You don’t need to quit your job to be an Entrepreneur

You just need to spend your time more wisely

Building up the launch of my Udemy course on web development for Entrepreneurs I have had the good fortune to spend some time lurking around /r/Entrepreneur at reddit.com. As part of promoting a Udemy course they recommend posting to relevant subreddits as it’s usually a good way of distributing free coupons. Now, /r/Entrepreneur has a 10 karma rule before you can submit posts; you earn karma when people upvote your comments and posts for being helpful/useful etc. This ensures people to give back to the community as well as stopping spammers, which is effectively what I would have been.

Now, I’m stubborn and not one to be beaten, so I decided to start hanging around the boards and commenting. After getting off to a rocky start (I got flagged so none of my posts were appearing although they were all actually genuine; the moderators resolved this quickly enough) I’ve quickly come to love it. It’s an incredible little community, filled with everyone from experienced entrepreneurs to people just starting out. They all value good feedback, which is an immensely good feeling as a contributor. I’m exceptionally glad that the rule was put in place to force me to spend some time on there; I got to help some cool people out, learn some things myself, and it also meant when my course post went out it was a lot more tailored and heartfelt, and much less spammy.

One of the interesting things on the forum is the number of post asking should I/shouldn’t I quit my job and pursue a life as an entrepreneur, or questions like “how do I get the money to start out?”; often there are specific triggers (been offered an opportunity) but sometimes it’s just general musings from the disenfranchised. This seems utterly crazy to me, as I know from experience you don’t need start up capital or all of your available time, to become an entrepreneur. My responses tend to be similar to most these posts, so I wanted to do a “No time and no budget: The weekend entrepreneur” summary.

Read These Books

The Lean Startup by Eric Ries: You’ve must have been hiding under a rock if you haven’t heard about lean startup by now. The premise is simple, and it is the underpinning philosophy to being a weekend entrepreneur. There are many aspects to it, but in a sentence; test early, test often, fail fast. If you’re waiting until you have a product to sell before you test if there is a market then you’re doing it wrong. With the advent of the internet it’s very very easy to test out your ideas by building landing pages and surveys so you know before you’ve spent a penny or before you’ve written a line of code if you’re going to make any money. Failing fast is a really good thing as it stops your burning time and money on what would be a failing proposition. History is littered with failed multiyear projects; lean stops this.

There’s a great example of this thinking in this reddit post: “Idea to profitable SAAS app in 3 weeks”. By using a twitter autoresponder and a mailing list the OP validated there were real people willing to pay actual money for the product. Didn’t need to give his job up and spend a year building an amazing piece of software that no-one wanted. 3 weeks!!

The 4 hour work week by Timothy Ferriss: If there were ever a book will make you want to start a new life out of the rat race this is it, and it very carefully steps through how to get there; you don’t just drop everything, but build it up at the same time as your current role until you’re at the point where you can quit your job and live on a beach in Thailand, spending very little of your time doing actual work. Think you’re too busy in your current role? 4HWW will help you navigate the boss or issue that’s stopping you from taking over the world. There’s a reason it’s spent 7 years in the New York Times Best Seller list.

Come up with ideas

Hopefully you already have ideas which is why you’re itching to get going, but if not, then this should be your top priority after reading the books above (both of which go into helping you craft ideas). Keep a notepad with you, or more likely, evernote on your phone. I’ve always got a list of apps, companies and courses I want to create and I’m always adding to it. As soon as you think of something, write it down.

Still struggling to come up with an idea? Go through forums like Reddit. Lots of people post ideas on their; most people don’t execute. Or maybe they only execute in their local geography, or against a certain niche. There’s lots of ideas that people may target at say, the US, which you can make work somewhere else with few or no changes. The person who can bring a product to market is the winner, not the person who comes up with the idea.

Still stuck? Try disrupting a market by applying a new model. Spotify usurped iTunes by applying a subscription model to a pay-per-item industry. Netflix did the same to blockbuster and went one further by changing the delivery method of the content. Maybe you could do an all-you-can wash laundrette for a monthly subscription? Toy around with ideas. Write down all the models you can think of and lots of random subniches and try and mix and match. Don’t limit your thinking!

Test your ideas

Now you’ve got your list of ideas it’s time to test them. You need to test quickly and cheaply; chances are you first 99 ideas might be duds so you need to work through them to get to the gold mine. How you do this will vary depending on what your product is; testing an idea about laundrettes is much harder than testing a new software product, but rest assured, it is possible.

If your idea is an online one, such as software or a service, the defacto way is to build yourself a landing page (such as this one I did recently). This page will pitch your product or idea to the audience to see if it’s something they’ll buy; you could put a mailing list sign up here so people can show interest. However, even better than that, you could put a “click here to buy” option; whilst this will go to a page saying that the product is not available, you can track how many people have clicked through using Google Analytics. These are people who are actually willing to pay money for your product. This should hopefully flesh out whether it’s a worthy idea. Shameless plug; Building this landing page is exactly what’s covered in my 5 star rated Udemy course, “Build the complete business/startup website”.

Even better than this is hand cranking your service; before spending the time to build your amazing automatic service, instead do it yourself by hand, or get a service like Mechanical Turk to do it on the cheap for you. Choose the bear minimum functionality that would provide value to your end user and perform that task yourself to prove that it’s a valuable service with “stickiness”. For example, someone I know through Startup Weekend HK had an idea to make home cooked meals to deliver to busy business people. Instead of ramping up suppliers and delivery folk, she instead advertised it to her network and cooked and delivered the food herself. Hard work for sure, but it quickly proved that the demand wasn’t there which allowed her to pivot to a modified version (which you can check out here). Now, this may not be feasible to you, the weekend entrepreneur, but there are many ideas and many strategies that will be.

Another good example is this: Wouldn’t it be great if you could scoop up all the discount coupons for a site off twitter and put them somewhere for people to use, then maybe monetize using adwords or affiliate links? You don’t need to know a thing about technology to build this; make a blog, hand select the links from twitter to start and then get traffic to your site. Are people clicking through? Then you can start making money right now, whilst you can find someone to automate it. Two asides; first, I don’t care how bad you claim to be with computers, you can learn programming, and taking the time to do this will save you a fortune on developers and will allow you to put these experiments together much quicker. You do not need a technical cofounder. DIY! Second, I actually did this coupon idea last week (see www.newudemycoupons.com). It’s a good one so far.

Whatever you do, do this; start building your mailing list. Having your own mailing list will give you a group of willing subjects to test and experiment on. This is the single most important thing you should take from this post! (You can sign up for my mailing list on the right if you’d like to be subjected to my experiments).

If your idea is something more manual, like the laundrette idea, then it’s time to get on your feet. Maybe put flyers out to test the demand in an area; tell your potential customers to go to a website to register for an early bird discount coupon. Even better, before getting a lease and buying lots of machines, collect the washing and do it at your house. Sure, the turn around may be slower than ideal, but if you have paying customers complaining the service is slow then it means that you have paying customers. Angry customers that are paying you money are a much more solvable problem than no customers.

That sounds great, but where will I find the time?

This one is surprisingly easy.

In the morning

Wake up an hour early! I know you really need that extra hour in bed, but really you don’t. It’ll hurt for the first week but once you’ve shaved that hour off you’ve just got 5 extra hours a week towards your startup.

In the evening

That’s right! Take point 1, apply it to when you go to sleep. You’ve got yourself another 5 hours. If this will cut your sleep down too much, then cut down on whatever crap you’re doing that’s not getting you towards your goal. Maybe do a little less drinking, spend a little less time in the gym or a little less TV time. Or alternatively, multitask.

Lunch time

This is the oft neglected one. Laptops are light, iPads are powerful. Start taking them to work and using them during your lunch hour (and actually take your lunch hour!). This is some really valuable time, particularly for the more boring tasks like trawling twitter and forums promoting your material.

I admit I’m far from perfect on this and don’t spend anywhere near as much time as I should. My friend, the ultimate part time Entrepreneur, stays up till 1 or 2 am after his girlfriend has gone to sleep to work on his projects and has opened a coworking space whilst building an iOS app dev business whilst continuing his day job which involves long days. He’s a true soldier, and an example that if you really want to be an entrepreneur you can find the time right now.

This is only a high level but hopefully it’s of some help to you if you’re in a quandary about how to begin your new life as an Entrepreneur; test it quickly and cheaply, fail fast, and start getting paid preferably before you’ve built anything.

(Image: John Fischer)