“Glass of water” is one of the most effective and powerful creativity techniques that exist.10/29/2014 “Glass of water” is one of the most effective and powerful creativity techniques that exist. It’s extremely easy to use, however it can make miracles with your ability to generate excellent ideas while you sleep. The author of this technique is Jose Silva, who became famous worldwide by developing a complex of psychological exercises called the Silva Method. Take a water glass and fill it with clean but not boiled water. With both hands, take the glass, close your eyes and look upward at a 45-degree angle. Formulate a task that you need to solve as a question. Then, drink half of the glass of water while thinking, “This is all I need to find the solution to the problem I have in mind.” Open your eyes. Put the glass of water near the bed and go to sleep without talking to anyone. In most cases you will receive an answer while you sleep in the form of a hint, insight or partial idea. Once you wake up, immediately write down all ideas, memories and thoughts that come to mind. Drink the second half-glass of water and thank your subconscious for the work that was done. If you didn’t get a satisfying answer, close your eyes, look slightly upward and drink the second half-glass of water while thinking, “This is all I need to find the solution to the problem I have in mind.” The idea for the problem’s solution will come to you during the day. And one more thing, believe that ideas will come to you. You might think, “Can I use a cup instead of the glass? Can I say a different phrase while drinking the water? Can I do this technique without water at all?” This technique works most effectively if you don’t change anything. It’s critical to use a glass, it’s critical what you say, and it’s critical that you expect ideas to come. Follow these instructions as a ritual. It works in 100% of the cases for me, it works for thousands of people who tried it, and it will work for you The Business Idea Factory: A World-Class System for Creating Successful Business Ideas
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Exercise: A $100 hour A $100 hour is one of my favorite exercises for generating business ideas. It will help you create many interesting ideas, some of which may bring enormous success. Think for one hour about how you can make an extra $100. In this exercise you don’t need to think about how to change the world, how to become a billionaire or how to create a steady stream of income. Your only goal is to generate as many ideas as possible of how you can earn an extra $100. That’s it. After the completion of the exercise, pick the one idea that you like the most and make a commitment to implement it. After you implement this business idea you will know if it works, if you can scale it and if you can outsource some tasks. The $100 hour technique is very easy and fun to do and it can bring your business enormous success. Your subconscious mind may be paralyzed by the thought, “I have to create a big business idea that will change my life,” but it will eagerly generate business ideas that can bring an extra $100. Some of these ideas will become big, profitable and successful businesses. The $100 hour technique will bring you many interesting ideas, but only under the condition that you do it regularly. When you are ironing, jogging, gardening, waiting in line or feeling bored during a corporate meeting, it’s a wonderful time for the $100 hour. Realizing which ideas you need and giving your brain tasks daily is the difference between creating thousands of ideas and no ideas at all. It is also the difference between enormous success in business and no success at all. The Business Idea Factory: A World-Class System for Creating Successful Business Ideas Join our mailing list and we will send you one to two emails a week for 12 weeks teaching you the basic body weight exercises, nutrition guidelines, and mindset tools you need to be Indestructible. Build a Business With Growth in its DNA 1. Profit Margin It’s easy to work out whether or not your business has profit margin, or to at least estimate it early on. Imagine not being involved in your business at all—everything the customer experiences gets handled by a team of people or systems. How much does it cost you to keep that customer and how much revenue do they generate? The actual, acceptable percentage will depend on a lot of things, but obviously you have to be making more than it’s costing you to service each customer. For our services startup I decided a reasonable figure was double. That is: half of our revenue is costs, half is profit, so I’d have a 50% margin. If it costs $50 / month to service a customer, I would price the service at $100. I solved this problem by cutting out 99% of what I offered and only offering a service that I knew affordable contractors could excel at it. This enabled me to have an acceptable margin in the business of around 50%. 2. Large Market I’m not into niches. I want to make sure whatever I start could be a $1,000,000 business in a few years, ideally more. I hope you are the same. If you want something that grows, it has to have something to grow into, and the last thing you want is to kill your momentum by hitting a ceiling. I’ve mentioned serving a large market previously, but since it’s such a big growth inhibitor, it bears repeating here. 3. Asset Building When I sold my business, I learned that project clients were worth very little. The website and the recurring clients were transferable assets. The historical revenue from project work wasn’t worth much at all. 4. Simple Business Model Having a simple product and a simple value proposition makes everything else easier. From elevator pitches to growth tracking to hiring—the more complex a model, the harder it is to know when things are going well. If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. 5. Recurring or Predictable Revenue Having a simple MRR model makes everything easier. There are other benefits like predictable revenue, simple metrics, simple goals, easy-to-see growth/growth sources, easy resourcing/scaling, and constant sources of motivation. A year in and I am still manually updating the MRR on a daily basis and giving my team members virtual high-fives. The 7 Day Startup: You Don't Learn Until You Launch Join our mailing list and we will send you one to two emails a week for 12 weeks teaching you the basic body weight exercises, nutrition guidelines, and mindset tools you need to be Indestructible. The basics of starting a business are very simple; you don’t need an MBA (keep the $60,000 tuition), venture capital, or even a detailed plan. You just need a product or service, a group of people willing to pay for it, and a way to get paid. This can be broken down as follows: 1. Product or service: what you sell 2. People willing to pay for it: your customers 3. A way to get paid: how you’ll exchange a product or service for money To make this clear let's say it again; To start a business, you need three things: a product or service, a group of people willing to pay for it, and a way to get paid. Everything else The hard way to start a business is to fumble along, uncertain whether your big idea will resonate with customers. The easy way is to find out what people want and then find a way to give it to them. the problem: Many businesses are modeled on the idea that customers should come back to the kitchen and make their own dinner. Instead of giving people what they really want, the business owners have the idea that it’s better to involve customers behind the scenes … because that’s what they think customers want. As you begin to think like an entrepreneur, you’ll notice that business ideas can come from anywhere. When you go to the store, pay attention to the way they display the signage. Check the prices on restaurant menus not just for your own budget but also to compare them with the prices at other places. When you see an ad, ask yourself: What is the most important message the company is trying to communicate? The $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future Join our mailing list and we will send you one to two emails a week for 12 weeks teaching you the basic body weight exercises, nutrition guidelines, and mindset tools you need to be Indestructible. As you begin to think like an entrepreneur, you’ll notice that business ideas can come from anywhere. When you go to the store, pay attention to the way they display the signage. Check the prices on restaurant menus not just for your own budget but also to compare them with the prices at other places. When you see an ad, ask yourself: What is the most important message the company is trying to communicate? When thinking about different business ideas, also think about money. Get in the habit of equating “money stuff” with ideas. When brainstorming and evaluating different projects, money isn’t the sole consideration—but it’s an important one. Ask three questions for every idea: a. How would I get paid with this idea? b. How much would I get paid from this idea? c. Is there a way I could get paid more than once? If you have an existing business and are thinking about how to apply the concepts from this book, focus on either getting money in the bank or developing new products or services. These are the most important tasks of your business—not administration, maintenance, or anything else that takes time without creating wealth or value. Friedrich Engels said: “An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory. The $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future. The point of launching a business quickly is that you can get real data from real customers. This will help you determine if the business is having an impact. But how do you know what a good result is? In examples where companies really take off, you don’t need to worry about this step. Companies like Buffer and Dropbox never had to worry about whether or not they were onto something; thousands of people were signing up. It was obvious! Similarly, when companies are an outright flop, that tends to be obvious as well. They are the one-percenters. Most companies fall in the middle, so it’s important to have some sort of framework around whether or not your business is going well. The way I like to think about this is to focus on the One Metric That Matters (OMTM) at different stages in your business.52 When you launch, it makes sense to focus on the number of people who sign up and pay you. Set a reasonable target that takes into consideration your reach and your marketing efforts and price point. With any business I’ve started, my primary goal has been to get to a point where I’m paying myself a reasonable wage as early as possible. The figure I’ve always used is $40,000 per year. If I can get to the point where I’m paying myself a wage of $40,000, I know I have enough there to keep the business going. Eventually I have the faith that I’ll continue to improve this number. Here are some general principles around setting your OMTM target: Make it a financial metric, not a vanity metric like website visits or Facebook likes. Pay particular attention to who is signing up. If it’s just your friends, then that’s very different from the general public. Set a goal for the first month and re-visit it each month after that. My team uses a live Google doc for tracking financials. It requires manual updating, but it’s great for motivation and it allows you to have live estimates instead of relying on old data in accounting systems. There’s a free template at wpcurve.com/7daystartup. Don’t measure something that no longer represents an important metric for your business. The OMTM will change over time. The 7 Day Startup: You Don't Learn Until You Launch Join our mailing list and we will send you one to two emails a week for 12 weeks teaching you the basic body weight exercises, nutrition guidelines, and mindset tools you need to be Indestructible. Once you know your assumptions, devise specific tests to validate them as cheaply as possible.10/11/2014 Once you know your assumptions, devise specific tests to validate them as cheaply as possible. These first tests in a channel are often very cheap: for instance, if you spend just $250 on AdWords, you’ll get a rough idea of how well the search engine marketing channel works for your business. With limited resources, it’s almost impossible to optimize multiple strategies at once. Running ten social ads and testing everything about them (ad copy, landing pages, etc.) is a full-time endeavor. That is optimization, not testing. Rather, you should be running several cheap tests (perhaps two social ads with two landing pages) that give some indication of how successful a given channel or channel strategy could be. “The faster you run high quality experiments, the more likely you’ll find scalable, effective growth tactics. Determining the success of a customer acquisition idea is dependent on an effective tracking and reporting system, so don’t start testing until your tracking/reporting system has been implemented.” Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers Join our mailing list and we will send you one to two emails a week for 12 weeks teaching you the basic body weight exercises, nutrition guidelines, and mindset tools you need to be Indestructible. The key is to cultivate mindfulness: prosoche, another key Greek term. Mindful attention is the trick that underlies many of the other tricks. It is a call to attend to the inner world—and thus also to the outer world, for uncontrolled emotion blurs reality as tears blur a view. Anyone who clears their vision and lives in full awareness of the world as it is, Seneca says, can never be bored with life. A person who does not sleepwalk through the world, moreover, is freed to respond to situations in the right way, without hesitation—as if they were questions asked all of a sudden, as Epictetus puts it. A violent attack, a quarrel, the loss of a friend: all these are demands barked at you by life, as by a schoolteacher trying to catch you not paying attention in class. Even a moment of boredom is such a question. Whatever happens, however unforeseen it is, you should be able to respond in a precisely suitable way. This is why, for Montaigne, learning to live “appropriately” (à propos) is the “great and glorious masterpiece” of human life. Stoics and Epicureans alike approached this goal mainly through rehearsal and meditation. Like tennis players practicing volleys and smashes for hours, they used rehearsal to carve grooves of habit, down which their minds would run as naturally as water down a river bed. It is a form of self-hypnotism. The great Stoic Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius kept notebooks in which he would go over the changes of perspective he wished to drill into himself: Seneca did this too: “Place before your mind’s eye the vast spread of time’s abyss, and consider the universe; and then contrast our so-called human life with infinity.” Pyrrhonians accordingly deal with all the problems life can throw at them by means of a single word which acts as shorthand for this maneuver: in Greek, epokhe. It means “I suspend judgment.” Or, in a different rendition given in French by Montaigne himself, je soutiens: “I hold back.” This phrase conquers all enemies; it undoes them, so that they disintegrate into atoms before your eyes. This sounds about as uplifting as the Stoic or Epicurean notion of “indifference.” But, like the other Hellenistic ideas, it works, and that is all that matters. Epokhe functions almost like one of those puzzling koans in Zen Buddhism: brief, enigmatic notions or unanswerable questions such as “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” We should have wife, children, goods, and above all health, if we can; but we must not bind ourselves to them so strongly that our happiness depends on them. We must reserve a back shop all our own, entirely free, in which to establish our real liberty and our principal retreat and solitude. Here our ordinary conversation must be between us and ourselves, and so private that no outside association or communication can find a place; here we must talk and laugh as if without wife, without children, without possessions, without retinue and servants, so that, when the time comes to lose them, it will be nothing new to us to do without them. He even fantasized about becoming like Hippias of Elis, a Greek Sophist philosopher of the fifth century BC, who learned to be self-sufficient, teaching himself to cook, shave, make his own clothes and shoes—everything he needed. It was a fine idea. Still: a self-sufficient Montaigne, mending his doublet with needle and thread, digging his garden, baking bread, tanning leather for his boots? Even Montaigne himself must have found this hard to picture. How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer Join our mailing list and we will send you one to two emails a week for 12 weeks teaching you the basic body weight exercises, nutrition guidelines, and mindset tools you need to be Indestructible. A common MVP mistake is over-emphasizing the “minimum” and under-emphasizing the “viable.”10/3/2014 The concept of the MVP is (in Eric Ries’ words): “The first step is to enter the Build phase as quickly as possible with a minimum viable product (MVP). The MVP is that version of the product that enables a full turn of the Build-Measure-Learn loop with a minimum amount of effort and the least amount of development time.” What this means: Rather than spending six months creating a product or service, do only the smallest amount of work required to truly test it. In practice, this is interpreted in a lot of ways that prove to be detrimental to bootstrapped startups. They create a really crappy version of the product or service without enough features to make it desirable enough for someone to pay for. Or they don’t create anything, and instead put up a landing page and base their decisions on email opt-ins. Or they realize it will take too long to create their actual product, so they create something else. Most of these interpretations go wrong when they get away from effectively measuring what needs to be measured. A common MVP mistake is over-emphasizing the “minimum” and under-emphasizing the “viable.” A much better MVP would have been: 1. Put screenshots up of an analytics report and explain what the product does. 2. When someone signs up (pays), get them to click on a few logos to select the services they liked. 3. Tell them their report will be ready soon. 4. Call them up and talk them through what’s being done, build the report, and give it to them. This would have taken me one day. The 7 Day Startup: You Don't Learn Until You Launch Join our mailing list and we will send you one to two emails a week for 12 weeks teaching you the basic body weight exercises, nutrition guidelines, and mindset tools you need to be Indestructible. |
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