1. Sell everything. Save money. This one would seem obvious, but it’s easy to get ahead of one’s self. My first business actually got off to a strong start. So I chose to “reward” myself with a gratuitous trip to Buenos Aires with some friends and proceeded to blow most of the money I had saved up from my first six months. Less than a year later, I would be broke and begging my ex-girlfriend to let me live with her so I didn’t end up on the street. Don’t make the same mistake I did.
2. Monetize your free time. A big complaint of a lot of people who want to start businesses is that they don’t have enough “free time.” Between work, hobbies and social obligations, they have maybe an hour or two a day to sit down and hammer out that new business idea they’ve been sitting on.
No, no, no, wrong, wrong, wrong. If it feels like you’re giving up your free time to work on a second job, then you’re screwed before you even start. Take what you love to do anyway — basketball stat analysis, home gardening, furniture carving, whatever — and simply monetize that. That’s your most obvious starting point. That way you’re not giving up any free-time, you’re expanding it.
3. Surround yourself with other entrepreneurs. A great point
Dan Andrews made on a podcast with me: surround yourself with the type of people you want to become. If all of your friends are bored desk jockeys, then there will be an unconscious social pressure for you to continue on as a bored desk jockey. They will not understand your aspirations, or even worse, they may resent them. Find other people who are in a similar position as you and push and motivate one another.
4. Quit your day job as soon as is reasonable. I wrote about this extensively
here. Burn the boats behind you. Give yourself no option of retreat.
5. Be shameless. Aspiring to do something no one else has ever done takes a certain degree of delusional self belief. You must be willing to make an ass out of yourself here and there. Cold-calling dozens of prospective clients and telling them that you can do a better job for them than anyone else. Pitching your new product to people who didn’t even know it existed. Promising delivery on content or services which you only kind of, sort of, know how to deliver on (but are willing to figure it out as you go along). You have to be shameless about this stuff.
6. Fuck your business idea. Mark Cuban once said that every great business idea you have, you should assume that 100 other people have had the same idea and are already working on it. Business ideas don’t matter. What matters is execution.
A lot of people are proud of themselves for coming up with a cool idea. But the most successful businesses in history were rarely new ideas. Google wasn’t a new idea. Facebook wasn’t a new idea. Microsoft wasn’t a new idea. All of these companies merely executed better than anyone else.
7. Less reading, more doing. Try to only read when you need a specific solution to a problem you’ve run into in the work you’re doing. For instance, don’t just sit around and read about marketing because you think maybe you should know about marketing. Ugh, how fucking boring (this, in a nutshell, is why college kind of sucks by the way). Read about marketing when your new project needs a new marketing strategy. Suddenly, that same reading becomes a lot more interesting.
Many people use reading up on what they want to do as a way to avoid actually
doing what they want to do. Reading is useless without execution.
8. Test, test, test. You don’t know anything until you’ve tested it. I don’t care if Frank Kern said it or Dan Kennedy said it or your step-mom said it. You don’t know until you test it. Every marketing seminar I’ve ever watched and every marketing book I’ve ever read told me to raise my prices. Yet, every split-test ever I’ve done on my books through this site, the lower priced book not only killed it in terms of revenue, but also generated more referrals, more positive reviews and traffic to my site.
9. Be eccentric. You can’t stand out unless you’re different. Capitalize on your quirkiness.
10. Obsess about your brand. The reality of the current economy is that pretty much any information, product or service a person wants, they already have dozens of choices of who to purchase them from. Scarcity doesn’t exist anymore. Differentiation purely through price or quality is an almost impossible strategy for entering or dominating a new market. What dominates now is brand. Your brand defines the relationship you have with your prospect and customer. It’s why they come back to you and not the other 11 Joe Schmoe’s offering the same exact service.
11. Don’t deliver a product, deliver an experience. Steve Jobs said that he wanted Apple products to provide an experience, not just a function. Apple is possibly the strongest brand on the planet right now. This is what I mean when I say obsess about your brand: obsess about the experience you’re giving your customers, not just the information or product you’re giving them.
