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.
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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. You need to find the means to put a smile on your face during challenging training and events.9/27/2014
I recommend that you find the means to put a smile on your face during challenging training and events. Although this may be difficult at first, it will get easier with time and practice. By doing this you are not just pretending to be positive but are actually forcing yourself into a happy place. Studies have shown that a smile brings the same level of stimulation as eating a bunch of chocolate bars (so if you are using that tactic to brighten your day, then smiling instead will have the added benefit of weight loss!). Smiling releases endorphins, serotonin, and natural painkillers. In fact, people with serious depression have been completely cured with daily twenty-minute sessions during which the patient just sits and smiles. Intriguingly, recent research on happiness by David Lykken and Auke Tellegen, from the University of Washington, suggests that over half of what makes a person happy is within our sphere of influence to change. They cite faith, family, community and work as places to find that happiness. I don’t know for sure if being happy makes one smile more or if smiling more makes one happy, but it would be hard to dispute that the two are linked. Making a habit of smiling is a good idea because it can: Induce the physiology of happiness Lower blood pressure Boost immunity Reduce stress Cure depression Create a positive feedback loop as you are more appealing to others when you smile It is amazing how something as simple as smiling can have such a profound effect. Unbeatable Mind: Forge Resiliency and Mental Toughness to Succeed at an Elite Level 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. I recommend you get serious about team training. When I was in the SEALs, the units that took training more seriously than others far outperformed. Team training should not be seen as a random occurrence or a nuisance by the leadership. Here are ten guidelines for team training to set the stage for success:
Unbeatable Mind: Forge Resiliency and Mental Toughness to Succeed at an Elite Level 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. Before we get started, let’s define what traction is. Traction is a sign that your company is taking off. It’s obvious in your core metrics: if you have a mobile app, your download rate is growing rapidly. If you’re a search engine, your number of searches is skyrocketing. If a SaaS tool, your monthly revenue is blowing up. If a consumer app, your daily active users are increasing quickly. You get the point. “A startup is a company designed to grow fast. Being newly founded does not in itself make a company a startup. Nor is it necessary for a startup to work on technology, or take venture funding, or have some sort of ‘exit.’ The only essential thing is growth. Everything else we associate with startups follows from growth.” In other words, traction is growth. The pursuit of traction is what defines a startup. Startups get traction through nineteen different channels; We discovered two broad themes through our research: Most founders only consider using traction channels they’re already familiar with or think they should be using because of their type of product or company. This means that far too many startups focus on the same channels (search engine marketing, public relations) and ignore other promising ways to get traction. It’s hard to predict the channel that will work best. You can make educated guesses, but until you start running tests, it’s difficult to tell which channel is the best one for you right now. Each traction channel has worked for startups of all kinds and in all different stages.
Poor distribution—not product—is the number one cause of failure. If you can get even a single distribution channel to work, you have great business. If you try for several but don’t nail one, you’re finished. 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. IT TOOK THE OIL tycoon John D. Rockefeller 46 years to make a billion dollars. He clawed his way to the top of the 19th-century business world. Starting with a single oil refinery in 1863, over two decades, he constructed oil pipelines and bought out rival refineries until he’d built an empire. Seventy years later, the 1980s computer baron Michael Dell achieved billionaire status in 14 years; Bill Gates in 12. In the 1990s, Jerry Yang and David Filo of Yahoo each earned ten figures in just four years. It took Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay, three years to do it. And in the late 2000s, Groupon’s Andrew Mason did it in two. Sure, there’s been inflation since Rockefeller, but there’s no disputing that we’ve decreased the time it takes innovative people to achieve dreams, get rich, and make an impact on the world—and this has largely been due to technology and communication. “A serious assessment of the history of technology shows that technological change is exponential,” writes the futurist and author Ray Kurzweil in his famous essay The Law of Accelerating Returns. “So we won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century—it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today’s rate).” At the same time, many industries remain decidedly stuck in the past. Most large businesses stop growing after a few years. Formal education, in many cases, is so slow or out-of-date that venture capitalists pay bright people to skip school and start Internet companies. Conventional wisdom—outside of the technology industry—on innovation and career building has hardly evolved since the 19th century. This dilemma is an exercise in lateral thinking. It’s the kind of puzzle in which the most elegant solution is revealed only when you attack it sideways. New ideas emerge when you question the assumptions upon which a problem is based (in this case: it’s that you can only help one person). Lateral thinking doesn’t replace hard work; it eliminates unnecessary cycles. The law of the lever, as shown by the Greek mathematician Archimedes, says the longer the lever, the less force you need exert. This is the smart way. Leverage is the overachiever’s approach to getting more bang for her proverbial buck. These principles explain how rocketeers and makeup artists defy expectations and become world-class icons. They’re how tech geeks save lives and community college flunkies catalyze global change. Momentum—not experience—is the single biggest predictor of business and personal success. Throughout history, fast-rising companies, rock-star executives, “overnight” movie stars, and top-selling products have outrun their peers by acting more like ladder hackers than ladder climbers. "This example" illustrates an interesting fact: people are generally willing to take a chance on something if it only feels like a small stretch. This is like an intern applying for a CEO job, or a brand-new startup bidding on a NASA contract. The players eliminated resistance by breaking the big challenge (acquire something valuable like a TV) into a series of easier, repeatable challenges (make a tiny trade). Researchers call this the psychology of “small wins.” Gamblers, on the other hand, would call it a “parlay,” which the dictionary defines as “a cumulative series of bets in which winnings accruing from each transaction are used as a stake for a further bet.” “By itself, one small win may seem unimportant,” writes Dr. Karl Weick in a seminal paper for American Psychologist in 1984. “A series of wins at small but significant tasks, however, reveals a pattern that may attract allies, deter opponents, and lower resistance to subsequent proposals.” “Once a small win has been accomplished,” Weick continues, “forces are set in motion that favor another small win.” But the key to success was not just rapid cycle time, it is alsothe direction they traded: sideways The players didn’t simply parlay toothpicks for pieces of wood of increasing size; they traded toothpicks for pens and mirrors for old bikes. They didn’t wait around for the owners of a vacant house to show up, so they could ask for a trade, and they didn’t knock on the same door over and over until a “no” became a “yes.” When a door was shut to them, they immediately picked another one. When the ladder became inefficient, they hacked it. And that is what made them successful so quickly. The key to Bigger or Better, in other words, is the “or.” But, according to behavioral biologists, speed is not the cheetah’s biggest predatory advantage. As science writer Katie Hiler puts it, “It is their agility—their skill at leaping sideways, changing directions abruptly and slowing down quickly—that gives those antelope such bad odds.” Business research shows that this kind of ladder switching generally tends to accelerate a company’s growth. Companies that pivot—that is, switch business models or products—while on the upswing tend to perform much better than those that stay on a single course. The 2011 Startup Genome Report of new technology companies states that, “Startups that pivot once or twice raise 2.5x more money, have 3.6x better user growth, and are 52% less likely to scale prematurely.” Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success 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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