The 3-Step Million Dollar Weekend Process
The 3-Step Million Dollar Weekend Process
What are the 3 steps to build a Million Dollar Business in a Weekend?
It's time to get started. To getting serious.
Joking.
I will still pursue my dog sandals, meetups and New York platform ideas. But while I do that, I gradually replace them with potentially Million Dollar Ideas until we find the one to pursue.
You did not picked 3 ideas for your Daily Rejection goals?
Then go back to my last article to figure yours out, come back, and let’s get started with building it 😀
The 3 Steps of the process are the following:
Finding Million Dollar Ideas
The One-Minute Business Model
The 48-Hour Money Challenge
And with having them spelled out here, let’s jump right into the first step.
Finding Million-Dollar Ideas
Noah makes THE most important point right at the start and a point I ignored as long as I can remember - simply because I did not know where to start, how to ask and how to move through uncomfortable moments of rejection.
It is deadly to build a business without first verifying that there are paying customers!
And he goes on to say the next so impotant sentence:
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 for 100% certainty that it’s a solution your customers will pay for.
Customers come first! In anything! First the customer, then the product, asset, service, whatever it may be.
When you don’t know what the customer thinks, any idea does not matter!
I think about my own approach that I used:
Oh i have that great idea, and then this and another one. And soon after I got lost, frustrated. I loved solving client problems. I was working in Customer Success! I saw many problems. But instead of focusing on problems I saw, I started to focus on ideas I had.
I created next to the client, not for the client. No wonder, I got more depressed and they got more turned off.
There wasn’t any fit. And it was a difficult pill to swallow.
But I finally did, realizing that I chose a wrong approach and that there is a better one, that will lead to more success or at least to more learnings.
The learning for now?
Have you asked what the customer thinks?
If you have not, with any idea of yours, then it is an idea, not a business. And it is time to get Customer Obsessed 😎
It is one of Jeff Bezos 16 Leadership Principles: Customer Obsession - ‘Leaders start with the customer and work backwards’. And it is all about the Customer First Approach!
And then ask yourself:
WHO are you selling to
WHAT problem are you solving
WHERE they are
With that, it’s time to dive into 3 markets, lots of ideas, and choose the 3 most-likely-to-succeed some. 😀
Collecting & Finding Ideas
It’s time to find ideas and the next bullet points are all there to find ideas:
Look for something working in one category and bring it to another
Make sure to find a must-have(painkiller), not nice to have
When in doubt, solve your own problems. If you are willing to pay for solutions, likely others will do too.
Don’t let doubt from someone else dissuade you from finding out the truth. The only other opinion is your customer. Think ‘Customer First Entrepreneur’: “listen to the problem your customer wants solved, create a solution to it, and validate that the’ll pay for it. No one else.”
… there will be more. But it’s first time for some asking training.
Asking Emails
Once you found an idea, and we do that more deep dive later too, when we have some additional challenges to tackle ;), it is time to ask.
“Hey {potential customer’s name},
Huge fan of {your product} and love using it all the time.
We are launching a {your product idea} and wanted to promote {the potential customer’s product}.
Think we can sell 200+ of it for you at no cost or work for you.
You free Friday to chat at 3pm?
{Your name}
Where is the ask here for money you may wonder?
It’s not there, but it is a product he is now able to sell to customers. And with the help of a platform where there are all his clients and one promotion there, he was able to easily test whether people would be up for it.
Turned out they were and Noah had his product-market fit:
WHO - found an audience of potential clients
WHAT - worked backwards to find a problem they wanted solved.
WHERE - found a platform where they are
And Done! A successful business was launched ;)
Really, that easy, may you ask?
No! Because we forgot a step - Testing it out!
The Ask provided us with a viable idea.
A quickly built landing page provided a good start to bring in front of clients.
And then it was time to test and see if the hypothesis would play out:
Would there be a client to click on buy?
If yes, fantastic! The first client said yes! The first dollar, first euro, first customer!
A huge win and a validation - there is a market out there, there is at least one client willing to pay for your product!
And that is a huge win! 😀
Before we dive deeper, let’s finish here, digest and let it sink.
There is more to come soon.
More challenges.
More fun.
More experiments.