5 Important lessons I learned about business from Noah Kagan’s new book.
As far as resumes go, Noah Kagan has one of the most impressive ones out there. He is living a life full of adventure, fun, and financial freedom, and lucky for us, he has recently published a book called “Million Dollar Weekend” packed with some amazing advice on how you can get to where he is now.
At its core the book focuses on how to validate and launch businesses as quickly as possible, with the lowest amount of money spent on validating that idea (Noah pushes very hard for a $0 spend on validation!).
In this article, I would like to share some of my key takeaways from the book, in the hopes that you might find some value in them.
Lesson 1: Analysis ahead of action is just speculation.
This lesson is key for me, so many times I have identified a problem and sat for days analyzing it and dreaming about the million-dollar startup I would have once I have solved it.
Sitting and planning out the path to get there, making growth and marketing strategies, and trying to understand the problem in depth.
Noah says that this is completely backward, and at best all this analysis is just speculation.
It would be best if you aimed to take action first, and Noah emphasizes taking small, low-cost actions that you can iterate on later. Validate your idea as early and easily as possible, don’t waste time making plans to sell to your million-person customer base when they don’t even exist yet.
Lesson 2: Building a business without customers is the fastest way to fail.
Following on from the previous point, every single business out there is built on customers. Without customers, you can’t have a business.
Spending valuable money and time setting up a business, that you haven’t validated, and with no clients is a fantastic way to fail very quickly.
Noah encourages readers to find customers first and work backward from there. Specifically, he says you should find your first three customers before anything else.
Finding two customers is easy, one friend + one family member = two customers. The third is the difficult one to find. If you can find three customers, you are well on your way to starting your business.
Once you have found your first three customers, work backward from there and build your business around them.
Lesson 3: Small experiments, repeated over time are the recipe for transformation in business and life.
Humans don’t often outwardly express their problems, and when we do we aren’t very good at it. We need a reliable way to identify problems and pain points that people face and how we can best solve them.
We want our approach here to be results-based, and the best way to do that is through trial and error — an experimentation process. Through regular, small experiments and repeating this process over time, we can identify problems in a data-backed way.
This will help you transform areas of your life and business in ways you would never expect. It’ll bring to light problems and solutions you wouldn’t have identified otherwise. As we know, problems are where the money lies!
Lesson 4: Learn to ask.
A big premise of the book is asking, and becoming comfortable with rejection. The only way you can get a customer to give you their money is by asking for it.
Asking is a great way to open up opportunities for yourself. Ask your family and friends what problems they have in their day-to-day lives, you might find your most successful business idea there.
Ask close friends and family to be your first customers, this will help get your business off the ground.
Let go of your inhibitions about asking, people want to see you succeed. We read blogs about successful people for this exact reason. Allow people in your life to support you, all you have to do is ask.
Get comfortable with rejections too. Noah says that once you reframe rejection as something desirable, the act of asking becomes a power all on its own. Once you let go of your fear of rejection, asking becomes so much easier.
Lesson 5: Successful people start.
Sure, unsuccessful people start too. Every business that has ever failed started once. The key to success is starting early, starting often, and learning as quickly as possible.
Starting and failing can be discouraging, but its vital not to let this get you down. This is also why it's so important to start out as cheap as possible and to validate as soon as possible.
The more invested you are in an idea, whether it be time or money, the more that failure will hurt.
So start regularly, but focus on validation first and foremost. Make sure you identify the viability of an idea early on and move on if you can tell it won’t be successful. Don’t look at this as a failure, this is actually a positive outcome. You’ve spent the littlest time possible identifying this idea as non-viable and now you can move on to something more worth your time.
