Book Recap- Million Dollar Weekend
OVERVIEW
The book title is a little misleading, it’s about taking only a weekend to start a business, not you will make a million dollars in a weekend. It’s polarising and gets your attention.
It’s a book where when something hits, you should write it down.
PART 1: START IT
Don’t focus on the end result, which you can’t always control or it may change. Instead, focus on the process: starting, experimenting, and learning. There is no such thing as failure, only feedback and information.
The book emphasises the ‘now, not how’ habit. You can overthink yourself out of doing anything. Instead, take action now because you don’t understand something until you’ve done it. Overthinking and analysis are purely speculation.
Develop your ask muscle, and set goals i.e get 25 rejections. See hard things as growing and not diminishing your self-worth. Don’t worry about rejection because, remember one day you will die and it won’t matter. Are these people going to come to your funeral? No. So don’t feel humiliated when someone says no.
There’s the coffee challenge. Ask for a discount next time you buy a coffee, it’s to practice getting comfortable with rejection.
Part 2 BUILD IT
Questions to ask yourself to find a problem:
What is one that irritated me?
What is one thing on my to-do list that’s been there for over a week?
What is something I regularly fail to do well?
What is one thing I wanted to buy recently but no one made?
Ways to find a business idea:
Look at best sellers online because it means an existing market exists.
Look at Facebook marketplaces or groups where people are asking for services. Plus, forums like Reddit and Quora.
Answerthepublic.com to find the most googled queries around a keyword.
Side note: another idea not suggested is to look at negative reviews of other companies.
Look for something working in one category and bring it to another. This is useful for marketing ideas.
If in doubt, solve your own problems because at least you’d get to use the product.
Tips for finding a business idea
Don’t ask friends or family what they think (because they will say good things to be nice). Ask the customer what they think of your idea?
Brainstorm 10 ideas. There’s no perfect idea because it will evolve over time.
Your job isn’t to create demand but to find existing demand and satisfy it.
Determine the size and growth of the market (is it growing or dying?) with Google Trends and Facebook ads (p.72).
Assume Facebook users are the size of the world, and type in keywords to see the approximate audience size. You can also see active ads in FB ad library, which is good for uncovering competitors and marketing ideas.
Validate your idea by finding 3 paying customers in 48 hours. Limitation breeds creativity. I.e presale, see how many replies to a marketplace ad since all customers want to spend or a landing page with email signup.
The key is to test market interest before spending time on a website and building a product when ultimately, the idea sucks.
Give customers multiple solutions and see what they are most interested in. If customers aren’t interested, ask them what they would be interested instead?
If customers are not interested ask them questions (p.98);
Why not?
What would make this a no-brainer purchase?
What would you pay for?
Do you know someone who would be interested? (ask for a referral)
Keep validating by talking to customers, getting feedback and turning rejection into improvements.
Slack was a gaming app
Instagram was first called ‘burbn’ and was used for checking in and making future plans.
Part 3 GROW IT
Define your unique angle (p.113)
Why should people listen to you?
What are you passionate about?
What will you do for other people?
The internet gives anyone a chance to be noticed, you don’t need permission to start! Take ownership of your own brand, don’t rely on an employer.
Gen-Z workers expect to change careers three times more than any generation. So a personal brand is important!
Create niche content than expand your content. For example, Ali Abdaal catered to a narrow audience of med exam content for British people (core circle). Then expanded to studying and productivity (medium circle).
Find a unique viewpoint. Questions to ask yourself (p.123).
What is something everyone thinks is true but isn't?
What is something nobody knows but should?.
What are the biggest mistakes your audience makes?
Information should be relevant, useful and surprising.
Be a guide, not a guru. Don’t tell, by saying ‘you should’, instead ‘how I’. Take viewers on a journey and show the process, which is more relatable. So share failings, less highlight reel and gatekeeping.
Idea- ask the audience to give you a challenge. Audience involvement
Have an email list, as you aren’t dependent on the algorithm.
A free resource for an email signup (p.142). Examples include a checklist, template or guide.
The law of 100 (p.149). It’s about quantity when starting out. If you are required to create more, you’ll actually make better work. Then if you do a few pieces of content and it has to be perfect.
If you are starting something, set a goal of 100 practices.
Set a marketing goal, ie users, email list or subscribers. Starting with the destination makes planning route easier. ‘Having more’, isn’t a goal. Add a timeframe to create urgency. Break your big goal into smaller targets. The reverse engineer or work backwards from a goal is so important so you only work on meaningful things that get the most results.
It’s hard to know what will work in marketing. However, to find what does requires lots of small experiments
Marketing ideas list (p.168)
Overdeliver and try make your customer happy as they are more likely to refer people. Word of mouth is powerful. This could be sending a thank you personal message .
Noah provides his email address and says send me a message with an update on how you are going. Which is refreshing, unlike writing a comment to boost engagement.
Lastly set colours for health, personal, work, travel. Schedule these into your calendar.Your calendar will tell you, what’s important to you. Review your calendar each sunday to see if you are living aligned to your values.
Never entrepreneur alone. Every great entrepreneur has a community. There’s no such thing as self-made, everyone is team-made.
Hawthorne Effect (producitivity hack)- we make better choices and work harder when someone is watching.
Overall Thoughts/ Criticisms
Summarised as a warm, friendly youtube video in book form. Easy and enjoyable read.
As with all self-help books, it’s content is repackaged stuff on the internet but is done well because of the examples and analogies. I like he tells you what you should and shouldn’t do.
Key Takeaways
The importance of a time limit makes you more inventive and focused (which we know is true, think Parkinson’s Law). You don’t need lots of time, more money or experience.
I think all advice is actionable, except I don’t think I’ll do the coffee challenge of asking for a discount. If someone knows their worth and sets their prices, I don’t want to question that. The idea that people don’t care about you anyway, and I doubt these people would attend my funeral. I just need to get comfortable with the uncomfortable feeling of rejection. I do feel bad, but it happens to so many people. Side note; Daniel Ricciardo in season 6 of Drive to Survive taking photos and handing out meals, trying to get a seat on the team (much respect). So rejection has limited downside, just feeling uncomfortable, but the upside possibilities are endless.
I think the key takeaway is to get through the idea validation process fast. Have a customer-first approach, and solve a problem for the customer. Don’t focus on the product because it may not be what the customer wants. This is hard for introverts, but you really need to validate your idea first. FOCUS ON THE PROBLEM NOT THE SOLUTION.
The idea of getting paying customers and then building the product is what happened with Fyre festival. The examples in the book are dog walking and selling jerky, so nothing revolutionary. Also the books refer to preselling to friends and family. Whereas preselling to strangers, they may think it’s a scam.
As with all books, use your discretion to decide what advice to take, no one can produce a book that applies to everything.
@noahkagan #milliondollarweekend