Million Dollar Weekend | Noah Kagan
In the vast ocean of business literature, it’s easy to drown in the monotony. Many of these books, while well-intentioned, can often lull you into a state of inertia rather than sparking the fire of innovation. However, there’s one that stands out from the crowd — Noah Kagan’s “ Million Dollar Weekend “
As a white-collar employee, I’ve come to realize that reading books can sometimes become a sophisticated form of procrastination. We convince ourselves that we’re gaining invaluable insights, but in reality, we’re just delaying the leap into action.
This is where Noah Kagan’s “Million Dollar Weekend” flips the script. Kagan understands the entrepreneurial mindset and the pitfalls of over-preparation. His book is a breath of fresh air in the business genre, cutting through the fluff and providing a practical guide to real action.
In the upcoming sections, I’ll share some insightful quotes from the book that have the potential to transform your entrepreneurial journey.
Million Dollar Weekend
- Find a problem people are having that you can solve.
- Craft an irresistible solution whose million-dollar-plus potential is backed by simple market research.
- Spend NO MONEY to quickly validate whether your idea is the real deal (or not) by preselling it before you build it.
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.
Show me an experimenter, and over the long run, I’ll show you a future winner.
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.
If you believe your product or service can fulfill a true need, it’s your moral obligation to sell it.
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.
Steve Jobs said, “You have to start with the customer experience and work backwards.”
Here are four questions to get you going:
What is one thing this morning that irritated me?
What is one thing on my to-do list that’s been there over a week?
What is one thing that I regularly fail to do well?
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.
Don’t worry if you think your ideas suck or are too hard. The real value is learning to create, assess, and validate ideas.
Even if you’re a great surfer with an amazing board, you will still fail if you don’t have a good wave to ride.
PRO TIP: When you’re launching a business, always ask yourself: is this going to be a one-off purchase, something customers buy here and there when they want to consume it, or can you make it a monthly recurring sale?
The hard part is not choosing which business idea. The hard part is getting customers. And that’s where you’ll focus first.
The real goal here is less which idea is golden and more putting in the reps of checking market size before we validate later. If your first idea passes the million-dollar opportunity test, perfect. Proceed to the next chapter.
If not, then move on to your next idea and run it through the same assessment. Don’t get in your own way, wondering which idea is best.
Pick one business idea.
Make sure it’s a million-dollar opportunity.
Confirm your business idea is profitable.
If you’re still stuck on how to do this and don’t just want to choose the first idea on the list, then start with the problem that is most exciting for you to solve yourself.
Validation is finding three customers in forty-eight hours who will give you money for your idea.
Find three customers in forty-eight hours who will give you money for your idea.
Validation is a conversation. Not a sales pitch, but a chat to learn about the customer, see if you can help them and if they’ll actually pay you.
The big takeaway is this: Almost every business idea is guaranteed to fail on the first try. Instagram started as a bourbon app. Slack started as a gaming app. Keep validating. Turn rejection into improvements. Feedback is gold.
Keep talking and listening to your customers so you can find out what they need.
Validation.
Your challenge is to get at least three paying customers within forty-eight hours.
“What’s your unique angle in thirty seconds or less?” In other words, why would anyone care to read his newsletter?
I know that sounds harsh, but that’s the first question you have to answer before you put yourself into the public sphere.
Look at what he did in those four sentences:
He defines who he is,
Why you should trust him,
What he is passionate about, and
What unique thing this prepares him to do for you.
Take a minute, and as Ben has done, write out a pitch in your journal describing your special sauce.
Ultimately, your audience wants to learn something from you that’s relevant, useful, and surprising. And they want to do that by going on a journey with you.
If I’ve learned anything from the thousands of videos I have created for YouTube, it is that people don’t want to be lectured at by an all-knowing guru — they want to tag along with a guide.
The goal here is to document what YOU do, not what you think everyone else should do. When you position yourself as someone who is on a journey and document your process and your progress, you become relatable, and that is what audiences long for.
Having a bond that leads people to open your emails — not the size of the list — is where the power of email lies.
You can set up one like Julien’s for free with SendFox.com (a service I helped build).
There are also other services like Mailchimp.com, Webflow.com, and ConvertKit.com to create landing pages.
Go to MillionDollarWeekend.com to see more landing page examples.
When you add your landing page to your email and your social bios, you can measure the traffic and conversion rate you get from these mentions with Bitly.com or Linktree.com, website address shorteners that track clicks.
If people like your stuff, they want more.
A MAJOR thing here is one-by-one marketing. This is personally engaging with each new subscriber. When you’re starting out, every single person matters. Frankly, everyone in your audience matters forever, but especially at the beginning, you should respond to every single new subscriber. I STILL do this for nearly every single email and did for most of my YouTube comments.
Second, with the Connection Email, you’re explicitly asking them to connect with you on social media, by following you on Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and so on.
Finally, the Content Email is where you give them a piece of great content — a blog post like Chris Von Wilpert’s, a video, or the invite to an event.
If you’re an interior designer, this is where you might show them your work and get them excited.
The Law of 100
A crazy study from the University of Florida.
Photography professor Jerry Uelsmann split his photography into two groups: the Quantity group and the Quality group.
The Quantity group had to take 100 pictures to get an A grade by the end of the semester, and the Quality group could turn in just one photo by the end of the semester — but it had to be perfect to get the A.
Can you guess what happened?
The Quantity group kicked the Quality group’s ass — in terms of quality!
Why?
The Quantity group experimented more! They took tons of photos, learned from their mistakes each time, spent more time in the darkroom, and they got better with time.
That’s what the Law of 100 is about.
It’s simple: Whatever you put yourself to, do it 100 times before you even THINK of stopping. This stops you from succumbing to what Seth Godin calls “the dip,” the moment in a long slog between starting and when mastery sets in where you start hating the work and you want to quit.
For me with my podcast, I wanted to get 100,000 downloads an episode, so when I only got to 30,000 downloads, I was discouraged and gave up completely — after just 50 tries. What’s wild is (a) if I was getting 30,000 downloads today, it would be a top podcast; and (b) since I’ve restarted and committed, I’m at 7,500 downloads an episode. A painful but valuable lesson.
Lean in and commit to 100 reps. (Think of this as doing reps and practicing as opposed to failing or succeeding.) This changes your mindset and makes it much easier to sustain forward motion when things get tough.
The key is to set up a system that helps you get your 100 reps done without thinking about the results.
The solution to all the doubt that will inevitably creep up on you is to commit to your first 100 — whatever it is for you — with complete disregard for your results.
The Law of 100 is about the power of consistency — the only way to get to greatness.
Be specific. One of the most common mistakes I see from entrepreneurs when they set goals is they say they want “more.” More revenue, more traffic, more downloads. But how much and by when?
Once you have a goal and a time frame, you can break down your goal into a timeline of smaller targets. Besides making your goals feel more achievable, having a timeline is crazy motivating because you get to tick off smaller wins on the way to achieving your overall target.
WORK BACKWARDS FROM YOUR GOAL!
That’s why for an entrepreneur it’s important to have a lazy mindset. If something’s too hard and not working after a good try? Give up and move on!
Double down on the experiments that work the best.
Kill the experiments that don’t meet expectations.
The first step to getting all you want in the world is allowing yourself to want it — and facing the fears necessary to be able to get what you want.
There’s no wrong dream.
Entrepreneurship is your chance to build your work around your life, not be swallowed up by it. The problem is, as an entrepreneur and maybe a spouse or parent as well, you have a ton of stuff pulling at you from moment to moment. That constant chaos keeps you from consistently winning your days. It is one of the greatest impediments to achieving fun and fulfillment. When you can’t focus, you lose control.
If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.
— Benjamin Franklin
Show me YOUR calendar and I’ll tell you what’s most important to you.
Great entrepreneurs have great entrepreneurial communities. There’s no such thing as self-made. Everyone is team-made.
The easiest way to connect with anyone is to compliment them first WITHOUT asking for anything in return.
The Prefluencer I’m reaching out to:
Send this message:
Hey [first name],
LOVING what you’re putting out. [Insert specifically what you liked or how it impacted your life]
Keep going!
[Your Name]
From here, the person will likely respond and you can open up a dialogue to talk about working together or helping each other in the future. Spam is sending a message asking for something, whereas connecting and building relationships like the above script is just sending a compliment without any expectations.
Your life is shaped by your willingness to face your fears. Remember, just keep going no matter what.
You have to define what success is for your life and not worry what others think. Million Dollar Weekend empowers you to create the life YOU want to live. And you get fifty-two chances to do it this year.
To experiment, experiment, experiment. To fail, fail, fail. Until you succeed.
Just start. And then . . . start again.
Originally published at https://myhighlightz.blogspot.com.
