Million Dollar Weekend: The Surprisingly Simple Way to Launch a 7-Figure Business in 48 Hours book by Noah Kagan ISBN:059353977X. StartUp, Startup Idea Generation...

Excerpts

Frequently Made Excuses

1. “I don’t have any good ideas.”

Start Here

After starting eight million-dollar businesses myself (Kickflip, Gambit, KingSumo, SendFox, Sumo, Tidycal, Monthly1K, AppSumo)

I call these three steps the Million Dollar Weekend process:

• 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

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—

Two weeks after we started, I was shocked to discover the entire group practically made ZERO progress

The whole group was derailed by the same two fears: FEAR OF STARTING. At some point people are told entrepreneurship is a huge risk, and you believed it.

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

From now on, everything you do in this book, and after, should be viewed as an experiment

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

It was absolutely beautiful. Amazing graphics. Worked great. And NO ONE CAME. Crickets.

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

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

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

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.

customers come first. Before the product or service. Even before the idea. To build a business, you need someone to sell to

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

PRO TIP: Focus on Zero to $1

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?

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

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.

But where do you find those customers?

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

In the beginning, founders should reach out to their friends, their former colleagues, their communities.

Before you even think about picking a business idea, make sure you have easy access to the people you want to help

CHALLENGE: Top three groups.

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!

Become a Problem Seeker

The crucial first step toward entrepreneurship is to study your own unhappiness and to think of solutions (aka business opportunities) for you to sell.

The Idea Generators

Here’s what the actual process looks like:

• What’s the most painful (aka valuable) problem you can solve for people . . .
• That you also have passion for and/or unique expertise in . . .
• For the largest niche possible that you belong to and understand .*

Your job as a problem seeker is to go to a community of yours

Use the following four challenges to come up with at least ten potentially profitable ideas

1. Solve Your Own Problems

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?

Find Me an X

CHALLENGE: Solve your own problems

2. Bestsellers Are Your Best Friends

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)?

CHALLENGE: Bestsellers are your best friends.
Write down two accessorizing ideas in your MDW Journal

DO NOT EDIT YOURSELF. Do not think, But how could that work? Just write as many down as you can.

3. Marketplaces

look for frequent requests on Craigslist gigs

Check completed listings on eBay

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

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

Is the potential solution a vitamin (a nice-to-have) or a painkiller (a must-have)?

I also use Reddit.com

Go to the r/SomebodyMakeThis subreddit where people are ACTIVELY offering up ideas and look for the first two things that interest you.

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.

Now you’ve got to pick the three best ideas from the ten

take your list of ten plus ideas, and eliminate the ones that you’re not excited about.

If you can’t decide, choose the ones you believe will be easiest to implement

Chapter 4: The One-Minute Business Model

Shape Your Idea into a Million-Dollar Opportunity