on the first try Instagram started as a bourbon app slack started as a gaming app keep validating turn rejection into improvements feedback is gold gold it's Taco Time keep talking and listening to your customers so you can find out what they need Pro tip active Communications calls and texts work a lot better than passive ones like posting on Facebook or Twitter and waiting for replies try to direct message DM people or whatever enables you to get the fastest response time possible two marketplaces a classic way to validate your product is to use marketplaces sites like Facebook Marketplace Craigslist Reddit or whatever you have locally the great thing about a Marketplace is you have a ton of people who are looking to spend money it's a reliable way to validate different business ideas you're thinking of example my good bud Neville wanted to validate whether people would pay to rent expensive cameras he posted one for rent on Craigslist and was able to get $75 for it in a few hours this simple validation cost him doll in a few minutes of time this is so much better versus building a website figuring out a domain designing a logo trying to find customers Etc I also often use a simple virtual product process on Marketplace sites to test products that don't even exist yet I find an item similar to the one I want to validate or I draw up a quick and dirty design of what I want to sell and then I post it to the marketplace along with a price to see if there's an audience I love playing disc golf and once I found this really cool disc on the Reddit DIY channel so I took the photo of the disc and just posted it on Facebook Marketplace and Twitter with a sentence saying hey disc golf or Nintendo lovers I am going to make five custom Nintendo discs if you want one PayPal me $20 the point is I didn't try to find a manufacturer I didn't make a website I didn't try to test the dis I just said will anyone actually give me money for this and people did I sold 20 of them and got an online manufacturer to make them and ship them to customers another good technique involves posting on social media where you have an audience of people my assistant Jamie was looking to develop a side hustle so I asked her if she had ever trained other people to be an assistant because one she already had the skill and was very good at it and two a lot of other people wanted jobs like hers so she posted a message on Facebook right then hey I'm an assistant I make a lot of money doing it I want to help if you're curious how I do it I'm happy to help a few other people out just leave a comment or message me authentic straightforward open and approachable soon enough people started responding and soon she was charging $100 for people to Shadow her as she did her job that is exactly how you do it three landing pages one really popular approach is to set up a simple landing page using a cheap or free service currently insta page unbounce and clickfunnels are popular landing page tools find the latest landing page tools at million dooll weekend.com then they run a bunch of ads to send people to the site and see if people actually will enter an email address to get on the mailing list or even pre-order the product the reason I don't love this approach is you have to spend time setting it up and buying ads and when you buy ads you have to become an ad expert the whole experience is slow and costly two things I hate my recommendation for you is if you feel you have to do this limit your work to 48 hours so you won't spend a bunch of time fruitlessly playing with your ads and landing pages or wasting money as an example of how to do a landing page right take what my former intern Justin Mez did while validating what would become the successful bone broth company Kettle and fire to start he bought the domain bone bro.com for $12 and set up a basic landing page using unbs Justin paid around $5 on Fiverr to come up with the simple logo after setting up the page and writing the copy he picked a price he decided he could make a profit if he charged $29.99 for 16 o if people were willing to give a stranger nearly $30 for a pint of a product they'd never tasted or even seen then it was probably destined for Success at the site people who hit order now got sent to a PayPal checkout where they were asked to send money to Justin's email address for beef marrow bone broth the site was ugly enough to give graphic designers the cold sweats but after Justin bought about $50 of Bing ads people started actually coming to the site and PayPal him money over the course of the two-e test he netted almost $500 in revenue and now Kettle and fire is a100 million company selling broth validated the key is if you go this route don't overthink the design the name the language the ads or any of that just focus on seeing if you can get people to buy your product challenge validation your challenge is to get at least three paying customers within 48 Hours grab your dream 10 list that you made earlier text call direct message or email the more real time the better example script to copy hey I remember you really liked beef jerky potential buyer yeah eat it all the time awesome I'm working on a new project with healthy beef jerky think you'll love it you down to be my first customer only $20 a month I don't know what kind of jerky healthy sourced by me and if you don't like it happy to refund you sounds good can I pay later why don't you venmo PayPal or send me cash now so I can confirm you only taking 10 orders as part of the first batch potential buyer money set after you've validated if no one is buying choose another idea and start over head back to chapter 3 and begin again if you validated your idea with at least three customers that's amazing you did it my friend you have a business boom now let's talk about how to grow your business free bonus grab my six ways to enhance your offering at million dooll weekend.com part three grow it make money while you sleep you made it happen I'm proud of you let's begin creating the growth machine to turn your first customers into a community of fans that will drive your business's success I'm going to show you the exact marketing strategy I've used with every one of my businesses in the following chapters you'll learn social media is for growth how to create your inner circle of a 100 True fans shout out Kevin Kelly for the inspiration in 30 days choose the right platform for you and keep it growing with your unfair Advantage email is for profit how to lead this audience into your ATM your email list so that you can convert them from an audience to customers the growth machine how to set up your marketing experiments and double down on what's working 52 chances this year how to convert your dream life to daily actions chapter six social media is for growth build an audience who will support you for life after my father died I began dreaming of Bo Jackson the only athlete in history to be both an NFL and an MLB allstar he was one of the most popular athletes on the planet during the early '90s I remember how much adoration my father felt for Bo coming from nothing Bo was a shy and stuttering alabamian who had achieved all the fame and riches imaginable and my father came to see Bo's success as proof of the American dream they also were both named Bo maybe it was out of a desire to pay my respects or maybe it was just to feel close to him again but when my dad passed away a few years ago I knew one thing I had to meet Bo the thing was he had disappeared from the Limelight he wasn't working in Hollywood and he wasn't using an agent to keep his Fame alive he was just living a quiet life in Chicago as I was trying to contact Bo I learned that in 2012 he had started Bo bikes Bama an annual charity bike ride to raise money for emergency disaster relief in Alabama that's when I decided the best thing I could do was offer my help this was a great cause and if I helped him maybe he'd meet with me and come on the podcast so I turned to my audience which I built through years of free YouTube videos and weekly email newsletters and q&as I asked them I asked them and was shocked by the reaction this was the message I sent out to my audience when I was growing up my father's favorite athlete was Bo Jackson and today Bo needs our help my father isn't alive to help but we can every year Bo does a bike ride to raise money for emergency disaster relief in Alabama this year my goal is to raise $25,000 to help the children and state of Alabama donate to boob bikes Bama using the form below fundraising ends March 31st I'm matching 1 one up to $5,000 gift levels Amigo 10 letter I'll personally mail you a thank you letter from Alabama homie 50 custom deck of cards I'll mail you a custom deck of playing cards with each card designed by my favorite artist sidekick $100 cards plus shirt custom deck of cards and taco powered t-shirt new hermano $500 phone call everything above and a 1-hour consult with Noah Inner Circle 1,000 everything above an Austin bike ride go on a bike ride and hang out with me in Austin plus a minol backpack and clothes from ran and huckberry BFF 10,000 Mexico City let's do a taco and talk business at a Michelin stard resta in Mexico City all expenses paid in 3 days we raised $30,000 from my audience and small donations all without going viral two days later Bo called me personally to thank me and soon thereafter he appeared on my podcast of course you were able to raise such a crazy amount I hear you responding my dear reader you have a huge audience but here's the remarkable thing when I went down the list of 102 names of people who donated to bikes Bama I recognized nearly every name I had interacted with these people I'd given them business advice I occasionally just said you're doing great keep going these weren't followers or an anonymous audience they were what marketing Guru Seth Goden calls your smallest viable audience or what Wired Magazine co-founder Kevin Kelly has called 1,000 true fans all built by connecting with people whose particular challenges and interests overlapped with my particular skills and Passions the lifetime value not to mention the lifelong Joy generated by a community of 100 high value attentive fans who know like and trust you will dwarf whatever short-term satisfaction you may get from having 10,000 low value inattentive followers and it doesn't matter if you sell mountain biking gear cooking lessons or SEO Services there are hundreds maybe even thousands of people among the billions of Internet users that will not only pay for what you're selling now but will follow and support your every entrepreneurial move for years to come a community who already knows you who follows you who is rooting for you is one of the most powerful forces in business and it's created through generosity adding value without expectation helping them with their Journey without asking for an immediate return sometimes it's helping them by boosting their self-esteem with a simple compliment I've spent 20 years giving out free content to people through OK dor and app Sumo so when I finally said hey I'm raising money for charity do you guys want to contribute it was easy for me to ask and saying yes was a no-brainer for my community it takes time to build a real audience back in 2000 I started ok dor.com to document my journey for friends from high school and college in those early years posts were all over the place marketing pictures of my Stu frog Seymour things happening in college as my blog evolved it became more focused on marketing and starting a business based on my interests and requests from readers the network of people who helped make my success possible were built by putting myself out there building my businesses in public failures and all for instance Seth Goden responded to one of my blog posts enabling me to meet him my marketing Idol and I got the mint job because of building in public name drop alert because I kept putting myself out there I also met Tim Ferris Andrew Chen Mike Posner Bo Jackson James Clear Ryan Holliday Firefox co-creator Blake Ross best-selling author ramit sethy and even my co-author tall Raz meeting people like this is one of the best things in life now I've never deliberately built a personal brand I was always just myself I liked sharing I was honest and transparent people get hooked on characters people do business with real people people especially those who feel like a friend take Danny Wong Design the local lawn care company that posts riveting weekly 45 second before and after clips of beautifying their client yards to Snappy music and targets their posts to homeowners within their service area they now have 2.3 million Tik Tok followers and regularly get 150,000 views and often tons more for their backyard Transformations and Dany himself is nowhere to be found in the videos finding your unique angle so how do you find your unique angle to start building up your community when people come to me asking how I can get my newsletter or blog posts or tweets to stand out from the crowd our conversation almost always centers around getting them to understand how their special sauce is the unfair advantage that will make them shine take for example Ben Kenyan Ben is the head strength and conditioning coach for the Philadelphia 76ers NBA basketball team he's also C CEO and founder of great day Squad he's a great guy super strong funny amazing beard I had the luck to interview him for okay dork because he wanted my advice on starting a newsletter he thought his problem was that he didn't know the process but the mechanics come down to figuring out how to embrace and amplify your uniqueness in a way that attracts people to become friends and customers I asked him one question what's your unique angle in 30 seconds or less in other words why would anyone care to read his newsletter I know that sounds harsh but that's the first question you have to answer before you put yourself into the public sphere pressed into defining his unique angle Ben paused he rumpled his face up laughed nervously and Shrugged this is hard finally he spoke slowly and then with confidence listen to how Ben defined his angle his sauce I've been a performance coach for the last 14 years working with the best athletes in the world helping people perform better is my groove I want to help anybody who wants to have a great day and shift them into the mentality to dominate their life I have information to share when it comes to dealing with the best that is beautiful both in its heartfelt honesty and authenticity but also in its Clarity let's pick it apart and look at what he did in those four sentences one he defines who he is two why you should trust him three what he is passionate about and four what unique thing this prepares him to do for you it is clear approachable direct and short the first three sentences Define what makes him special 14 years helping the best athletes in the world perform better and the fourth how he's solving his customers problems teaching mindsets needed to dominate life defines the kind of love and attention he'll generously dispense to cultivate a community take a minute and as Ben has done done write out a pitch in your Journal describing your special sauce challenge write out your unique angle there are no right answers here you can change these anytime you'd like one who are you two why should people listen three what are you passionate about four what will you do for people pick a platform with your unique angle you need to reach an audience and the best way to do it for free is through social media you can choose any free platform phot photographers love Instagram to Showcase their newest cool stuff to the world Consultants love to stand on a soap box at LinkedIn journalists marketers and others like the few hundred characters of Twitter designers can show off their work at dribble authors can start a blog for free on wordpress.com and that's just today the platforms are going to change but what won't change is how you pick one you need to know three things to choose one which site has the audience you want to connect with two what medium do you enjoy creating content in three what disproportionate results will you get compared to the work you put in so you can see how this process works for a real person let's break down how I chose my platform to start I eliminated the ones that don't work for me Instagram I don't take a lot of picks bye-bye insta but hey if you're an interior designer like Kelsey Hutchins where are people going to look for photos of your work Instagram without a doubt that's how she gets most of her business podcasting I tried it for years and frankly the audience is highly engaged but growing that audience relative to the work involved was near impossible no matter what I did I couldn't grow it a limited number of people listen to podcasts and currently discovering new podcasts is nearly impossible however Jordan Harbinger has turned his love of interviewing and podcasts into a seven fig business the Jordan Harbinger show LinkedIn great audience of business people but it's incredibly noisy and going viral on it is really tough but Justin Welsh has used LinkedIn to sell a course that brought in $1.3 million in the first two years blogging I love blogging on okor and still do it but the volume of Google searches has gone down overall for me the work of posting doesn't drive as many viral shares anymore because more of the audience is spending their time directly on social media former Rolling Stone writer Matt Tabby brings in 1.3 million visitors a month and over $500,000 a year on substack so blogging can still work Twitter I love it but the audience isn't growing their monthly users have been flat for years going viral works there but getting people off the platform and buying on yours is tough Nick Huber of the sweaty startup has turned his storage business into an even larger business mostly from tweeting provocative comments about how to run compan ianes Tik Tok no shade on Tik Tok here but in my experience 1 million followers there or 100,000 on YouTube not equivalent I'd take YouTube Every time in fact by one measure one YouTube sub equals 25 on Tik Tok then again if your audience is all under 25 and getting all its news dance moves and buying advice on Tik Tok you've got to go where your people are I've started experimenting with Tik Tok and have gotten 150,000 plus followers repurposing my YouTube content but no Direct business impact after multiple attempts just cuz these platforms don't work for me does not mean they won't work for you the more important part is to start with just one as an experiment for me it was YouTube oh yeah come to Papa YouTube is the largest streaming video site on the internet it has 122 million active daily users who consume a billion hours of video each day plus YouTube monetizes your videos for you with ads and hosts them at no cost my favorite price YouTube is simply the best way I've ever seen to grow an audience and an audience of quality for free the challenge with YouTube is that it's harder to create a video than write a tweet which discourages most people however I see that as an advantage since it means less competition if you're willing to do it or maybe you hate being on camera but that's no excuse either so many channels have gotten massive like Sunny V2 2 plus million subscribers to his documentaries about famous people and we've never seen his face you also don't need an expensive Studio or Hollywood gear I started my 750,000 plus subscriber Channel shirtless in my living room talking about marketing shooting with my iPhone 12 nothing fancy needed no excuses just get to it the key principle is to start right now to build your audience and then move them to your email list which we'll cover in the next chapter challenge update your bio choose your one platform and using the unique angle pitch you wrote out before clean up and rewrite your profile bio on that platform to reflect who you are and how you help your ideal customer here's my bio Chief Sumo at appsumo number 30 at Facebook helping entrepreneurs atok dor.com creating content for your core Circle in the time it will take for you to read this sentence the content on my Blog odor. Twitter at NOA Kagen and YouTube youtube.com/ Ador will have reached an extra 5,000 people for free that's wild amazing and doable for you too a good post or video works while you sleep without any additional cost the internet gives anyone the chance to have the same broadcasting power as a massive media brand no permission is needed to build your own audience take Ali abdall in 2017 he was a Cambridge University medical student who thought he'd try his hand at YouTube his videos included things like tips on studying and memorization for the bat this is the British medical school entrance exam the biomedical admissions test he made videos about how to take section one of the exam and then about how to take section two later he showed how to prep for the med school interview and his audience grew because there was a very specific group of people who were desperate for Ali's expertise on a very specific problem they faced today Ali is a massive star with more than 4.4 million YouTube subscribers and earns more than $400,000 a month Ali is one of the guys I respect most on YouTube and a great guide for the audience Gathering Journey so let's unpack his playbook for all of us to replicate Ali uses what I call the content Circle framework the basic idea is to start with specific topics for a tiny Circle to build raving fans then slowly expand your circle of content to influence larger groups of people here are the three steps One Core Circle start with a very narrow audience Ali started with the medical school exams for British people your Niche within a niche can be the most obscure thing imaginable as long as it makes you and your audience passionate two medium Circle As you move bigger your content should overlap somewhat with what concerns your core Circle but it should appeal to a broader audience Ali started talking about studying and productivity in general since that's required for all students three large Circle here you go for the largest audience possible that's still related some of Ali's most watched videos are about his salary made possible by his medical video fame or the latest Apple product which he uses to increase productivity all the circles should still include your core audience but keep expanding your circle of influence here are examples of other people who followed the content Circle framework Dustin wonderlick of Dustin's fish tanks started by literally reviewing fish tanks and you know what there's a real audience for that as time went on he expanded to All Things fish like what kind of fish to buy to rid your tank of algae and what the top aquarium plants are and now he has a 150,000 subscribers and a million dooll online business selling fish and Arium supplies then there's Kyle Lota the Austin Bas Creator behind the very cool YouTube channel Kyle got camera Kyle's into biohacking he reviews cold plunges red light therapy saunas sleep gadgets supplements and all that while he's got a modest audience 16,000 subscribers on YouTube he's built such a tight Community with his core that even though a lot of his videos get only 400 views he Nets a cool $1 million a year from affiliate sales he knows his core Circle and they love him or take an offline example Andy Schneider aka the chicken Whisperer just loved raising chickens in his backyard outside Atlanta people kept asking him for info and hints on raising their own so he started holding regular meetings about raising backyard poultry like real life YouTube 5 years later Schneider had a radio show a magazine and a book and now he travels around the United States leading Workshop s hundreds of thousands of dollars followed but it all started with serving a niche within a niche backyard farmers who wanted to raise chickens to get started identify a value that A specific group of people your core Circle want and become a reliable source of information for them here's a formula you can use outcome you'll deliver plus target market here's an example of content circles for a house cleaning company core Circle how to clean your evaporative cooler Plus in the Southwest USA medium Circle how to choose laundry detergents for new homeowners large Circle the 10 best vacuums for a family once you have your outcome and Market figured you need to find a unique Viewpoint in your Niche to come up with your unique Viewpoint to ask yourself a few questions what is something everyone thinks is true but you think is wrong what is something nobody in your target market is talking about but should be what are the biggest mistakes people in your Market are making but are are totally blind to ultimately your audience wants to learn something from you that's relevant useful and surprising and they want to do that by going on a journey with you challenge create your own content Circle think back to your validation days who are the customers you want to appeal to and what's the outcome you can create content for what's the unique point of view in your content they'd be excited to hear about formula equals outcome you'll deliver plus the target market core Circle medium Circle large Circle be the guide not the guru if I've learned anything from the thousands of videos I have created for YouTube it is that people don't want to be lectured at by an all- knowing Guru they want to tag along with a guide that's why I post so many videos where I reveal the nuts and bolts of my processes Ali is an absolute genius at this process his videos which are almost always titled how I rather than how two follow him as he guides viewers through how he studies for medical school entrance exams or takes notes on his iPad Pro or how he learned to type really fast the goal here is to document what you do not what you think everyone else should do when you position yourself as someone who's on a journey and document your process and your progress you become relatable and that is what audiences long for some of my most popular videos feature me failing often it's fascinating that people want to see what's really going on not the Highlight Reel we think they want if you think you don't have anything worth documenting you're probably wrong whether you have a desk job or some unique hobby there is something about your process that others can learn from an example of this is the Matt's off-road recovery YouTube channel which has 1.4 million subscribers showing Matt just doing his regular day job using his tow truck to help people who've gotten stuck in a way that makes it entertaining and instructive the cool thing with becoming your audience's guide is it makes them want to interact with you that's why I regularly co-create with my Audience by doing the business equivalent of schoolyard dares like when I dared my monthly 1K class to supply me with a business idea to validate which became Sumo jerky I ask my audience to challenge me to do something difficult then I go out and do it getting your audience involved helps them feel like an integral part of the show which boosts the chances they'll engage with your videos which pushes your content up the rankings and attracts even more subscribers Devin Stone of legal eagle is a genius at this way of building audience engagement in his push to help people think like a lawyer he encourages his audience to leave comments in the form of objections which he then sustains or overrules in the comment thread challenge post one piece of content now it's time to post content publicly now this piece of content can come in any format you know I love me some YouTube but as you've seen different niches work on different platforms the content you create can be a YouTube video a Twitter thread or a blog post you've already taken the first steps in this chapter one your unique angle the secret sauce nobody else has two the platform you're going to post on three your content Circle the narrow audience who you'll laser target four posting it today this last step is obviously the hardest one don't worry about scripts camera equipment or even if it gets any views the important part is taking the first step at building your community next we're going to show you how to turn the community into customers with an email list chapter 7 email is for profit use email to make a fat ton of money app sumo's first $10,000 Day started with an email about a boner I was just starting to build appsumo and my whole business was based on sending emails to subscribers and presenting them with an awesome deal up to that point the emails were written by me and a 17-year-old Bulgarian guy named Nicola who didn't speak English very well no offense Nicola and we were making around $100 per email our most profitable email to date had made $1,000 I was right where you are now just starting out and then my friend Neville medura started bugging me to let him write one of our emails Neville a copywriter was convinced that appsumo emails were being ignored because they were always selling selling selling entrepreneurs who expressed an attractive Story made more sales he said but I was skeptical of the magic of story my emails were fine I was targeting the right people appsumo would grow still I figured I had nothing to lose from giving him a chance so I let Neville draft the email for our next offer an app called kest that helped with fonts a subject I know nothing about normally Nicolo would have just written there's a deal on this product and you get to save $1,000 throw in a buy button and that was my typical email it was just go by not much more than that an hour later Neville sent me a rough draft of an email and what he wrote completely changed my mind about how entrepreneurs should interact with their customers it started with a line I will never forget if you get a boner when I whisper the word gamand into your ear you might be interested I had no idea what gamand was but from that line on the email grew increasingly entertaining and captivating it showed people that I'd had a funny struggle with fonts and it taught them how they could overcome it with kest Neville told a long story about how Steve Jobs was fascinated by fonts specifically about how he loved the font helvetica and made sweet sweet love to it it was a silly story but it brought the reader into my head the actual monetary offer wasn't any better than the offers I put in my earlier emails the big difference was the copy it was an authentic person on the page struggling telling jokes laughing and teaching in my email list loved the new me we made $956,000 into the email we made nearly 100 times more money Here's the final email we sent out we had to take the boner out Corporate email obscenity filters and all subject Steve Jobs was originally obsessed with typography two testy 3 atok dor.com from appsumo no appsumo I'm going to save you a bunch of time if the names Luca sand Unicode or Courier new don't mean anything too you go ahead and close this message you see my friend today we're reaching out only to the community of people known as font Fanatics you know who you are if your knees go weak when I whisper gamond you might be one of them you can call yourself a designer or a developer to normal society but behind closed doors we know the Elegance of verdana Curves turn you on and that's why we're here today as Steve Jobs described his obsession with beautiful typography I learned about serif and Sans serif type faces about varying the amount of space between different letter combin ations about what makes great typography great it was beautiful historical artistically subtle in a way science can't capture and I found it fascinating Steve Jobs if like jobs Your Lust For fonts craves more and more every month the solution stands before you kest did you hear that I said kest it takes an obsessive eye to pick which fonts play well together and every month a new combination of fonts is delivered to you complete with HT ML and CSS highlighting maybe you're like me you can easily tell when something looks really good but you sometimes don't know why this is a problem I have I can see a clean looking web page but can't tell why my Franken sight doesn't look as slick often the answer is typography when I smash Ariel 12 with TOA 36 it somehow doesn't work and don't even get me started on the color schemes once again kernis to the rescue when you get your new fonts you can Rejoice that you don't have to fool around with them they are ready to implement and the grueling process of marrying fonts together has been taken care of by the almighty kist himself most things in life aren't free and don't dare expect kest to be kest charges $15 a month for delivering the most obsessively picked font combinations every month this my dear sumoing is $180 a year a fair price for making your clients knees quiver when they see your stunning work but full price makes the appsumo angry and hungry we have convinced kernis through intimidation and force to give away a lifetime membership at less than the yearly price this means no monthly payments no yearly payments no alimony payments no nothing for life just magical font combinations every month capable of making an ugly project come to life from beautiful typography as you know from past appsumo promotions we always get late to the gamers whining and pleading to let them buy the deal after it's over the countdown timer on appsumo does not lie if you are a designer take action now to stand out from lifeless design and stay ahead of the game get your lifetime membership to kest here kest PS We also convinced AKA threatened kest to give away the last four months of font combinations for every lifetime sign up through this deal you get them soon as you sign up only 48 hours left your pal at Noah Kagan all it took was a bad joke and a 100 times increase in Revenue to make me rethink how I communicated with my email list the email was fun it wasn't pure utility sales have repeatedly been shown to go up when the people selling are enjoying themselves over the 15 years before I launched appsumo I had learned how to grow a pretty huge audience at okay dor by promoting interesting people exposing my passions interacting with my followers and just all in all having fun being myself somewhere along the way though I came to believe that the audience building excitable nerd me and the business me had to be separate until this $10,000 profit eye opener I had failed to apply my audience building powers to my businesses every time I launched a new product or business I started building a new from the ground up like I had Amnesia Neville's email changed all of that it gave me permission to make who I am a part of how I market and sell more important it opened my eyes to the singular power of email I now could see how social media telling stories and email could create a really large business in chapter 6 you built an audience on social media for free and you learned how to appeal to them with the generosity that will lead them to root for your success now you're going to lead this audience into your own ATM your email list so that you are in regular personal contact with them and can convert them from an audience to customers I'm going to show a simple four-step process to turn your audience into a massive paycheck which is what a vibrant and engaged email subscriber list is ready let's go in this chapter you'll learn how to use a piece of useful free content to get people excited to sign up for your list how to create a simple effective landing page and publicize it far and wide how to automate your email system so it's sending out emails to new subscribers 24 hours a day your email list is power which of these options is the most valuable for your business a 100 email subscribers B 1,000 YouTube subscribers C 10,000 Instagram followers the answer may surprise you but it's a email is the king and queen of communicating with customers email is the most valuable Channel because it allows you to own the distribution and the communication with your customer customers and not be at the mercy of another platform's fickle algorithm still skeptical let me give you six reasons why email is the best one my company appsumo generates $65 million a year in total transactions and you know what nearly 50% of that comes from email this percentage has been consistent for more than 10 years two don't believe me I have 120,000 Twitter followers 750,000 YouTube subscribers and 150,000 Tik Tok fans and I would give them all up for my 100,000 email subscribers why every time I send an email 40,000 people open it and consume my content I'm not hoping the platform Gods will allow me to reach them on the other platforms anywhere between 100 and 1 million people pay attention to my content but it's not consistent or in my control three I know what you're saying come on Noah email is dead now ask yourself when was the last time you checked your email exactly email is used obsessively by over 4 billion people it's the largest way of communicating at scale that exists today 89% of people check it every day four social media decides who and how many people you're seen by one tweak to the algorithm and your toast remember the digital publisher little things yeah no one else does either they closed after they lost 75% of their 20,000,000 monthly visitors when Facebook changed its algorithm in 2018 CEO Joe spiser says it killed his business and he lost $100 million the five you own your email list forever if appsumo shuts down tomorrow my insurance policy my sweet sweet baby my beloved my email list comes with me and makes anything I do after so much easier because it's mine six it also doesn't cost you significant money to grow your list or to communicate with your list whereas Facebook or Google ads consistently cost money honestly the number one regret of just about every entrepreneur I know is this I wish I started my email as sooner don't be that person email marketing needs to be your new best friend the only way to consistently monetize whatever audience you build wherever you build it is with email that means that you're not really building an audience if you don't have their email no matter how many new social media platforms pop up email is still the most powerful channel for deepening your relationship with your audience even if you don't have a business at this very moment it's great to start building your email list now so when you do want to have a business you already have a trusted group of people who want to help you out there is one vitally important point I want to make before we move on that is the importance of having a list of people who want you to win sheer size is not the metric to use to evaluate an email list it doesn't matter if you have 100,000 Subs if none of them care about you one of the very first clients of my great friend Charlie hone he's worked for Tim Ferris ramit sethy Tucker Max was a Real Estate Mogul who bought an email list of 1 million subscribers to promote his book The List was made up of people who'd signed up for discounts at retail and restaurant chains and had nothing whatsoever to do with the Mogul Charlie emailed them a sequence of five emails and fewer than 100 people open the messages it's about quality not quantity what percentage of your list opens every email because they feel like they know and trust you a healthy email list has a 20% open rate target that having a bond that leads people to open your emails not the size of the list is where the power of email lies the big question now is how can you get your first subscribers let me show you set up a landing page your audience needs somewhere to go to actually join your email list even though you can technically start an email list just by emailing people in Gmail or your local email client just saying the way companies marketers entrepreneurs and content creators do this is by sending their audiences to a landing page Julian Maran a monthly 1K student did a landing page for his business sleep Sumo helping people sleep better that's it give me your email and I'll give you a bonus Resource One free tip each week to improve your sleep simple a landing page is a simple web page with an image a few words and a box where people can input their email address to get future Updates this is where you can offer them the bonus content AKA lead magnet see the next page you just created all you need your website to do is to communicate a value proposition and provide a way to capture emails ch chenge build your landing page you can set up one like Julian for free with send fox.com a service I help build there are also other services like mailchimp.com webflow docomomo create landing pages go to million dooll weekend.com to see more landing page examples getting your first 100 email subscribers 0 to 10 the dream 10 what's the easiest way to start building your list use your existing Network yes your dream 10 these are people people who know you and care about you the members of this highly engaged audience are waiting to visit subscribe to and share your website and content they are your most powerful tool for knocking over that initial subscription Domino my mom my brother and my other close friends are on my mailing list always look at what assets and networks you have available before you reach out to randoms here's a template you can use my former monthly 1K student Brian Harris used it and he's been able to get to 10,000 plus subscribers at video fruit he sent his dream 10 and more a message that says hey name I just wanted to let you know that I'm starting description of your new business I'm going to publish one article per week SL a weekly tip on how to subject is this something you are interested in here's an easy way to sign up insert landing page address or you can just write back with yes dude I'd like to and I'll do it for you hope things are great that's it then if they respond with a yes which they most likely will because you know them put their email on your subscriber list 11 to 50 lazy marketing now that you have a landing page you've got to publicize it obviously you're already doing that by putting it in your calls to action inside your videos Tik toks or wherever you are promoting yourself online and in their corresponding descriptions but you can go a lot further by putting a link to it in every point of contact you have with others that means putting the landing page address in your email signature biography on Twitter LinkedIn Tik Tok Instagram and Facebook those offer more leverage than most people think on average a person sends around 40 emails per day that means that every day you have a chance to place your new landing page address in at least 40 emails that's 40 lottery tickets with above average Chan of winning just make it fun like this one of mine when you add your landing page to your email and your social bios you can measure the traffic and conversion rate you get from these mentions with bitly.com or link tree.com website address shorteners that track clicks challenge update email signature and social media bios put your landing page address in your email signature and your social bios send me a link to your new landing page at twitter.com Noak I'd love to hear from you 51 to 100 Post in your places you already have a social presence now it's time to post a modified version of that email above in Facebook Snapchat Twitter Reddit groups or wherever you're active hey everyone starting a Weekly Newsletter about subject go to website.com to join the newsletter posting in your top places should move your total subscribers list close to 100 use targeted referrals to grow your list ask your family and friends to refer one specific person who they think would like your newsletter the more specific you are when you describe the person the more likely you are to make it easier for them to do it take what I did for Sumo jerky do you know someone who makes purchase decisions at an office and likes a good laugh don't forget about people you work with I know there can be conflict but you have more friends than you realize who want to support you growing beyond your first subscribers Chris Von wilpert was trying to build a Content marketing agency he knew that the marketing software company HubSpot with the number five top worldwide traffic rank in the online marketing Tech space was a massive object of Interest among the marketers who made up his potential client base so he decided on a strategy one write an insanely detailed blog post dissecting the success of and drawing lessons from hubspot's content marketing approach he spent 40 hours working on this two use social media and pretty much everything else to get that post in front of his ideal customers three put a call to action CTA at the end of the post telling readers to sign up to receive a download of growth hacks he'd put together after all of Chris's intense Outreach 5,000 people had viewed his blog post reverse engineering HubSpot success and within 2 weeks his email list grew from zero to over 1,000 subscribers just putting out a great free piece of content and incentivizing the readers with a lead magnet the free growth hack spreadsheet for those who signed up worked I was one of them I thought the post and his audience Outreach was so fire I reached out personally in the end that turned into a $100,000 Payday for Chris because after I asked him to reverse engineer another company's growth strategy for my okay dork and it became my most shared blog post ever I offered off him $100,000 to live in our Austin offices for 6 months and execute his content marketing strategy for appsumo seriously using a lead magnet gives people an incentive to join your email list versus just asking people to sign up now not every lead magnet has to involve the complexity and dedication that Chris's did plenty of more modest content combined with attractive bonuses can seriously boost your email subscriber list here are four examples of lead magnets I use a checklist that can be used to properly perform something I explained in a video a template for determining say a business's profit margin an advanced guide that goes further into the details of a subject of one of my videos a unique book that provides substantial value but is offered for free for me it is 11 side hustle ideas to make $500 Day from your phone the appropriate opt-in incentive depends on your content here are other other types of examples a DIY Carpenter could offer plans to make a corner table a marketing YouTuber could offer scripts of what to say on sales phone calls a landscaping expert might offer recommendations for which kinds of grass to use around the United States YouTuber Nick true at mapped out money who makes video tutorials that teach the best practices for using the personal budgeting software wab found that he gets the highest signup rates when he offers a checklist that relates to the video his followers really like having a resource that they can use to put his advice into practice Jess Dante of love in London runs a YouTube channel helping viewers plan their trips to London by suggesting lesser-known restaurants and stores to visit her Superstar opt-in incentive is a free London 101 guide with everything a first-time visitor needs to know it's been downloaded more than 45,000 times where you make your call to action will also have an impact on your success building your email list you can make your call to action in a variety of places or ways inside your videos one of the best ways is to give a short relevant tease of the bonus or resource you're offering within the YouTube video and tell people where they can learn more challenge create a lead magnet it's time to create your first lead magnet using the process we've just outlined above you can use your piece of content from the previous chapter as a base or start something new don't spend more than 2 hours on the first iteration if you want to turn it into a big thing later on great but start small go to million dooll weekend.com to get lead magnet templates see what I did there now that you have an email list that's starting to grow let's enable it to work for you 24/7 set up your cash register what's your first action after you read a really great book you go look for other books by that author right point is if people like your stuff they want more at the exact moment your customer is interacting with or just found your business they are most excited about it so that's when you want to funnel them into other experiences with you instead of letting them go because they want you so what does this mean this means that instead of waiting for a week or more after they subscribe to send them their first email you set up an autoresponder and hit them up right away and better yet send them your best stuff so you know they'll have a great experience when they're dining at the email restaurant of you an autoresponder is a tool that automatically sends an email or a sequence of emails to specific groups of people in response to specific behavior in this case to your new subscribers when they sign up for your business's newsletter and news at your cutter landing page think of it as a personal assistant who works more or less for free 24 hours a day don't feel bad about it they don't mind every email provider has an autoresponder again I recommend send fox.com but you can use mailchimp.com or convert kit.com as well here's the three-step progression of emails that I've found works best one welcome email subject you're awesome thanks for joining okay dork you are awesome over 17 years of working online I've learned some things number 30 at Facebook and help launch mobile status updates and more number four at mint and led growth to 1 million users within one year started app Sumo which is now an $85 per year business and now I want to help you on your journey to living the life you want what could I write to provide value to you love you Noah tacos Kagan 2 connection email subject connect with me on LinkedIn howy Migo send me a connection request on LinkedIn to help share our relationships see behind the scenes thoughts on marketing startups and more hugs Noah 3 content email subject starting an 8 figure business with $50 I started app Sumo in March 2010 in one weekend with $50 I launched version one of the site it was simple 12 years later Sumo group has grown into an8 fig business starting a business can be hard but I want to show you an easier way here's how I built appsumo docomo Noah first the welcome email is just what it says it is a big bare hug of a welcome telling your new subscriber how happy you are that they just joined your band of pirates and what sort of stuff they should expect from you remember this welcome will arrive at the moment they are most willing to participate in your business that's why every time someone joins my list I ask one question in my welcome email what could I write to provide value to you in that way you'll get tons of content ideas and know exactly what your subscribers want a major thing here is one by one marketing this is personally engaging with each new subscriber when you're starting out every single person matters frankly everyone in your audience matters forever but especially at the beginning you should respond to every single new subscriber I still do this for nearly every single email and did for most of my YouTube comments second with the connection email you're explicitly asking them to connect with on social media by following you on Instagram LinkedIn Facebook Twitter and so on finally the content email is where you give them a piece of great content a blog post like Chris Von Wilbert's a video or the invite to an event if you're an interior designer this is where you might show them your work and get them excited or for Sleep Sumo Julianne could send a blog post about the science of sleeping under or on top of the covers you know there are two types of sleepers in the world now one final tip before we move on I always advise sending your best content email free course best articles or videos content most useful for your audience Etc in the beginning the reason is simple for each subscriber open rates usually start high then decline after a few emails so show subscribers your best work to minimize that decline challenge set up an autoresponder I happen to think senf fox.com I help build it is pretty darn good but there are a bunch of others that I recommend like convert kit.com and mailchimp.com go to million dooll week.com for a free tutorial and templates you can copy for yourself the law of 100 in 2018 I started a podcast called Noah Kagan presents I did around 50 episodes total and got about 30,000 downloads an episode and then I gave it up completely does that sound familiar to you have you been trying to start a business learn chess grow your social presence or maybe play guitar and you also gave up a little bit early compare that to the story of a guys from buffer.com I remember these guys commenting on my blog in 2010 telling me that they were doing social sharing were starting this business blah blah and I remember thinking to myself they are so not going to stick with that idea and fail I don't know why I was such a hater what I do know is it's over 10 years later now and their business is doing $20 million in recurring Revenue so what's the difference between my podcast and buffer they stuck with it and I didn't to avoid fails like that I've come to rely on an effective framework I call the law of 100 let me explain using a crazy study from the University of Florida photography Professor Jerry yulsman split his photography into two groups the quantity group and the Quality Group the quantity group group had to take 100 pictures to get an A Grade by the end of the semester and the Quality Group could turn in just one photo by the end of the semester but it had to be perfect to get the a can you guess what happened the quantity group kicked the quality group's ass in terms of quality why the quantity group experimented more they took tons of photos learned from their mistakes each time spent more time in the dark room and they got better with time that's what the law 100 is about it's simple whatever you put yourself to do it 100 times before you even think of stopping this stops you from succumbing to what Seth Goden calls the dip the moment in a long slog between starting and when Mastery sets in where you start hating the work and you want to quit for me with my podcast I wanted to get 100,000 downloads an episode so when I only got to 30,000 downloads I was discouraged and gave up completely after just just 50 tries what's Wild is a if I was getting 30,000 downloads today it would be a top podcast and B since I've restarted and committed I'm at 7,500 downloads an episode a painful but valuable lesson lean in and commit to 100 reps think of this as doing reps and practicing as opposed to failing or succeeding this changes your mindset and makes it much easier to sustain Forward Motion when things get tough the key is to set up a system that helps you get your 100 reps done without thinking about the results the solution to all the doubt that will inevitably creep up on you is to commit to your first 100 whatever it is for you with complete disregard for your results if you want to start a YouTube channel publish 100 videos if you're doing a newsletter write a 100 emails if you're starting a new hobby like chess or guitar practice for 100 days if you're creating a business directly pitch 100 customers just focus on that first 100 don't worry about whether people are watching or liking or engaging or buying or following just put it out for the first 100 it's about your doing it rather than anyone else's liking it once that's done you can decide whether you want to give it up or not the lesson here is to do today what you need in order to reach you your end goal step by step session by session video by video and email by email with each iteration you keep improving a little bit the law of 100 is about the power of consistency the only way to get to Greatness challenge the law of 100 commit to doing 100 emails posts or whatever action will move you closer to your goals to live up to your commitment use the law of 100 grid below to track your progress and don't break the chain task one 3 4 6 2 3 4 2 268 20 30 31 32 32 34 3 36 37 38 30 4 42 42 3 44446 478 4 42 43 4445 6 c f8 f 16 61 62 63 64 65 66766 771 27374 7476 77879 8181 8828 485868 78899 919 29394 95969 7989 9100 get a digital copy of the law of 100 tracker at million dooll weekend.com chapter 8 the growth machine my battle tested growth Playbook sorry Noah you're not good enough yet to Market my company that's how mint.com founder Aaron patzer said no to me the first time I asked him to be his director of marketing and it was true I was no marketer then and I had no experience or real plan but after being fired from Facebook I was desperate to show the world I wasn't a loser I came back to him with a detailed marketing plan I'd use again and again for the next 15 years and then I pitched it to Aaron as an offer that can't be refused I'll get you 100,000 users in 6 months before you've even launched the product I told him if I don't hit my target you don't have to pay me I executed the marketing plan with two key components sponsoring very targeted Financial bloggers and writing the best Finance content online 6 months later in September 2007 mint officially launched with 1 million users I had exceeded my goal 10 times over and got my first sixf figure salary since then I have grown eight different million-dollar businesses with the same marketing plan sumo.com reached 1 billion impressions in 12 months senf fox.com got 10,000 customers in 6 months and 850,000 plus YouTube subscribers in the past few years I've learned how to create a marketing plan to repeatably grow businesses there are an unlimited number of marketing strategies out there but there are five questions I keep coming back to for every single business here are my five exact questions to create your own marketing plan and if you want to see the original mint marketing plan go to million weekend.com one what is your one goal for this year two who exactly is your customer and where can you find them three what is one marketing activity you can double down on four how can you Delight your first 100 customers five if you had to double your business with no money in 30 days what would you do merely copying the plan and then hoping and praying won't work that's gambling that's luck as a strategy it's impossible to know which marketing strategies will work for you blogging worked for me atm.com but has never worked for appsumo docomo but we couldn't make the economics work for my OK dork brand ultimately this is all about setting up a process that helps you identify which tactics work for you before we start marketing we have to choose a goal to work toward one set a single hyperfocused exact goal Mark Zuckerberg sat me down in his office and I started pitching how we could sell tickets inside Facebook events Mark we are not profitable and we need the money letun try this out I pleaded he said no then he took a dry erase marker and wrote on the board growth and next to it he wrote a number one billion and proceeded to explain that every single activity we did should be focused only on on growing our user base to 1 billion users a laser focus on the outcome and strict prioritizing drove the company to where it is today that's the moment it clicked for me and I use it to this day to choose one very specific goal to work toward first off you need to set a goal that means choosing a number for appsumo in the beginning the goal was 100,000 email addresses everything else revenue from purchases sharing deals visibility brand awareness is rooted in that single number we noticed that if we could grow that number everything else grew too other examples could be the monthly Freedom number you chose in chapter 1 1,000 YouTube subscribers $1 million in net revenue 50 clients your goal is the one number that matters most starting with the destination makes planning the route much easier Pro tip be specific one of the most common mistakes I see from entrepreneurs when they set goals is they say they want more more Revenue more traffic more downloads but how much and by when now at a time frame a terrible goal is I want to be rich that's totally meaningless what's the number a better one is I want to be worth $1 million there's no time frame and without a time frame there's no urgency so what's a goal we can work with I want to be worth $1 million in 3 years me likey once you have a goal and a time frame you can break down your goal into a Time line of smaller targets besides making your goals feel more achievable having a timeline is crazy motivating because you get to tick off smaller wins on the way to achieving your overall Target recently my main goal was to grow my youtube.com/ dork channel to 500,000 subscribers within one year time frame so I set out a monthly schedule keeping in mind that I'd probably want to start slow and then accelerate as I test my different tactics and double down on the ones that work here's how I've modeled my goal of 500,000 subscribers this spreadsheet gives me tangible monthly targets July's goal is 18,83 3 subscribers August's goal is 19784 subscribers September's goal is 20783 subscribers knowing the numbers is an extremely helpful way to stay focused on one objective I can say no to a lot of ideas that might be fun to try but don't bring results you you've got a timeline great what's next two create your marketing experiment list I'm tweeting twice a day and it's going to help me sell my new course to Realtors said one of my students letun call him Ricky the realtor oh really I responded yeah every day I tweet things and then I use a new tool I bought to reply to people so they can follow me and eventually become my customers Ricky said right I said pretty sure this wasn't going to work out fast forward many days later I asked Ricky how many sales he had made 0 I say this in a judgment free way but have you tried any other marketing ideas to help sell to Realtors he had not before you paddle quickly in the wrong direction we must quickly try different marketing experiments to figure out which ones we can double down on the best way to do this is by using an experiment-based marketing list to plan and track your marketing strategies let me give you a real world example the story of Daniel Bliss Daniel is a hobbyist climber a Canadian a great guy and the winner of the app Sumo make a $1,000 a month business getaway to Austin where we personally worked together for a week on his business our goal for his getaway was to turn his climbing hobby into a real business making $4,000 a month getting to his freedom number would allow him to quit his day job as a postal worker and go rock climbing in Thailand spoiler alert he's enjoying a lot of padti now Daniel was smartly focused on solving one of his own problems he's a rock climber and it hurt his neck to lean back and look up while he was baying standing on the ground helping the climber above him he wanted to buy glasses to let him look up without craning his neck he had already found a manufacturer on Alibaba to make the glasses he wanted with mirrors that let you see up while looking forward Daniel had also already validated his business by getting a few pairs made and selling 12 pairs by hand he sold two pairs to a couple he met while climbing and the rest to his climbing group but now he was stuck how do you grow beyond that like most entrepreneurs Daniel did the obvious yet wrong things he wasted time tricking out his Shopify website with bells and whistles he investigated intellectual property laws to protect his design he stocked competitors let's fix that first we worked backwards from his goal to determine how many he wanted to sell to get to $4,000 a month goal $4,000 profit a month the glasses sell for $60 a pair with shipping he makes $24 per pair sold for or 24 equals6 SI glasses sold each month basically five to six pairs of glasses a day I can't stress how important this is so I'll repeat it again work backwards from your goal next we created a list of marketing strategies that could get Daniel to his goal Source expected sales actual sales personal Network plus referrals 30 sale to Vancouver rock climbing group 20 wholesale 50 marketplaces eBay 25 giveaways 25 Facebook ads 16 total 166 his goal now Daniel had only one hour a week to do this so I asked him if you could use only two of the marketing activities what would they be they were also the marketing experiments with highest expected sales he chose one personal Network plus referrals two wholesale selling to climbing gyms online stores starting with his top two channels Daniel first searched Facebook for every single friend who listed climbing in their profiles and added them to a sheet you can also do this just by looking at contacts on your phone then he individually messaged them hey first name hope you've been awesome I saw you like climbing me too my neck always hurts when I Bay so I created super affordable ballet goggles have about 10 available are you interested climb on Daniel a few sales came just from messaging his Facebook friends score then we created a list of every rock climbing Store offline and online in Canada one search Google for rock climbing Vancouver or search rock climbing on Yelp 2A go to websites listed and get the owner's name if possible email and phone number or to be hire someone on fiverr.com or Craigslist to go through every listing and add them on a sheet and we messag them too subject helping you make an extra ,000 at your Climbing Gym hey Colleen hope things have been amazing with you I've been working with climbing gyms like yours and wanted to hook up your members with my newbay glasses www.bay shades.com people go nuts over them was thinking we can email your members with a special discount just for you and we split the profit evenly be a great way for you to make a profit and hook up your members at the same time can you let me know by this Friday if this sounds appealing to you rock on Dan Bliss afterwards Daniel had time and tried several other marketing strategies listed we posted on marketplaces this involves posting your product to sites that already have your customers like eBay Etsy Craigslist or Amazon all totally free too and after waiting a few days no sales we tried Facebook and Google advert iing here's the exact Facebook ad we created this drove zero sales we also did giveaways Daniel reached out to various Facebook pages and meetup groups and bloggers related to climbing and offered to send them a sample and then if they like the glasses to grant them a special price to sell to their members subject free Bay glasses for you and your group name hey your group looks awesome glad to see the climbing Community growing in location wanted to let you know about these cool cool new ble glasses for rock climbers called ble Shades would love to send you a free pair to try out if you like them I'll happily give your group uh the special price you can share with your members just email me by 2 days from when email is sent with an address we can ship to and we will send you a pair Bay on Daniel this did not produce any results but then Daniel got an email from a large online site he'd contacted named Sierra Trading saying they were interested in the glasses holy crap he'd been waiting weeks to hear back from small local stores now an online provider was finally responding within a day the order placed was for $4 $200 after 30 days here's Daniel's final result Daniel's actual sale of fors and $200 Source expected sales actual sales reach out to friends referrals 39 sale to Vancouver rock climbing group 20 11 wholesale options 5217 Market places eBay 25 giveaways 25 Facebook ads 160 total 166 his goal 237 the point here is you never know what's going to work when it comes to marketing to find the thing that does work what you need is a process of small experiments based on your best guess of what might work it's all about prioritizing tactics and ruthlessly testing them Daniel tried six different experiments in 30 days he thought wholesaling would make 50 sales turns out it made 200 plus he thought eBay would do 30 units turns out it did a whopping zero so he modified his plan to go wholesale and doubled down on that since it made 90% of his sales now let's get a list of marketing strategies you can do to do that you need to know one who is your ideal customer two where are they who is your ideal customer at mint we focused on Personal Finance bloggers and Tech professionals at appsumo our customer is marketing agency Matt who is a solopreneur at OK dork my customer is an underdog looking for inspiration on their business Journey the best way I found to figure out your ideal customer is to look for patterns with your existing ones think about what's in common with your existing customers certain age common interest specific gender certain Hobbies from a specific area challenge who's your customer describe to me who your ideal customer is the more specific the better think about their gender age location and anything else that makes them unique next where can you find more of these ideal customers look where you found your previous ones and ask your existing customers here's the exact message I still send to people to this day hey Maria thank you so much for being a customer where's the one specific place you'd expect to learn about my product now make a list of these places where we can find more of these people for example Daniel who people who rock climb Outdoors at least once a week where North America Canada belong to a rock climbing gym purchase things from sporting good stores read outside magazine our fans of Alex honold the free soloist climber are in meetup slashonline groups to talk about climbers watch specific YouTubers who teach new climbing techniques and eat energy food like Cliff Bars if you can't think of where here's a list of generic marketing ideas to get you going contacting your network the number one place you should look for customers is in your own existing Network the benefit is that people already know you so making the sale is easier paid ads reach out to potential customers on search engines like Bing and Google so your name will appear when certain keywords are searched social ads Target your audience through ads on social channels like Twitter and Facebook Reddit Tik Tok or LinkedIn content marketing create and publish content blogs podcasts videos with the goal of generating interest in your product service cold Outreach speak directly to potential customers this could mean picking up the phone and calling potential customers or sending cold emails to prospects target market blogs sponsor posts and content on popular blogs within your target market influencer marketing identify and build relationships with individuals who have influence over your target market for example h profile bloggers or instagrammers PR pitch the press and bloggers in your Niche to cover your story SEO search engine optimization is another reliable way to grow your traffic but it takes time do some keyword research on sites like answer the public or spyfu to discover what people in your Niche are talking about create hyper targeted content to drive traffic giveaways round up some epic prizes create a sweep Stakes page and promote the out of it collaborations appear on other podcasts shows newsletters YouTube channels after you figured out your marketing ideas lists we need to estimate expected sales from these ideas setting your expected sales is one of the most important parts of your strategy these targets will give you something to measure against and help you identify where you can double down in the future so how do you go about setting targets for your sources the most important aspect of this process is not to worry about being exact it's to make decent guesses so you can have a framework to prioritize and double down on your sources when setting your targets the trick is to use your best guess it doesn't have to be a super accurate number it's all to help you prioritize your marketing activities over time you'll get better at this here's an example for 30 days of sales marketing experiments expected sales one SEO write four blog posts 10 contact everyone in my network 253 call my aunt Ronda 14 Post in Meetup Group 55 post flyer 9 total 40 this spreadsheet helps you prioritize your time by focusing on the largest expected sales items first another option is to add a column for time how long it will take you to do the different activities you can use this to see which activities will not take much time but still get sales also you can consider including cost if you're doing ads but I encourage people to not spend money on marketing at first exhaust your free options challenge where are your customers Now list at least five places your customers are and how many sales in 30 days you think you can get from them marketing experiments expected sales 1 2 3 4 5 total three double down on what works there's a golden rule to marketing tactics I want you to repeat after me find what works and Double Down On It find what doesn't work and kill it even now I can forget this Golden Rule at sumo.com a little while ago we started massively promoting our Instagram posts to convert our followers into customers when we saw that one we had more than 100,000 Instagram followers and our posts were getting a lot of likes and two Instagram is cool and works for tons of other people and you know what it literally drove z0 but it took us six months and $220,000 spent before we admitted it wasn't working and killed it the simple lesson here is that you need to find the tactics that are right for your business not just what's the hottest marketing strategy this month now there's nothing wrong with experimenting and trying new channels but you need to set time limits to stop if something isn't working I find 30 days is more than enough to get results from your marketing experiments that's why for an entrepreneur it's important to have a lazy mindset if something's too hard and not working after a good try give up and move on Double Down on the experiments that work the best kill the experiments that don't meet expectations the point is to continue only if you see traction seriously be ruthless even $100 a day or 30 minutes a day is an opportunity cost of time and money that could be spent Elsewhere for instance when I wanted to grow my online presence in 2019 I tried everything Twitter Tik Tok blogging Instagram YouTube I know I know sounds familiar right after 30 days of trying all of them I forced myself to choose between them by then it had become clear in terms of the amount of audience I was getting relative to the work it took that one was vastly better than the rest I stopped doing every other channel and went all in on YouTube I like to check back against my assumptions weekly and sometimes daily to measure my marketing plan progress the first couple of weeks of your strategy will likely feature a lot of experimentation and testing until you find what works and what doesn't generally you'll need a month to see if a channel is promising or not once you find a Channel or tactic that works do more of it until it stops working for someone like Daniel the climbing glasses guy that means focusing his efforts on online wholesalers which were his number one sales Channel by far take the tactic that works and double it remember the lazy mindset Works challenge what marketing strategies can I double down on let's update your original marketing experiments sheet with actual sales this should make it obvious which experiments to double down on and which ones to kill fill this out right now marketing experiments expected sales actual sales 1 2 3 4 5 total but instead of focusing only on your new customers let's take advantage of the ones you already have four make your first 100 customers happier how would you double your business if you could not get any new customers this will help you think of ways you can overd deliver to your current customers because the biggest growth lever in business is customer retention and referrals if you're just starting out every referral can literally double your business here are some examples of how I've done this when I started growing my YouTube Channel I personally replied to every YouTube comment this made the audience feel special and connected to me with Gambit I gave my personal phone number to every customer even when we were making $20 million plus a year that level of customer service and attention to detail is how we were able to grow so fast in the first years of appsumo decom and even today I personally write to customers to see what they like and dislike about us They invariably start their reply by saying you're Noah and you're writing to me really but by the end they're thrilled and they're telling their friends here's an email from one of the first ever appsumo customers on the 17th of May 2010 138 noat NOA appsumo wrote hey will thank you so much for buying we are going to enable your pro account today and email you I wanted to ask you a few questions if you have 2 minutes what made you interested in buying I Amer what other website /s Services would you want big discounts on any suggestions or things you would have wanted to see on our website appsumo docomo docomo friend Noah will Derek email Remove to me hi Noah I do love Reddit and imer is the best image hosting for Reddit I like the service and want to support it having this offer on Reddit seems like a brilliant way of supporting all involved it's like an awesome Reddit discount it would be good to mention clearly that it's not instant I didn't realize when I ran through the process I wouldn't just be presented with a code once the PayPal had been processed waiting isn't a problem but buy now is a little misleading when it's pay now we send you your upgrade within 24 hours nowadays I expect everything to be instant it's weird when it takes time I'd love a discount on my Napster subscription battle funds on Battlefield Heroes or my Spotify subscript description I've just signed up to the beta of flatter but I can't see how a discount would work with those guys cheers will this is not scalable that's the point the other key is to keep overd delivering and make your current customers as happy as possible the benefits of this are twofold happy customers will refer your business to their friends happy customers are more likely to spend more cash and buy your new products or Services the longer you retain customers the more more opportunity you have to earn more revenue from them as well every step of the way you can get feedback to make your product or service even better ask your customers this what is one thing we can do today that will make you twice as happy with us a great example to leave you with is Nick be from bear performance nutrition this is a guy who was deployed overseas in Korea had to get up at 4:00 a.m. to do his side hustle and made it a point to personally message every one of his customer customers this was the foundation that helped him build his supplement business into a seven fig company today challenge make your customers happy ask one customer what is one thing I can do today that will make you twice as happy with us tldr of growth in your MDW Journal answer these five questions one what is your one goal for this year two who exactly is your customer and where can you find them three what is one marketing activity you can double down on four how can you Delight your first 100 customers five if you had to double your business with no money in 30 days what would you do chapter 9 52 chances this year using systems and routines to design the business and life you want in 2014 appsumo was doing about $4 million a year in revenue and I was taking home about $150,000 of it I could finally afford everything I've dreamed of having I made it and I felt like it wasn't exhaustion that's something else something temporary and physical this was deeper the reality was I felt lost and sad with a misery that had set deep roots in my soul and it was tainting everything else in my life I didn't love a lot of the products we were selling I didn't love a lot of the people at my company I didn't love where I was living I didn't love my girl friend it made zero sense how could I be this successful or successful but feel this unhappy I started trying a lot of things to cure The Dread I felt every morning as my eyes opened books Reddit forms therapy intermittent fasting cold showers my reaction this just sucks now I'm sad and freezing it all came to ahead a month later at an affiliate marketing conference when I was talking to my friend Rob and I told him how sad I was and how Soul numbing my successful routine felt it's sucking me dry I said I feel empty I'll never forget crying in a meeting I sat in on a presentation in a windowless conference room as some dude droned on about scaling ad campaigns and my eyes welled up with tears I felt a hollow that scared me wasn't success supposed to make my life better something had to change and that's when I decided to go on a spiritual Quest just like the Beatles and Steve Jobs did when they were seeking Enlightenment it seemed to help them and I prayed it would do the same for me it was so clear now I had to leave my life to find myself that settled it i' travel to India just like the Beatles and Steve I traveled to rishikesh in Northern India and spent time at the ashram of the Maharishi mahes Yogi the same Guru who developed Transcendental Meditation and taught it to the Beatles I spent time in a cave with a sadu who'd left the whole world behind I hung out with yogis and Goa hoping it would spark something I walked around most of India looking to escape my comfort zone willing to risk everything for a life change in my quest for a self-discovery experience and after a month it dawned on me after actually growing a multi-million doll business I was doing what I thought I should be doing versus what I really wanted I was told I had to promote one product a day to hyperscale the business so we were pushing out products like a $49 PDF showing how to make iPhone apps that wasn't useful I was told by my $110,000 a day business coach to aggressively hire more people to get even more profits so we went from four people to 20 people in 6 months I was told to act more professional so we reduced the quirky branding on the appsumo website I was told to be in meetings and conduct formal performance reviews so my calendar was full of meetings with employees and partners I didn't care for I became an entrepreneur to live the life I wanted not to do what the stereo typical CEO should do and being an entrepreneur I had the power to make changes starting a business all comes back to Freedom that does not mean everything you do is to always maximize profits maybe Freedom means spending time with your kids in the morning and relaxing in the afternoon or working remotely while practicing your Tango lessons in Argentina or making a product just cuz you think it's cool on my flight home I decided to promote only products I could 100 % stand behind on appsumo I committed to removing friends and colleagues who were toxic regardless of their rockstar I wanted to keep our product rating systems via tacos not stars as everyone else does I arranged my day so I had no meetings before noon and spent Fridays drinking happy hour all day with great friends like Neville these might seem like small changes but these are the reasons I became an entrepreneur to live my life my way my turnaround wasn't immediate I still have to work on all of these things today but entrepreneurship and million-dollar weekend has taught me more about myself than everything else combined I've learned this the first step to getting all you want in the world is allowing yourself to want it and facing the fears necessary to be able to get what you want some people work a steady job for $7,000 a year and are extremely happy you accomplished your dream yay but many of us have other dreams there's no wrong dream million dooll weekend is for those who have a dream to build something themselves remember Daniel Bliss the postal worker who created Bay Shades here's his advice for you the million-dollar weekend process was instrumental in sparking my entrepreneurial Spirit my initial business idea gradually evolved and within a couple of years I became the main distributor for a European climbing brand in America over the course of the next decade I closed the business having achieved something approaching a million in sales the earnings from the business didn't just sit in a bank account I was able to invest and create wealth which has opened up so many opportunities it's allowed me to pursue personal passions like traveling and training as a free diving instructor in Egypt and fund my ongoing education in computer science and programming what's more I've managed to strike a balance that has significantly improved my quality of life I still work part-time at the post office and Dabble ins side hustles but my main focus has always been to increase my freedom continue my Learning Journey and make the most of the time Freedom that entrepreneurship has granted me looking ahead my future is a blank canvas and while I'm not sure what I'll do next I know it'll be more interesting than delivering mail 8 hours a day looking back I can honestly say that I am a completely different person because of million dooll weekend challenge let's share your story of success to help others just as you learn from Daniel your words can Inspire someone else send an email to Noah million weekend.com or post on social media and tag me at NOA Kagan with how you've improved your life I'll share it on million dooll weekend.com the fact you're reading and taking action is leading you in the right direction in this Final Chapter we are going to determine the dreams you want to fulfill and prioritize the important tasks to achieve those dreams then we'll explore building a supportive Network who can keep you accountable and help you accomplish so much more bringing out your dreams in a j o you must accept the system you are in as an entrepreneur you get to design your own system the challenge of your business and your life is designing a system that optimizes for your overall happiness we we all get into entrepreneurship to fulfill our goals of personal freedom and joy but your version of success is unique from that of every other entrepreneurs which means you get to design your own path in order to do this you have to believe that you can redesign your life to create space for the fun and fulfillment that you deserve permission granted do not let fear hold you back designing the life of your dreams is where you truly become rich so keep moving entrepreneurship is your chance to build your work around your life not be swallowed up by it the problem is as an entrepreneur and maybe a spouse or parent as well you have a ton of stuff pulling at you from moment to moment that constant chaos keeps you from consistently winning your growth your days it is one of the greatest impediments to achieving fun and fulfillment when you can't focus you lose control so how do we prevent ourselves from losing focus on our goals or losing control of Our Lives let's design a checklist to regain your focus and I'll show you mine dream your checklist imagine your best year ever close your eyes picture eating Chipotle with all the guacamole you want you're making your freedom number you spend half your day researching plants cuz you love it and you get to live in multiple places your dreams can become reality only if you think about what you really want here's an excerpt from my recent dream year appsumo is the marketplace place for software and easily grows to $30 million we find a dreamhouse pool garage nice kitchen with great house for entertaining that is also reasonably priced amazing experience in Spain with Ian and lots of drinking's biking grow YouTube channel to 500,000 subscribers get an airplane pilot's license my health gets into the best condition ever from biking continue biking Across America I hang out with Joe Rogan on his podast talking about something unique I did I create a business Netflix show that goes Super popular I write a popular book that's not another Biz or self-help book that people really resonate with do one week of solo travel visit a mountain biking City Asheville Sun Valley Jackson Hall Sedona fly my parents to spend time with me in Europe I do an RV camper trip to the Grand Canyon including biking along the way maybe some disc golf fires diners Brewer maybe with my brother you're going to start by writing down how you'd love this year to turn out for you this dream year isn't just I'm going to have a nice house and my business will rock it include the specifics where you're living what you're doing how you feel where you travel to Etc this is to inspire you about all the things you can do in your life then really dial in the ones that feel important to you I've found it also helps me dream bigger hot damn I can do all these inspiring things remember this is a dream year that means dreaming big and not worrying about the how all you're doing right now is creating a vision for the year that fills you with excitement once you have a clear picture of your dream year then you can focus on making it come true instead of being reactive throughout the year and getting thrown off course you have a chance to focus on what would be an incredible year for you and to write it all down challenge write out your dream dream year make the checklist detailed and specific turn your dream year into goals now that you have created your dream year it's time to take your dreams and choose and organize them into your goals this is your life so pick the things from your dream list you're most excited about another key thing is consistency it's a good thing if you're continuing goals from previous years also I prefer to have fewer things to accomplish but I'm very excited to do them categorize them into four sections work Health personal and travel but feel free to change or add to these however you'd like it's your life here are the ones I picked from the above year work $30 million for appsumo 500,000 YouTube subscribers finish million dooll weekend book Health bike Across America 75,000 push-ups personal complete pilot's license and fly to Albuquerque either donate all the money you make or spend it on yourself and Friends friends get a nice house in Austin travel do one week of solo travel visit a mountain biking City Asheville Sun Valley Jackson Hall Sedona trip with parents and brother tee things about your goals don't worry about doing everything in your dream year really think about which ones would excite you my rule of thumb is if you're hesitating on the dream then it shouldn't make your goals list I don't always accomplish everything on my lists every year and that's okay this list is to help you prioritize your time which we'll talk about next you can schedule and make sure you are working toward the things you really want to do over the past 10 years I've tried to set super aggressive goals but I found that it's better to aim for more sustainable goals it's more impressive to find and stick with something than burn out after being impressive for one year this list works for you not the other way around if midyear you realize something doesn't matter change it I aim to review and update this list only twice a year the best way to make sure you accomplish your goals is to see them often here's where I put mine on the lock screen of my phone on a sticky on my computer on a text file that I look at each week on the mirror of my bathroom on a daily note that I read every day challenge find one person to send your yearly goals to this can be someone who invested $1 in you early on a friend anyone you trust to check in with you regularly and challenge you on your BS as they help you follow through on your promises challenge yearly goals list use the four categories to flush out your yearly goals work Health personal travel now that you have your goals Let's help you prioritize your time to avoid the distractions of Life coloring your calendar if you fail to plan you are planning to fail Benjamin Franklin 168 we all have the same number of hours in a week 168 how is it that some people get so much more done than others with all the obligations like kids Community day jobs hobbies and More in our lives you must make sure to allocate time to things that matter show me your calendar and I'll tell you what's most important to you since we've created your goals we now take those items and place them in your calendar every week here's my calendaring system put everything in a category assign a color code to your categories schedule with color your te weekly priorities perform a weekly Sunday accountability review I'm not telling you how to spend your time instead I'm giving you the systems to make sure you're allocating time toward your goals category and color code here's a pretty typical screenshot of my calendar showing my weekly schedule see a recent version of my calendar at million weekend.com notice something it's in black and white since my publisher said color is too expensive huh but everything is colorcoded blue equals work green equals Health purple personal yellow equals travel what color coding does is help me look at my calendar and instantly see am I spending my biggest blocks of time toward my goals one glance gives me an immediate snapshot of the alignment of my work and priorities and the mix of each day this may stress you out or feel like extra work to do this system great throw it away I don't care how you organize your time I care that you prioritize your time to work on the goals you have in your life this gives me the opportunity to look at my calendar and say my stated priority is to build my YouTube audience to 500,000 so why is there so little blue and allocate more to it pro tip frontload your priorities meaning if your main goal is YouTube focus on it earlier in the week to make sure you're getting done what matters most I get tired as the week goes on so put my most important tasks on Monday and Tuesday how to prioritize the important tasks so you can accomplish your goals I asked Neville what he did all day and he said he watched The Simpsons and played guitar flabbergasted huh you just sat around your house and did nothing all day the guilt and anxiety that would have created in me is astronomical the reality of the situation is Neville prioritizes his week accordingly sets up systems to make sure the right things get done in his business and lives his life the way he wants not others here are the questions I use to prioritize my time one how do I pick what to actually do each week every Sunday I spend 15 minutes looking over the past week and setting my tasks for the next one this is your chance to revisit your yearly goals and choose activities each week to move you closer toward your goals two how do I know if these tasks are moving me in the right direction of my goal during my Sunday review I also take my previous Sunday's goals and see how I did against them this is my chance to evaluate if it moved the needle toward my yearly goal it's not to judge or shame yourself but to keep yourself accountable and continually improve three what if I want to be lazy do I need to schedule it w what would Neville do hell no there are days just like Nevels when you want to do nothing enjoy it use your laziness to your advantage are there parts of your work you can Outsource stop doing or find software to do for you maybe at a great price on appsumo docomo can I double down on activities that move me toward my goals whichever activities you love or help you with your goals put those on repeat my motto the more things that are on repeat the better if every Monday and Thursday you do 3 hours of YouTube work starting at 1:00 p.m. it becomes habitual and every Tuesday night I go biking it's automat automatic if the important tasks are automatically added you free up your brain to focus on the more complex issues that give you energy and move you toward your goals with your goals set up the final piece of living your dream is your support system to help you with accountability and help you succeed let's get that set up never entrepreneur alone 90% of my net worth comes from meeting people when I started appsumo I called Andrew Warner who introduced me to Chad who became my business partner CTO and one of my best friends Andrew Chen whom I met at a startup picnic changed our business from software bundles to individual deals that shift increased our company Revenue four times that Year Tim Ferris before he was Uber famous tweeted a post that helped Drive the second deal I ever did and he helped drive a ton of sales Eric re The Lean Startup guy helped me do sxsw bundle that took appsumo from six to seven figures Neville met H helped turn appsumo emails from $100 per send into $10,000 with one email great entrepreneurs have great entrepreneurial communities there's no such thing as self-made everyone is teamm made you're going to get frustrated and lonely as an entrepreneur that comes with the title so you've got to have the right group around you other entrepreneurs who get the unique path you're walking especially starting out solo you need to create your own social infrastructure for support partnership learning and accountability let me show three ways to meet the right people to help you on your business Journey one get an accountability buddy we make better choices and work harder when someone else is observing our Behavior researchers call it the Hawthorne effect I call it my number one productivity hack there's just something about a little external pressure that helps to keep us honest and on the right track that's why every SU for the past 10 years I've sent my friend Adam Gilbert my Sunday review email outlining everything I said I'd do last week how much of it I accomplished and everything I want to do in the week ahead here's one week's review on sun OCT 2 at 8:50 p.m. Noah Kagan NOA gmail.com wrote work appsumo write up marketing customer Journey made great progress on this continue working on Black Friday marketing really dialed in stoked on this check in with keep people at the company one by one did most finishing up tmrw support finding CFO VP marketing advisor and potentially sales advisor marketing adviser moved forward CFO this week and sales advisor in a week meet with agent to work on book layout design done talking more W them meet with tall Raz done review comments from beta readers ahead him got great feedback need more Health boxing squash one Epic ride done above no squash yam Kapur personal books to read thinking in systems physical 4,000 weeks digital the fish that ate the whale audio go to ACL with Dan maybe TB tonight travel research cities for parents Europe trip done Adam replied to this email with nice work on Black Friday can't wait to see how that turns out how much time are you spending on your push-ups I don't see them listed and you said it was an important goal for you this year find someone you respect probably a peer working towards similar goals and establish this Sunday ritual to help each other on your Journeys your buddy is there to support you and celebrate the small victories this person must reply and hold you accountable if they never reply or don't call you out when you don't follow through you need to find a better person accountability buddies that seems like a potential million-dollar business maybe one of you can validate and create it challenge accountability buddy my accountability buddy is find one person to send your weekly goals to for the past 10 years I've worked with Adam Gilbert from my body.com every week on my yearly goals accountability is a superpower go to million dooll weekend.com and join our newsletter I'll try to connect you with an accountability buddy you found an accountability buddy but how can you meet others to help you succeed at business here are two ways that work two target pre fluenc I always make an effort to connect with ambitious people before they make it it's so much easier to connect with them help each other and build actual relationships I met Tim in 2007 before he was famous and was trying to promote this book that wasn't out yet called the 4our work week I met RIT sey while he was still in college and had just started this blog I will teach youber rich.com which was making 0 and since then we've all become good friends and they helped me in every I've achieved remember it's not about where they are today as much as where you think they are going I still reach out to ambitious people all the time a few years ago I contacted Harry dry from marketing examples a young kid from England I loved what he was doing with his newsletter offering great marketing case studies and copyrighting tips I love connecting with interesting people like him and this relationship creates a great opportunity to help each other now and in the future connect with no expectations today Harry has 100,000 subscribers on his email list 30,000 LinkedIn followers and 140,000 on Twitter he's doing epic and we're friends it would have been harder to connect now but I got him as a preflu so it was simple just like with ramit sethy and Tim Ferris here are three principles to help you find preflu one who's doing work you're impressed by two and who doesn't have a ton of attention and is likely to reply three and what can you do to help this person challenge connect with a preflu the easiest way to connect with anyone is to compliment them first without asking for anything in return the preflu I'm reaching out to send this message hey loving what you're putting out insert specifically what you liked or how it impacted your life keep going from here the person will likely respond and you can open up a dialogue to talk about working together or helping each other in the future spam is sending a message asking for something whereas connecting and building relationships like the above script is just sending a compliment without any expectations three build your VIP network with referrals Andrew Chen is one of the most well-known Executives in Silicon Valley a VC partner at andreon Horowitz which specializes in games arvr metaverse and and other cool stuff but back in 2007 I was the only person Andrew knew when he moved to the Bay Area as a 23-year-old when he arrived Andrew knew he needed to widen his Network to achieve his dreams and be successful as an ambitious 20-some Andrew wanted to find people 10 times better than him to build his Network Andrew set a goal meet five new people per day for my first 6 months in the Bay Area in less than a year Andrew was associated with high-profile people like venture capitalist Mark andrees co-founder of Netscape and entrepreneur Eric Yuan founder of zoom and through that strategy he became a general partner at Andre and Horowitz one of the most respected Venture Capital firms in the world his strategy amounted to persistently reaching out following up and asking for referrals after meeting someone new Andrew would send them a thank you email in it he would include highlights from the chat he found interesting follow-ups and to-dos requests to meet more people want to try the same in your city use the below template next time you meet someone new hi Noah quick thanks for meeting with me you equals awesome here are three epic lessons I took away from our chat look into haptics great opportunity for bis growth you mentioned it as the next billion doll industry damn to be successful you need to start with things that don't scale great quote you mentioned companies to watch for are mutual Mobile on it and backlinko super grateful I'm curious are one or two other people you believe I should meet thanks again Andrew when he got a new list of people to meet Andrew would send an intro email with three key points short blurb about himself value he could provide that is to say what's in it for them why he was excited to meet them he'd send this to everyone he was introduced to personalizing to the entrepreneur or VIP he wanted to meet and you can do the same telling someone why you are interesting how you can help and why you want to meet works like Gang Busters if you fail to include these points for the person you're reaching out to expect to be ignored here's an email Andrew sent that I've annotated to highlight the important parts subject Steve Smith told me about you your subject line needs to grab the reader with your strongest hook in this case a mutual connection hi Bob hope you're doing awesome this Tuesday morning my good friend Steve Smith said you're his number one pick of someone I should meet next plus I love your blog especially the article on how to make it big in SF be detailed to elevate the compliment I've been experimenting with meetup.com events thanks to your inspiration must be a truthful statement love to talk with you about how to do marketing for your business your gift how's next Tuesday at 10:00 a.m. at Koopa Cafe for you or whatever is most convenient for you the more specific your call to action the better I'd also be happy to feature you in an upcoming blog post on my site which has about 2,000 monthly readers more value for the person thanks Andrew PS about me just move to SF recently hung out with Mark andron Mitch kapor and more challenge ask your friends for one referral one tell me the first person that comes to mind who's the most impressive friend you know two send this message to that friend hey you are the most impressive friend I know and I'd love your help in expanding my network I love VR 3D printers email marketing who's one person you think I should connect with if no one comes to mind no pressure I like asking for just one person to make it easier to think about and then say no pressure on the other person versus give them an assignment of having to introduce me to someone three after you've had a great meeting with that person thank your original friend and ask the new one for a referral you learned the power of starting now you overcame your fear of asking you figured out million-dollar opportunities and how to validate them quickly you learned social for growth and email for profit you mastered marketing and then you learned how to figure out your dreams and accomplish them with amazing people what's next start again I remember visiting my father at his home home in the last days of his life it was a sad scene pill bottles and empty Sierra Nevada beer cans everywhere my father drifting in and out of sleep on his Lazy Boy chair as some crappy local news station played in the background I sat next to him staring glumly at the TV feeling like a little boy again yearning for his love and approval I'd come to say goodbye but I'd also come to tell him of my good fortune and thank him for the lessons that helped me get there as is my way I tried to do it humorously no need to worry Dad I'm not here to crash on your couch I got a place of my own now and you won't believe it but the business I started is actually going to do a few million in Revenue this year amazing right yes very nice Noah he replied can you change the channel please that was it no final Father and Son Hollywood scene no wise words or weeping acknowledgement of how proud I had made him right then and there I could feel myself falling into a deep Funk insecurities rushing back all those voices inside that no one can hear that are always there and that were never completely free from growing louder and more insistent that I wasn't enough that it would all come crumbling down sooner than later and that Matt kler was right about me being a liability crazy how our brains can flip on us right I would have never imagine that day I got fired from Facebook over 15 years ago would begin the adventure of a lifetime I'm great they dumped me so I could go out and explore the world my way today I feel fortunate and excited that I can now share those lessons with you so you can create the path you want to live in your life the tests of your will and grit never stop the doubts never quite disappear no matter how much you achieve a dying father might seem like a rare dramatic example but in moments large and small your life is shaped by your willingness to face your fears remember just keep going no matter what you have to Define what success is for your life and not worry what others think million dooll weekend empowers you to create the life you want to live and you get 52 chances to do it this year achieving your dreams comes down to one question how many times are you willing to get back up after falling down entrepreneurship is nothing more than the ability to come up with ideas and the courage to try them out to experiment experiment experiment to fail fail fail until you succeed just start and then start again love Noah PS shoot me an email Noah million dooll weekend.com I'm here with you million-dollar weekend graduate congratulations to for completing the 48h hour challenge of creating a business and changing your life sincerely acknowledgements you are the first person I want to acknowledge well done on facing your fears having a dream and going after it tall Raz I dreamed for years of the chance to work with you on a book Thank you for taking a chance on me somehow you were magically able to take all my Adventures theories ideas Antics and put them together in a helpful narrative better than I could have ever dreamed thank you also for being a mutual lover of schvitzing Adam Gilbert for our bike ride 10 plus years ago where I shared a dream to put my knowledge into a book for other people and for always always always being my guardian angel Chad boa for being a great partner and early advocate of this book Neville Medora for saving my ass in the last weeks to update the text Maria Fernanda Salo Bergos for being you and taking care of me while I was writing Lisa deona as my second mom and huge advocate the entire time of this book Charlie hone for being my secret weapon of writing and always reminding me to be Noah Kagan Tommy Dixon for staying true to his beliefs and supporting me with the book launch Nikki pon sack for all the book research Jeremy Mary for pushing me outside my comfort zone creating great content together and helping make amazing chapter titles for this book Mitchell Cohen for a lot of feedback on early versions of this book and reminding me to always be more optimistic Mary Adrien Stephanie Mary Kate and the team at penguin for believing in the book David malow for helping put together the proposal that kicked this book off Sam par for inspiring me to hustle Aman Al Abdullah for inspiring me to be more consistent and always holding me to a high standard Ilona abramova for helping run appsumo dcom while I was working on the book and being great with sentences everyone at the appsumo dcom team thanks coki our YouTube editor for helping create amazing content together and showing what an underdog can do to every Sumo Ling and Underdog out there who buys from appsumo or enjoys my content you inspire me when you go after your dreams Dan Andrews tropical mba.com for great bike rides and for being a business philosopher and great thinking partner Tim Ferris for providing the platform that helped make this book possible James Clear Vanessa van Edwards remit sethy Dan Martell Mark Manson Chris gabo and Ryan Moran for being available to share advice on how to write and promote a book every single person who left comments on the early drafts and was a part of the launch Team you know who you are Peter Maldonado chs.cc from his yummy company my mom and dad for being my biggest Advocates and teaching me so much throughout this book it made me realize how many people in our lives want us to succeed I promise you have way more people than you expect who want to see you win I'm one of them if you feel that I missed you my bad insert your name here