The 7 Day Startup by Dan Norris

• Without question, the biggest mistake people make is obsessing over their idea and not focusing enough on finding people willing to pay for their product.
• You can never predict what happens after you start a business. Long-term plans and detailed documents are pointless. Most business go on to do something very different from what they set out to do.
• You don’t learn until you launch.
• There is a lot of bullshit in startup land.
• Anyone can create a job for themselves. But not everyone can change the world.
• Execution is your ability to present your idea just as well as the best ideas in the world.
• The reality is that most ideas aren’t going to go viral. Let’s face it: the chances of you coming up with the next Dropbox are low. This is particularly true for bootstrapped companies.
• Email signups are often considered the key indicator of whether an idea is sound.
• Just because you can get a few people to sign up for your “coming soon business”, it doesn’t validate the business.
• Momentum is a key part of a successful startup.
• To really test whether you can build a business, you have to start building it.
• There’s a huge forgotten void between “idea” and “successful business” that validation doesn’t account for.
• Once you start something with a clear end date, it drives you forward.
• If you want to be an entrepreneur, you have to launch.
• If you have a conversation with a friend about your business idea this month, and next month you are having the same conversation, you are a wantrepreneur.
• It’s amazing what you can achieve in 7 days.
• Beware that launching fast requires you to compromise a lot.
• Once you aim for a week, you will start to question every assumption and figure out a way to make it happen.
• The 7 Pre-Launch Tasks
• Day One - You need to have an idea.
• Day Two - You need to have something to launch at the end of the seven day.
• Day Three - You need a business name.
• Day Four - You need a landing page or some sort of online presence.
• Day Five - Get your business in front of enough people to help you decide whether or not to continue.
• Day Six - You need to measure what success means to you.
• Day Seven - You have to launch.
• The Idea Matters - A bad idea, executed well, will not make a good business.
• Execution Matters - A good idea, executed poorly, will not make a good business.
• A Founder’s ability to Get Customers (To HUstle) Matters - A great idea, executed well, will fail without customers.
• Timing Matters - Speaking hypothetically about an idea is pointless if the timing is wrong.
• Luck Matters - In fact, it matters much more than most entrepreneurs would care to admin.
• The beauty is that you can always change your idea once you start learning from real customer data.
• If you only spend one day on your idea, you’ll be more open to changing it if it doesn’t work out.
• If you want to be an entrepreneur, you need to be passionate about growing a business.
• It makes no sense to start a business that is going to have you doing work you don’t enjoy.
• It’s worth thinking about what skills you have, what are you known for, and where you can provide the most value.
• Your idea is not a solid startup idea if you don’t have the capacity to make use of a profitable, growing business model.
• Business is not just about making money. It’s about creating something that is valuable.
• Things that carry value are assets, so it’s your job as a startup founder to build them.
• Focusing on short-term launches or projects won’t build assets. Assets are built over time by ignoring short-term distractions in favor of a bigger, long-term vision.
• At the idea stage you have to think about what assets your idea will result in. Some ideas--when worked on--will naturally result in the development of assets over time, and some won’t.
• The long-term goal of a startup is to become a legitimate player in the industry and create an impact.
• All that matters is what your customers care about.
• The best bootstrapped business have ways of generating leads that tap into a key differentiator in the business or the founder.
• For a business idea to be a good idea for a bootstrapper, it needs to be something you can launch quickly.
• Complex software products, physical products, or local physical business are difficult. If it’s going to take you a year to launch, you won’t learn from real customer data as you go.
• Choose an idea that you can launch and modify quickly. Then when you start getting real data from paying customers, you can innovate and get the product just right.
• Creating a startup means creating something valuable for your customers that is a long-term assets.
• You need to think about how you can truly create something.
• Consistently producing original concepts will boost your motivation and confidence, set you up as an authority, and put you in a place where you can develop real, long-term assets.
• It is possible to start a business without constructing anything, but in the long term the business that stand out are the most creative ones.
• Creation doesn’t just happen one day in the future when you think the time is right.
• It’s something that the best companies and the smartest entrepreneurs do every day.
• Fundamentally entrepreneurship is about creating a product that people want and selling it to them.
• Playing the visionary is a privilege reserved for second-time and third-time entrepreneurs. It’s fun, but it’s fraught with danger.
• As an entrepreneur you need something that people want to pay for, with their money or attention. Asking them will not work, because people are bad a t predicting their own behavior.
• Solve problems where people are already paying for solutions.
• Everyone might be saying that your idea is great, but look at whether or not they are currently paying for a solution to the same problem.
• Start by solving existing problems that people are already paying for solutions to.
• Idea Evaluation Checklist
• Enjoyable daily tasks
• Product/founder fit
• Scalable business model
• Operates profitably without the founder
• An asset you can sell
• Large market potential
• Taps into pain or pleasure differentiators
• Unique lead generation advantage
• Ability to launch quickly
• Brainstorm a bunch of ideas and evaluate them against the checklist. Choose the idea that stands out as being the best option for you.
• Learning is the essential unit of progress for startups.
• Rather than spending six months creating a product or service, do only the smallest amount of work required to truly test it.
• A common MVP mistake is over-emphasizing the “minimum” and under-emphasizing the “viable”.
• Once you have your product or service idea, it’s time to think about what you can launch within one week that represents your final vision for your product or service as closely as possible.
• The key is to forget about automation and figure out what you can do manually.
• An MVP in a service business isn’t too hard, but with software or physical products it becomes a bit trickier.
• Build what you need, not what you think others need (i.e. don’t act on assumptions).
• Charge from day one.
• Stop trying to build the perfect product.
• Ship fast, ship frequently.
• Price for the customers you want.
• What can you do manually (hint: probably everything)?
• Write down exactly what you will launch on Day 7. What will your customers get, what is included, and what is excluded? If necessary, write down what is automated and what will be done manually in the short term.
• You will grow into whatever name you come up with. Most names mean very little when they are first conceived.
• The irony is that a terrible name is often the result of overthinking it.
• The most sensible way to approach your business name is to come up with a few options. From there you can use some logic to pick the best one.
• The more time you spend looking at names, the weirder it gets.
• Always favor a name that’s simple. Even if it doesn’t mean anything, being simple makes it memorable. Eventually it will mean something.
• Here are some quick guidelines: Try to avoid making up words. Don’t use misspellings or words that people commonly misspell. This only increases the chance people won’t find you.
• Your business name has to be easy to say in order for people to talk about you.
• Come up with a bunch of potential business names and evaluate them against the criteria above. Choose whichever one makes the most sense to you and run with it. Grab the best domain you can for that name.
• A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week.
• You don’t want to spend weeks or months on the landing page. One day is a reasonable amount of time to get a page ready.
• It’s imperative that on Day 7 you have a page with a payment button on it, because that is the only way you’ll learn if people want what you are offering.
• A marketing funnel is the process by which someone will become a customer.
• PayPal is still by far the easiest way to get online payments happening quickly.
• When you are selling online, images make a huge difference.
• Build yourself a website!
• The main purpose of marketing is to get your product in front of qualified buyers. This means getting people to your landing page or your sales page.
• Create in-depth content based around the customer problems that your business solves.
• Make content as actionable and useful to your target audience as possible.
• Optimize your site for email opt-ins so you can get people back to your site by sending emails.
• Your email list will become one of the most valuable assets in your business. A list of people who trust you, that you can contact exclusively whenever you like, is a gold mine.
• I suggest building an email list before you launch and continually looking at ways of growing your list.
• The easiest say to get started with email marketing is signing up for a free account on MailChimp.com.
• Hearing your voice builds people’s trust significantly.
• Most podcasters I know, even the ones with seven-figure business, are doing their podcast from home.
• Effective guest blogging is like every other form of marketing: it’s all about targeting. If you can get your message in front of the right people, it will work well. If you get the message in front of irrelevant people, it won’t work at all.
• Organizing local, in-person events has been a winning strategy for all types of business for a long time.
• Doing live, local events is a powerful form of content marketing.
• Free users are not the same as paying customers.
• Getting press attention for your company can be a huge bonus.
• Test out a bunch of options and double down on what is working well. Look for sources of momentum and do more of what is working.
• Build a list of what marketing methods you are going to choose. Put together a rough plan for the first week or two of your launch.
• 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.
• 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 metric of choice has always been MRR.
• Pay particular attention to who is signing up. If it’s just your friends, then that’s very different from the general public.
• Save your excitement until you land people you don’t know as customers.
• Don’t measure something that no longer represents an important metric for your business.
• The truth is that running a business is never black and white.
• Focus on what your paying customers are saying and how many people continue to pay you, and you can’t go too far wrong.
• Create a spreadsheet that covers the first few moths in business, the number of signups, revenue, estimated costs, and monthly growth.
• If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.
• The most important thing is...don’t stress! A launch will very rarely make or break a successful sustainable business, which is what you are trying to build.
• Dan Andrews of Tropical MBA has said that it takes 1,000 days to build a business.
• Launch day is just 1 out of 1,000.
• Launch and start executing your marketing plan.
• Creating a product and getting customers is great, but business will not survive and thrive without growing profits over time.
• For your to achieve ongoing growth, you need a self-sufficient business model.
• Every decision you make about how you design your business and what work to take on will impact its ability to grow.
• I’m not into niches. I want to make sure whatever I start could be a $1M business in a few years, ideally more.
• If you want something that grows, it has to have something to grow into, and the last thing you want is to kill your momentum by hitting a ceiling.
• Make sure there is enough potential in what you are doing to have a continually growing business.
• Assets help your business grow and make it worth something when you sell.
• What are you working on today that will make you indestructible tomorrow?
• A business with one basic product like Buffer or Dropbox is a growth machine. It you want a scalable business model, it’s much better to work on one simple offering than thirty different ones.
• Follow the momentum.
• Having a simple MRR model makes everything easier.
• Not every service suits a recurring model, so you could think about other ways to build predictable revenue. Seriously consider offering a recurring aspect to your business if you think there’s a chance you can make it work.
• INformation products might give you big bursts of revenue, but a few years down the track your business may not have progressed.
• Build growth elements into the DNA of your business and optimize for ongoing profit growth and asset value. IN a few years you will have something valuable instead of a job that just pays reasonably well.
• The only way to win is to learn faster than anyone else.
• The first major hurdle is launching; then, getting your first customer; and then, proving the concept and generating a wage for yourself in a scalable way.
• You are better off launching quickly and paying attention to real data rather than making assumptions. This doesn’t just apply to launching; it’s a general business principle that you can apply to almost every decision.
• Most of the assumptions you have prior to and after launching your business will be wrong.
• If you have an open mind, you can easily test your assumptions and those assumptions made by others in your industry.
• One small discovery might be good enough to kickstart a whole new business or product.
• Solve problems as they arise.
• A lot of business owners spend time solving problems they don’t have.
• These days you can solve most business problems quickly. There’s no reason to spend any time on problems you don’t have. DOing so will only cost you valuable time and money. It will take attention away from the work you should be doing.
• There’s a good chance that if you are a new business, you only have one problem: not enough customers. That’s where you should be spending your time.
• Being true to your word is a very important part of building trust in business. Whether you are offering services or selling a product, make sure you always deliver on what you promise.
• Your reputation is everything and it will impact every business you start, not just this one.
• Launching quickly is important early on when the conditions are uncertain. Once you have a clear path, however, quality is more important.
• Any time you feel yourself wondering if what you are doing is good enough, compare it to the best.
• By comparing yourself to the best, you set higher expectations for yourself, and you will be better for it.
• The minutiae that you are debating could be distracting you from a fundamental problem that you aren’t seeing.
• Always take a step back and ask yourself if it’s possible that someone else may have solved this problem before.
• The companies that learn the quickest, win. This is partly because they do not make decisions based on assumptions and partly because they learn from their predecessors.
• Don’t believe that people should only work on their business and not in their business. It’s crucially important that you do both.
• You’ll naturally gravitate to things that you do well, but if your skills are hard to replace, you have t be careful.
• Do more of what is working.
• Momentum is a powerful force, so keep an eye out for what is working and do more of it.
• Your own personal happiness and motivation are the most important keys to the success of your business.
• No amount of money is worth working with a difficult customer.
• Every difficult customer can be replaced by a better one, generally much quicker than you think.
• You need to do everything to keep your customers and the data you get from churning customers is priceless.
• Think in the long term about what asset you are building as a result of actions you complete today. Getting carried away on short-term projects will kill any chance of momentum and hurt growth.
• If you are in doubt, come back to the product. Anything you can do that improves the product or improve the customer experience will be a sound investment.
• Treat business advice with suspicion and test every assumption including your own. It’s far more important to learn from your customers.
• Move quicker and learn faster than your competition.