My thoughts on "Million Dollar Weekend"
Entrepreneurship and I have had a rocky relationship in the past. Over the past 10 years, I’ve made various attempts at starting my own ventures. My first attempt in 2015 was an utter failure (I honestly think I don’t even understood how business actually works then). My second attempt three years ago during the pandemic showed spots of success (I made some sales here or there), but I was never able to build it to any level of consistent and predictable revenue.
Deep down, I know I’m smart enough and resourceful enough to start and build a successful business, but up to this point, I just haven’t been able to put the pieces together.
Before I read “Million Dollar Weekend,” by Noah Kagan, I was very close to throwing in the towel and just accepting that I don’t have what it takes to be successful at entrepreneurship. Fortunately, after reading this book, I realized that I absolutely have the wherewithal to build a business - I just needed a better strategy.
Before I lay out some of the key ideas in the book, I should remark that if you’ve read books on entrepreneurship and business in the past, you definitely won’t learn any revolutionary or original concepts in this book. That being said, Noah has done a brilliant job of organizing familiar strategies into a blueprint that makes you wonder: "It really is THAT simple…why didn’t I think of this before?”
The main conceit of the book is to demonstrate to you that starting a business can be very simple and very fast. I especially admire Noah’s repeated emphasis throughout the book of building the habit of asking for money. I think many new, inexperienced entrepreneurs get so hung up with “what we think we should do” when it comes to starting a business that we forget about the core activity that makes any business work - asking for money and making money! Over and over again.
Let’s take a look at some of the main ideas of the book.
The main framework of the book is called the “Million Dollar Weekend Process,” which be boiled down to four keywords, in the following sequence:
Solve a Problem that people are having
Design a Solution that is supported by simple and quick back-of-the-napkin market research
Presell (and by doing so, validate) that solution
Build (and deliver) the solution
Problem 👉 Solution 👉 Presell 👉 Build
Are other people or yourself experiencing a problem that you can solve? If yes, then move to the next step.
Is the market for your solution big enough and growing enough to pass muster with Noah’s “one-minute business model” calculation? In other words, do you have a million-dollar opportunity on your hands? If yes, move on to the next step.
Can you find THREE customers within 48 hours who will give you money upfront for this solution, even before it’s built or created? If yes, then you’ve validated your business idea and can now incorporate the various growth and marketing strategies that Noah lays out later in the book.
The beauty of this framework is that it’s very fast and low-risk. Noah encourages you to run a 48-hour validation cycle and also encourages you to spend very little to no money at all while doing so. Even if you are unable to get 3 paying customers in 48 hours, the worst case scenario is that you just lost 48 hours of your time, lost none of your money and got a little more experience in the process.
Once you’ve validated your business idea and built the initial foundation for your business, the next step is to start growing it. Again, Noah does a fantastic job of laying out a very simple and straightforward three-step process for scaling your business:
Pick a social media platform to grow an audience of potential customers
Move them to an email list where you can continue to build a relationship with your audience and also sell your products and services
Implement Noah’s battle-tested growth playbook (which primarily consists of running many marketing experiments) to grow your business to the next level
Principles I gained from reading this book:
Build the Now, Not How Habit - Take action first, get real feedback and learn from that. Act first, then figure it out later.
Stop thinking and get to work
Focus on being a starter, an experimenter and a learner
Start small, start fast and don’t worry about what you don’t know
You only get what you want by asking for it
There’s practically unlimited upside to asking and almost no downside
Asking for what you want is a requirement of entrepreneurial success
“Love rejections! Collect them like treasures.”
Be a customer-first entrepreneur
Iron law of the market - it is deadly to start a business without first verifying that there are proven paying customers.
Your job is to find existing demand and satisfy it - you don’t want to be begging or convincing people
Create a “must-have” business: you want to sell pain-killers, not vitamins
When it comes to generating business ideas, the customer comes first, before the product or service.
Listen to the problems your customers want solved, create a solution for it and validate that they’ll pay for it.
What is the most pressing issue within your area of expertise and interest that you can address effectively for the largest audience?
When in doubt, solve your own problems.
The Three W’s of Business
Who are they?
What problem are you solving?
Where are they?
“Keep validating. Turn rejections into improvements. Feedback is gold.”
When it comes to your content, be the guide, not the guru
People want to tag along with a guide - the goal is to document what you do, not tell people what to do.
Build an audience on social media. Then move them to your email list.
Start your email list as soon as possible
Follow the Law of 100
Whatever you set out to do, do it 100 times before you even think of stopping. Commit to your first 100 with complete disregard for the results.
Find out what works and double down on it. Find out what doesn’t work and kill it.
The biggest growth levers in business are customer retention and referrals.
The more things on repeat, the better.
Great entrepreneurs have great entrepreneurial communities. Everyone is “team-made".
Leverage the Hawthorne effect and get an accountability partner