Million Dollar Weekend: Launch a 7-Figure Business in 48 Hours PDF

PORTFOLIO / PENGUIN An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC penguinrandomhouse.com Copyright © 2024 by Noah Kagan Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader. Selfies on this page used by permission. Top row from left to right: photo by Tony Perrin; Gitel Hesselberg; Kailash Saravanan; Andrea Reynolds. Second row: Yann Le Bouhellec, all rights reserved frenchlevelup.com; photo by Tommy Smith; Regina Jones- Morneault, the Fabric Pharmacist; Allan Allas. Third row: Madelayne Morales R. photo by @madimoralesr; photo by Cara Boardwine; Brian Griffeth; Andrew Charles copyright © 2023 by Mindpower Growth, all rights reserved. Fourth row: photo by Ronald Annjaya; Juan Vera; Minh Duong; Mathieu Boumal. Image on this page used with permission of Nick Gray; images on this page, this page from the collection of the author; image on this page used with permission of Justin Mares; image on this page by Ben Kenyon; image on this page © copyright 2023 by Daniel Bliss. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Kagan, Noah, author. | Raz, Tahl, author. Title: Million dollar weekend : the surprisingly simple way to launch a 7-figure business in 48 hours / Noah Kagan, with Tahl Raz. Description: New York : Portfolio/Penguin, | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2023023688 (print) | LCCN 2023023689 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593539774 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593716236 (international edition) | ISBN 9780593539781 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: New business enterprises. | Business planning. | Entrepreneurship. Classification: LCC HD62.5.K327 2024 (print) | LCC HD62.5 (ebook) | DDC 658.1/1—dc23/eng/20230525 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023023688 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023023689 Cover design: Brian Lemus Cover image: Andrii_Malysh / Shutterstock BOOK DESIGN BY TANYA MAIBORODA, ADAPTED FOR EBOOK BY ESTELLE MALMED pid_prh_6.2_146088460_c0_r0 Dedicated to everyone willing to take a chance on themselves Contents Frequently Made Excuses Start Here PART 1 | START IT Rediscover Your Creator’s Courage 1. Just Fu**ing Start Begin Before You Are Ready 2. The Unlimited Upside of Asking Get a Gold Medal in Rejection PART 2 | BUILD IT Launch Your Business with the Million Dollar Weekend Process 3. Finding Million-Dollar Ideas Simple Exercises to Generate Profitable Business Ideas 4. The One-Minute Business Model Shape Your Idea into a Million-Dollar Opportunity 5. The 48-Hour Money Challenge Validate Your Business by Getting Paid PART 3 | GROW IT Make Money While You Sleep 6. Social Media Is for Growth... Build an Audience Who Will Support You for Life 7.... Email Is for Profit Use Email to Make a F*&k-Ton of Money 8. The Growth Machine My Battle-Tested Growth Playbook 9. 52 Chances This Year Use Systems and Routines to Design the Business, and Life, You Want Start Again Acknowledgments Notes _146088460_ Frequently Made Excuses Welcome to a book that will help you start a million-dollar 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 ten most common and the exact chapters where we demolish them: 1. “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-dollar 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. 2. “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. 3. “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 Dollar Weekend process (chapter 5) in the early mornings, evenings, and weekends. Once you’ve 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. 4. “I’ve started a few different businesses. They do okay and then I lose interest.” D’oh. 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. 5. “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 3: Grow It. 6. “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 eight-figure 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. 7. “I need to read more books, do more research, and be totally prepared before I can really start.” You will never feel 100 percent 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 @#!*. I’ve spent so much money and have made zero dollars in profit.” Don’t spend another dime until you’ve made your first dollar. The Million Dollar Weekend process (chapter 5) requires no up-front spending. 9. “I’m not good at marketing.” Marketing is easy when you have a product people want. Chapter 3 shows you step by step 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 used to help Mint reach 1 million users in six months and TidyCal.com to reach 10,000 paying customers in six months. 10. “I need a technical cofounder 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 eight million-dollar businesses myself (Kickflip, Gambit, KingSumo, SendFox, Sumo, Tidycal, Monthly1K, AppSumo), I wanted to PROVE I could teach others to do the same. In trying to share the process I realized that it consists of just a few core steps. I call these three steps the Million Dollar Weekend process: 1. Find a problem people are having that you can solve. 2. Craft an irresistible solution whose million-dollar-plus potential is backed by simple market research. 3. Spend NO MONEY to quickly validate whether your idea is the real deal (or not) by preselling it before you build it. I knew I was onto something, because early on everyone who followed the process eventually launched a profitable side hustle or business. People like Michael Osborn, 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 side-hustle cookie business (chocolate chip for me!). Or Daniel Reifenberger, 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 Dollar 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 $1000-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. Two 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: 1. 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. 2. 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 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 supposed 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 Creator’s 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 kit 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 Khan Academy: Started off as a set of ten-minute videos Sal Khan created for his cousins AppSumo: 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 that just dream about them. You gotta act. And you gotta 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 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’ve 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 you can do with limitations. You have only forty-eight hours. Each chapter contains tried-and-tested challenges I’ve developed to get wantrepreneurs 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-dollar business, step by step. Here’s how your Million Dollar Weekend journey is structured: PART 1. START IT You’ll work your way through part 1 in the three to four 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 2. 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 Zero 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-dollar 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 3. 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 7. 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 six 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 Dollar Weekend contract. Those people who’ve 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 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 Dollar Weekend is: Signature: ___________________________________ Date: ___________________________________ FREE MDW JOURNAL, SCRIPTS, TEMPLATES, AND MORE If you want your very own journal to document your Million Dollar Weekend, go to MillionDollarWeekend.com and download the journal template. One scribble in these notes could potentially be your million-dollar 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. MillionDollarWeekend.com PART 1 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 Fu**ing 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 Palo Alto. 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+ million—said, “Hey, let’s go to the coffee shop across the street to talk about work.” It had been nine months, eight days, and about two hours since I was hired as Facebook’s thirtieth employee. I was just twenty-four years old, and here I was among the smartest collection of people I’d ever been around, led by a man-child who seemed even then like he was the smartest of them all. Ivy Leaguers. Big brains. Coders and entrepreneurial savants. All of us doing what we believed to be the most important, impactful work in the world. I got 0.1 percent 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 Cohler (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. As the company grew from baby to behemoth, the talents that allowed me to thrive in startup 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 twenty minutes, it was done. I spent the next eight 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 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 I’d 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 copiers, 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 Lynbrook 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 Marti would go on to work as a senior developer at Google; another of my best friends, Boris, was number twenty at Lyft. Other guys sold companies to Zynga 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’s 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 pre-IPO. 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 three 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. 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. —Shaan 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 my self-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—cue 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 students online marketing on Jeju Island in Korea Consulted for startups like ScanR and SpeedDate Set up a startup versus venture capital dodgeball tournament series Blogged for my site OkDork and launched Freecallsto.com to cover the emerging internet phone call industry Launched peoplereminder.com, a personal CRM website Started Entrepreneur27.org happy hours and local events like chess meetups Created a conference business called CommunityNext that started pulling in $50,000 per event doing what I would have done for free— bringing together emerging business stars, like Keith Rabois, Max Levchin, David Sacks, and Tim Ferriss It was during this time that the variables to the Million Dollar 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 OkDork 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 six months later—which got me a full-time offer: 1 percent of the company and a $100,000 job. The original Mint.com homepage Marketing is easy when you have a great product. Mint’s product was so good that less than two years after it started, Intuit bought it for $170 million. There was, however, no $1.7 million payday for me (¯\_( ツ )_/¯). It was the math that sent me packing. I had figured that the company would sell for $200 million at most, which would cap my 1 percent share at $2 million pretax. 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 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 this 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 results 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 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-shit starting-and- asking experience that will get your heart racing. This is the script I’ve seen work best: Hey [first name] I’m reading this book Million Dollar 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? [your name] 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-changer 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 venmo/cash app @noahkagan or [email protected]. I may even say yes. Post and tag me @noahkagan, #thedollarchallenge. 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. Oy vey. 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 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 life-changing? When most people decide they want to start a 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. PRO TIP: 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 five minutes, saving us twenty-four hours of waiting. I know your inner 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 two 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 [first name], 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? [your name] Don’t be afraid to act. Be afraid of living a life that seems more like a résumé 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’ve 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 eighteenth birthday until I turned thirty, 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 liked to eat and drink, and the plane tickets that would let me work from Argentina or Korea or Thailand, all together that came to a little less than $3,000 a month. At the time, that’s what my living expenses were. Roughly speaking: $1,000 for housing, $1,000 for food and travel, $1,000 for savings and investment. MY FREEDOM NUMBER: $3,000 Activities Amount Housing $1,000 Food and travel $1,000 Savings and investment $1,000 Total (Freedom Number) $3,000 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 twenties 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 blurted out, “Holy shit! No way—my number was $1,500!” It turns out many of the entrepreneurs I know used 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, 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 percent 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. Three thousand dollars is not some kind of “$20 million in net worth by age forty” 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 a Gold Medal in Rejection As my dad and I entered the tenth local shop that afternoon, I felt my muscles go tight with a full body cringe. He’d 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. 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-won success. This particular day was glorious, though. Absolutely glorious. He sold two copiers 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 noes. 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 a hundred rejections each week, because if you work that hard to get so many noes, my little Noah’le, in them you will find a few yeses, too.” Maybe that’s why he named me NO-ah, 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 MacDonald turned a red paper clip into a HOUSE with a series of just fourteen 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: chutzpah. It’s the Yiddish word for moxie, nerve, audacity; it’s a determined, give-no-f*cks approach to life. When Israelis say you have chutzpah, 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 thirty years later, just to see if she could. She knew a little something about chutzpah herself. That skill—having the chutzpah 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 catalogs that sent kids door to door 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 to door around San Jose in my JNCO baggy shorts, with a highly irresistible 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. Yay, pizzzzzzzza 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+ people via my Monthly1K 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 straitjacket 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: Noah 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—six to eight 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: “Ha Ha Ha. You really think I would leave Google for your shitty company?!?” That. Hurt. And it always will. So how do I get through the fear and the sadness? For one thing—and I do this often—I remind 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 twenty-five rejections.” That alone helps me accept that I will get rejected and turn it more into a game versus a blow to my self-worth. I’ve trained 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 Spanx founder Sara Blakely would ask her and her brother nightly: “What did you guys fail at this week?” It was this early conditioning to embrace failure that, Blakely says, helped her persist through seven years of almost daily humiliation selling fax machines door to door, persist after nearly every hosiery factory in America declined to manufacture her first product, and finally persist through a seemingly endless litany of noes before finally convincing a Dallas-based Neiman Marcus buyer on a cold call to put her body-shaping panty hose in a handful of stores. The average person faces one rejection and gives up. Blakely didn’t, and at age forty-one became the youngest self-made female billionaire in the United States. Now that’s a rejection résumé my father would appreciate. Remember, you could be eleven noes away from making your first million, but if you stop at the tenth 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 noes 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 twelfth follow-up, she gave in: “Actually, we have an internship for businesspeople.” 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 Up! Studies show that if you initially get a no, your follow-up ask is TWICE as likely to get a yes. At AppSumo.com, almost 50 percent 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. Follow up on the things you really want. I use followup.cc for email and Siri very often to remember follow-ups. You can also use the Snooze feature in Google or just write it down! PRO TIP: 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 Ziglar 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 twenty 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 cliché 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 up: “NOW, 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 twenty businesses signed up; enough, we hoped, to entice students to pony up $10 for the cards (which cost us 50 cents to print). We found that giving the discount cards to student groups and fraternities as fundraising tools was our best method to sell them. We helped others make money and split the proceeds from the $10 cards fifty-fifty. Again, we just had to educate people about how it helped them. Pretty soon, we expanded to multiple campuses—wash, rinse, repeat—and generated $50,000 within a year. Not bad for some freshmen interns, right? Now it’s your turn. CHALLENGE The Coffee Challenge. Go to any coffee shop or anyplace in person. Make a simple purchase and ask for 10 percent 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. Excuse me... can... I... get... 10 percent off this order?” Seth asked. The room went silent. Cue 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’d 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 ten thousand people have done it. Here’s an exact script you can use: YOU: Hi, how’s it going? THEM: Great, what would you like? YOU: I’d like a skinny low-fat vanilla latte [my fav drink, or substitute your own]. THEM: Sure. That’ll be $3.50. YOU: Can I get 10 percent off? [This is key: Make the statement clear, with a smile, and don’t say anything afterwards.] THEM: What’s this for? YOU: 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 five 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 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: Dieter S.: “I felt a lot more confident facing rejection, and it empowered me to successfully ask for sponsorship money on my bike- riding side hustle.” Jennifer Jones: “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.” Jason Blake: “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 percent 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 asking’s unlimited upside. Asking is a muscle, and this challenge is the gym. 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 thirty seconds right now and leave a short review? Think back to why you decided to 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 Dollar 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 thirty seconds. You can go to the book’s 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 2 Build It Launch Your Business with the Million Dollar 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 Dollar Weekend is about to begin. In these next three chapters—over the next forty-eight hours— you’ll execute the simple but effective three-step Million Dollar Weekend process for entrepreneurial experimentation that will be the engine to create your dream business: Finding Million-Dollar 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 48-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 3 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: BetArcade. 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 six 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. 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 OfferPal, the payments provider for our successful games. They were charging 50 percent 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 two weeks after that we had the service called Gambit running. We instantly made our friends 20 percent more money by charging lower commissions and listening to them. In the first year, we ended up making more than $15 million in top-line 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 BetArcade—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 percent 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 six 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 sixteen 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 Ws 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 Dollar 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 cent) 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 solopreneur living in a basement apartment in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco. By day, I was consulting for an online dating site called SpeedDate. 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 must-have (a painkiller). And getting more customers is the most essential business need. One night I was thinking about a company called MacHeist 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 MacHeist had solved the problem of providing companies with customers. Every time MacHeist 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 MacHeist bundle was a success. Could I do what MacHeist 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’s 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 FreshBooks (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 Imgur to host their viral meme images. On Reddit’s front page, every other post featured an image hosted on Imgur. While anyone could use Imgur 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 GoodRX, 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 customer’s. 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 Dollar Weekend validation mode. Using the Ask muscle, I cold-emailed Imgur’s creator, Alan Schaaf, 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 Imgur on Reddit TO: Alan Schaff FROM: Noah Kagan Hey Alan Huge fan of Imgur and love using your product all the time. We are launching a deal site and wanted to promote your Imgur Pro. Think we can sell 200+ of it for you at no cost or work for you. You free Friday to chat on AIM at 5pm 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? Imgur Pro at a discount. Where: Time for me to flex the Ask muscle and pitch some Redditors? Game on! Then I cold-emailed Chris Slowe, Reddit’s founding engineer, and asked him to breakfast. After explaining what I planned 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 Smoak TO: Chris Slowe FROM: Noah Kagan Hey Chris Talked with Chris Smoak 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 Imgur. You free this Wed at 9am? Be epic, Noah Kagan The original AppSumo.com homepage, built in 4 hours “Why not?” Chris replied. “Our users love Imgur. 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.com: 48 hours. Total cost to build AppSumo.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’d just built, and holy crap, my first sale arrived within minutes. The first dollar is always the sweetest. It’s momentum. It’s possibility. It’s fear getting its ass kicked. PRO TIP: Focus on Zero 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 ten 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, you 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 customers. 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: 1. Spend hours at home thinking about the app (and coming up with clever names for it). 2. Spend $100 hiring their cousin to draw a cool logo. 3. Set up an LLC. 4. Watch YouTube videos about apps and programming and business. And dogs. 5. Consider signing up for a developer boot camp and quickly realize coding is hard. 6. Buy the domain name for the snazzy website they’re going to build. 7. Look into hiring a developer on Upwork, and quickly realize it’s prohibitively expensive. 8. 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: 1. Call or text three people right now who have dogs and ask them to pay you to walk their dog. 2. Turns out none of these dog owners have problems walking their dog. You discover their real problem is finding dog sitters when they’re traveling. 3. 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 Ferriss 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 Monthly1K 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 a $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, coworkers, 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. Voilà, 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 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 entrepreneur’s 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 origin 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 1 did well, validating it. And Microsoft started with Bill Gates building software 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 store 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 solution 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 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 reliable 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 opportunities) for you to sell. Look at this email my friend Boris Korsunsky 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 9, 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 P.S. 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 AppSumo because I couldn’t find great discounts on the best business apps; our team built SumoMe because we needed a tool to grow our email list; we launched TidyCal.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 (CommunityNext), or a good in-game payment service (Gambit), or weights for my home gym during the COVID 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-dollar business idea does NOT look like: Getting on TikTok 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 woo-woo method that promises inspiration in a box Here’s what the actual process looks like: 1. What’s the most painful (aka valuable) problem you can solve for people... 2. That you also have passion for and/or unique expertise in... 3. For the largest niche possible that you belong to and understand... Simple enough, but takes some light and fun brainwork. Remember to focus on your Zone of Influence here (your existing community): the 150 followers you have on TikTok, the 200 in your local Taco Aficionados group, the 300 in the WhatsApp group for your mountain biking club (not to mention the 143,000 in the 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 MillionDollarWeekend.com. Now it’s your turn. Use the following four challenges to come up with at least ten potentially profitable ideas: 1. 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/Wtr. 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: 1. What is one thing this morning that irritated me? 2. What is one thing on my to-do list that’s been there over a week? 3. What is one thing that I regularly fail to do well? 4. 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 X 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 thirty, 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 paddleboarding 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. 2. Bestsellers 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: 1. Customizing Nike shoes. 2. Video game tutorial for an Xbox game. 3. Teaching computer novices how to use a MacBook. CHALLENGE Bestsellers are your best friends. Write down two accessorizing ideas in your MDW Journal. PS: 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. 3. Marketplaces One of my favorite ways 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. 4. 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 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 a vitamin (a nice-to-have) or a painkiller (a must-have)? 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/SomebodyMakeThis 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 MDW Journal. You should now have a list of ten 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, bestsellers, marketplaces, and search engine queries). Write your ten ideas: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Now you’ve got to pick the three best ideas from the ten plus you’ve come up with. There’s never a “perfect” idea. For instance, AppSumo started out selling bundles of web tools and three years later evolved 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 ten 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-dollar opportunity on your hands. CHAPTER 4 The One-Minute Business Model Shape Your Idea into a Million-Dollar Opportunity Fine!” I said. “Watch me do it!” My Monthly1K 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 twenty-four hours, and we get to choose your idea?” The others nodded. I had to laugh. The cojones 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 AppSumo networks and mailing lists to promote it. I had to do this like anybody who didn’t have a big social media following. Five minutes later, a flood of ideas came in

Million Dollar Weekend: Launch a 7-Figure Business in 48 Hours PDF

Document Details

Tags

Related

Summary

Full Transcript

Upgrade to continue