All right, so how do you start your first business in a weekend?
That is what Noah Kagan purports to teach us in this book Million Dollar Weekend,
which is what we're discussing in this episode of Book Club,
the ongoing series where I distill and discuss highlights and summaries
from some of my favorite books.
And genuinely, this is a absolutely fantastic book to read
if you are an aspiring entrepreneur.
If you've ever thought that you want to start your own business
and you have not yet done it, you need to read this book
because it's going to give you a play-by-play roadmap
on how exactly to do that.
Okay, so the book is broken down into three parts.
We've got part one, start it.
Part two, build it.
And part three, grow it.
And in this video, I'm going to focus on part one and two,
start it and build it.
Let's go.
If you're watching this and you haven't yet started your business,
I suspect, for a lot of people I know,
you might have been thinking about starting a business for several years.
You have just not yet taken action.
And there is this pervasive myth that happens amongst
everyone who is an aspiring entrepreneur,
which is, I need the right idea.
I cannot get started until I have the right idea.
But the thing is, and what Noah talks about throughout the book,
is you don't start a business by first having the right idea
and then starting the business.
You start a business by deciding to start a business
and then you find a process to come up with the right idea.
And really, the core message he's sharing this first chapter,
which is why it's called a chapter one,
just f***ing start,
is begin before you are ready.
No one feels ready to start a business.
Just like I've heard, no one really feels ready to have kids.
The timing is never quite right.
Similarly, the timing to start a business is never quite right.
You have to just start.
You have to begin before you're ready.
And just to labour this point just a little bit more,
there's a nice quote here.
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.
And there is a motto that he talks about here.
And this is a motto that has really stuck with me
since I read the book a couple of weeks ago.
And that motto is, now, not how.
Whenever we think of doing something, we're like,
okay, well, I've got this idea for this thing,
but how do I do it?
And there's this tyranny of how.
The how holds us back from doing things.
Instead, think, what is the smallest action I can take right now?
Even if you don't know what to do about anything,
there's probably a small action that you can figure out
that you can just take action on.
And then once you've taken action on that,
you can then get started with the thing.
So honestly, the whole first chapter is a lot of emotional support.
Genuinely, I've been running my YouTuber Academy for a few years now.
We've taught like 5,000 students in it.
95% of students, when it comes to starting YouTube channels,
it's not technical things they're struggling with.
It's the emotional side of things.
They're like, oh, I couldn't possibly make YouTube videos
unless I have the perfect idea.
No one starts making YouTube videos with a perfect idea.
Just like no one starts a business with the perfect idea.
You decide to start, and then you can figure out the idea second.
Now, whatever stage of the business process you're at,
you're hopefully making some amount of money,
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So now that we've gotten the emotional support
side out of the way, that begs the question,
what happens next?
And that is where we now come
to the customer first approach to building a business.
I have interviewed hundreds of entrepreneurs on my podcast,
spoken to hundreds more in real life.
And all of them basically talk about this idea,
this customer first approach,
which is that you're not trying to find an idea
for a business.
Instead, first of all, you're starting with
who are the people you would like to serve?
Because fundamentally what a business is,
a business solves a problem for someone
who's willing to pay for that problem to be solved.
And the biggest thing that holds back entrepreneurs
and has done forever is trying to build something
without first verifying that there's actually someone
out there willing to pay for the thing.
This is the problem that students often have.
Because students come up with great ideas
and it's amazing.
They're like, I have this idea for this business.
And they'll just go and try and build it
without first verifying that there are in fact
people to pay for it.
Here we go.
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?
I also get those emails.
My alter reply, have you asked what the customer thinks?
Basically, when you're trying to start a business,
the first step is to figure out
who are you going to sell to?
And that's ideally within your own zone of influence.
For example, in my position of being a medical student
at university, the people I'm serving
are probably the people around me
or the parents of the people around me
or the people I interact with in hospitals
or the people I interact with at the university
or the local businesses I interact with.
That's like within my zone of influence.
The other good thing that this customer
should ideally have is money.
It is so much easier to create a business
where you are targeting people who have money
rather than people who don't have money.
Again, this is one of the issues with students
is that if you're a student,
then everyone you know is your age
and probably does not have very much money.
If it were me and I were a student starting a business,
I might be thinking, okay,
my friends don't have any money,
but who does?
Their parents do.
Okay, what are the problems
that my friends' parents have?
Who else has money?
Like my college or my university,
there's a pot of money I can tap into there.
Okay, now that you've brainstormed
who are the sorts of people ideally with money
that you'd potentially like to serve,
the next step is to brainstorm
what are all of the problems that they have.
Now, the easiest way to do this
is to just go and ask them,
what are the things in their life
that are really annoying?
What are the things that they already pay for?
What are the things where they're paying for something
but the thing they're paying for doesn't seem very good?
And if you do this enough,
you will come up with an infinite list of problems
that people have.
And the whole world progresses and evolves
based on people discovering a problem
and then trying to find the solution to that problem.
Uber started because someone complained,
was like, oh man, it's really annoying
trying to held out a cab
and trying to ring the taxi company.
And so that's where the idea for Uber comes along.
And there's a really good example here.
So I love this.
There's the founder first approach
and then there's the customer first approach.
So here we go.
Let's say you have an idea for a dog walking out.
How would you go about doing it?
Here's the way most people,
most entrepreneurs would do it.
One, spend hours at home thinking about the app
and coming up with clever names for it.
Two, spend $100 hiring their cousin to draw a cool logo.
Three, set up an LLC.
Four, watch YouTube videos about apps
and programming and business and dogs.
Five, consider signing up for a developer bootcamp
and quickly realize that coding is hard.
Six, buy the domain name for the snazzy website
they're going to build.
Seven, look into hiring a developer on Upwork
and quickly realize it's prohibitively expensive.
Eight, give up again.
Does that sound familiar?
That is founder first.
Now let's take the same idea for a dog walking app
and let's put it through the customer first perspective.
One, call or text three people right now who have dogs
and ask them to pay you to walk their dog.
Two, turns out none of these dog owners
have problems walking their dog.
You discover their real problem is finding dog sitters
when they're traveling.
Three, ask for the next travel dates
and have them pay you a deposit.
They pay jackpot.
And the idea here is that quickly,
based on this really simple example
which I think we can all relate to in some ways,
in the founder first approach,
you go down a rabbit hole
where you build this thing
without verifying that people actually have the problem
and are willing to pay for it.
In the second one, you come up with an idea, cool.
Then you talk to people and you see,
does the idea have legs?
Would they be willing to pay you for it?
You realize, no, they don't.
And now you do something else
because you realize they are willing to pay you
for this other thing.
And crucially, you ask for that first sale.
You make that first dollar.
The first dollar is always the hardest.
The first three customers are always the hardest.
If you just aim to try and get
your first three paying customers
as soon as is humanly possible
before you even try and build anything,
then at least you have some kind of validation
that the idea has legs.
So this, for example, is an email
that one of Noah's friends, Boris, sent.
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, smiley face.
Convenient and home-cooked meals.
On February 9th, for $20,
there will be a personal chef making us food
and delivering it to you conveniently and deliciously.
If this is something you're seriously interested in,
please PayPal $20.
Open to all and any feedback.
Cheers, Boris.
P.S. Please let me know
if you have any dietary requirements, et cetera.
I promise the dinner will be delish,
exclamation mark, exclamation mark, exclamation mark.
This is how you validate the idea for a business.
You know, you might have a business idea
and at a party you say to someone,
oh, I'm thinking of starting a business around bloody blah.
Would you be interested?
Social etiquette dictates
that they basically have to say yes.
You're very unlikely to meet someone
who will actually say,
no, I won't get about that.
But here's the crucial bit.
If you ask them for money,
be like, oh, okay, cool.
Well, you know, I'm taking pre-orders now.
Would you be willing to pay me $20 for it?
Now you see how good your idea actually is
because no one is gonna part with their money
unless they actually believe in the idea.
Words are cheap, money is not.
So if someone says, yeah, I like your business idea,
that means jackal.
What matters is, are they actually paying for it?
Have they pre-ordered the thing?
Would they be willing to be your first customer
for a 50% discount with a money back guarantee?
Anything like that.
Now, the other way to get business ideas
is to also look to your own problems.
If you find something is a problem for you,
chances are it'll be a problem for other people as well.
And there are four prompts that Noah gives us
that I fully agree with
that help us figure out what our own problems are.
So firstly, what is one thing this morning that irritated me?
Secondly, what is one thing on my to-do list
that's been there for over a week?
Thirdly, what is one thing that I regularly fail to do well?
And fourthly, what is one thing I wanted to buy recently
only to find out that no one made it?
And these sorts of prompts help you think about
like the problems in your own life.
You should sort of become a magnet for problems.
Like as you go through life,
anytime you find something annoying,
what an aspiring entrepreneur
or an actual entrepreneur does is they recognize,
I'm finding this thing annoying.
I have just identified a problem.
And a problem with a solution is a business,
assuming people are willing to pay for that solution.
Whereas what most people do is like,
they will just come across a problem
and they'll be like, oh yeah, it's just a thing.
Oh yeah, it's really annoying that we have to fill out
these like feedback forms in our lectures.
And that's where the idea will stop.
What I used to do in med school was,
oh man, it's really annoying
that we've got to fill out
those feedback forms in lectures.
I wonder if there would be
a more efficient way of doing that.
If we found the right person,
we could build a solution to this.
And when I was in med school,
I was unsophisticated with this.
I was like, oh, how might I build this?
I knew how to code.
I knew how to make websites and apps and stuff.
So I would default to like,
just trying to build the thing.
I've wasted years of my life chasing business ideas
where I was like, I found an idea,
I'm going to build the thing.
And I didn't find any customers
to pay for the bloody thing.
And I really, if someone had told me this when I was 13,
I would literally say seven years of my life
chasing down random rabbit holes
because I was afraid or didn't realize
I could speak to people
and actually just ask them for money.
The main thing is that honestly,
the way you start a business these days
is that you try and get people to pay for the thing
before you make the thing.
People come to me and they're like,
hey, Ali, I've got a bit of an audience.
I want to make an online course.
And I'm always like, okay, cool.
I know that the temptation is there to build the course
and then sell it in that order,
but you should flip that around.
You should sell the course and then build it.
So if for example, you're thinking,
you know, maybe your audience wants a course
on how to build the perfect productive desk setup.
You could go out and spend like a month
or two or three trying to create the course.
That would be a terrible idea.
Instead, what you should do is pre-sell it.
You can whip up a landing page in like a Google doc
in maybe half a day.
You can send it out to people in your audience
and be like, hey, potentially working on this course
about how to have a productive desk setup.
If this sounds interesting,
you can pre-order the course here.
It'll be released in the next month
and I'll give you your money back if you don't like it.
50% off, something to that effect.
Because based on how the pre-sell goes,
if enough people want to buy it,
then it gives you an idea.
It lets you validate the market.
So it's about finding a problem,
finding someone who's willing to pay
for the solution to that problem,
talking to those people quite a lot,
getting money from them.
And only once you have done that,
do you know that, okay,
this is a business idea worth pursuing.
And now you can start to build the thing
because you already have paying customers.
This is the thing that I wish I had known
when I started my entrepreneurship journey.
This is the thing I wish is a message
that could be hammered into the heads
of every single aspiring entrepreneur out there.
I give so many talks these days around the world.
It's super fun.
And there's always like half the audience
are aspiring entrepreneurs.
And they're all stuck in this thing of like,
oh, I need to have a good business idea
or, oh, I've just been building this thing,
but like I haven't built it yet.
And I need to make my MVP first.
And then all of it is a total waste of time.
If you speak to people who are second time founders,
people who have started multiple companies,
you'll find they spend the majority of their time
just talking to customers.
The more you talk to your customers,
the more you validate the idea actually has a market.
The more you understand what problems they have,
the more you can start to see,
huh, maybe I thought this thing should be red,
but actually this thing is blue.
The more you try and ask them for money
to pre-sell the thing that you haven't even built yet,
the more likely you are to succeed in the business.
Honestly, I think you should totally read the book.
It's absolutely amazing.
Noah's done a smashing job of it.
And if you liked this video
and you wanna see a way deeper dive into this,
I actually have an interview with Noah Kagan
on the Deep Dive podcast
that will be linked right over here.
Thank you so much for watching
and I'll see you in the next video.
Bye-bye.