all right so how do you start your first business in a weekend that is what Noah Haan purports to teach us in this book million dooll weekend which is what we're discussing in this episode of book club the ongoing Series where I distill and discuss highlights and summaries from some of my favorite books and genuinely this is a absolutely fantastic book to read if you are an aspiring entrepreneur if you've ever thought that you want to start your own business and you have not yet done it you need
to read this book because it's going to give you a play-by-play road map on how exactly to do that okay so the book has broken down into three parts we've got part one start it part two build it and part three grow it and in this video I'm going to focus on part one and two start it and build it let's go if you're watching this and you haven't yet started your business I suspect for a lot of people I know you might have been thinking about starting a business for several years you have just not
yet taken action and there is this pervasive myth that happens amongst everyone who is an aspiring entrepreneur which is I need the right idea I cannot get started until I have the right idea but the thing is and what Noah talks about throughout the book is you don't start a business by first having the right idea and then starting the business you start a business by deciding to start a business and then you find a process to come up with the right idea and really the core message he's sharing
this first chapter which is why it's called a chapter one just start is begin before you are ready no one feels ready to start a business just like I've heard no one really feels ready to have kids the timing is never quite right similarly the timing to start a business is never quite right you have to just start you have to begin before you're ready and just to label this point just a little bit more there's a nice quote here most people overthink First Act later every successful entrepreneur
ACT first figure it out later any analysis ahead of action is purely speculation you really do not understand something until you've done it rather than trying to plan your way into the confidence to act just start acting and there is a motto that he talks about here and this is a motto that that that has really stuck with me since I read the book a couple weeks ago and that motto is now not how whenever we think of doing something we're like okay well I've got this idea for this thing but like
how do I do it and you know there's this tyranny of of how the how holds us back from doing things instead think what is the smallest action I can take right now even if you don't know what to do about anything there probably a small action that you can figure out that you can just take action on and then once you've taken action on that you can then get started with the thing so honestly the whole first chapter is a lot of emotional support genuinely like I've been running my YouTuber Academy f
or a few years now we've taught like 5,000 students in it 95% of students when it comes to starting YouTube channels it's not technical things they're struggling with it's the emotional side of things they're like oh I couldn't possibly make YouTube videos unless I have the perfect idea no one starts making YouTube videos with the perfect idea just like no one starts a business with the perfect idea you decide to start and then you can figure out the idea second now whatever stage of the busines
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212 and thank you so much trading 212 for sponsoring this video so now that we've gotten the emotional support side out of the way that begs the question what happens next and that is where we now come to the customer first approach to to building a business I have interviewed hundreds of entrepreneurs on my podcast spoken to hundreds of more in real life and all of them basically talk about this idea this customer first approach which is that you're not trying to find an idea for a business ins
tead first of all you're starting with who are the people you would like to serve because fundamentally what a business is a business solves a problem for someone who is willing to pay for that problem to be solved and the biggest thing that holds back entrepreneurs and has done forever is trying to build something without first verifying that there's actually someone out there willing to pay for the thing this is the problem that students often have because students come up with great ideas and
it's amazing they're like I have this idea for this business and they'll just go and try and build it without first verifying that there are in fact people to pay for it here we go that's why when it comes to generating business ideas customers come first before the product or service even before the idea to build a business you need someone to sell to I can't tell you how many times someone has emailed me saying what do you think of this business idea I also get those emails my auto reply have
you asked what the customer things basically when you're trying to start a business the first step is to figure out who are you going to sell to and that's ideally within your own zone of influence for example in my position of being a medical student at University the people I'm serving are probably the people around me or the parents of the people around me or the people I interact with in hospitals or the people I interact with at the University or the local businesses I interact with that's
like within my zone of influence the other good thing that this customer should ideally have is money it is so much easier to create a business where you are targeting people who have money rather than people who don't have money again this is one of the issues with students is that if you're a student then everyone you know is your age and probably does not have very much money if it were me and I were students starting a business I might be thinking okay my friends don't have any money but wh
o does their parents do okay what are the problems that my friends's parents have who else has money like my college on my University there's a pot of money I can tap into there okay now that you've brainstormed who are the sorts of people ideally with money that you'd potentially like to serve the next step is to brainstorm what are all of the problems that they have now the easiest way to do this is to just go and ask them what are the things in their life that are really annoying what are the
things that they already pay for what are the things where they're paying for something but the thing they're paying for doesn't seem very good and if you do this enough you will come up with an infinite list of problems that people have and the whole world progresses and evolves based on people discovering a problem and then trying to find the solution to that problem Uber started because someone complained was like oh man it's really annoying trying to held down a cab and trying to ring the t
axi company and so that's where the idea for Uber comes along and there's a really good example here so I love this there's the founder first approach and then there's the customer first approach so here we go let's say you have an idea for a dog walking app how would you go about doing it here's the way most people most entrepreneurs would do it one spend hours at home thinking about the app and coming up with clever names for it two spend $100 hiring their cousin to draw a cool logo three set
up an LLC four watch YouTube videos about apps and programming in business and dogs five consider signing up for a developer boot camp and quickly realize that coding is hard six buy the domain name for the snazzy website they're going to build seven look into hiring a developer on upwork and quickly realize it's prohibitively expensive eight give up again does that sound familiar that is founder first now let's take the same idea for a dog walking app and let's put it through the customer first
perspective one call or text three people right now who have dogs and ask them to pay you to walk their dog two turns out none of these dog owners have problems walking their dog you discover their real problem is finding dog sitters when they're traveling three ask for their next travel dates and have them pay you a deposit they pay jackpot and the idea here is that quickly you know based on this really simple example which I think we can all relate to in some ways in the founder first approac
h you go down a rabbit hole where you build this thing without verifying that people actually have the problem and are willing to pay for it in the second one you come up with an idea cool and then you talk to people and you see does the idea have legs would they be willing to pay you for it you realize no they don't and now you do something else cuz you realize they are willing to pay for this other thing and crucially you ask for that first sale you make that first dollar the first dollar is a
lways the hardest the first three customers are always the hardest if you just aim to try and get your first three paying customers as soon as is humanly possible before you even try and build anything then at least you have some kind of validation that the idea has legs so this for example is an email that one of Noah's friends Boris sent subject helping you help me with food hey friends one thing I realized is that I'm busy all the time and I don't have time to cook a quality meal I wanted to
invite a few close friends to test a business idea with me consider yourself the lucky Chosen Few smiley face convenient and home-cooked meals on February 9th for $20 there will be a personal chef making us food and delivering it to you conveniently and deliciously if this is something you're seriously interested in please PayPal $20 open to all and any feedback cheers Boris PS please let me know if you have any dietary requirements Etc I promise the dinner will be delish exclamation mark exclam
ation mark exclamation mark this is how you validate the idea for a business you know you might have a business idea and you at a party you say to someone oh I'm thinking of starting a business around bloody blah would you be interested social etica dictates they basically have to say yes you are very unlikely to meet someone who will actually say no I won I won't get about that but here's the crucial bit if you ask ask them for money be like okay cool well you know I'm taking pre-orders now wou
ld you be willing to pay me $20 for it now you see how good your idea actually is because no one is going to part with their money unless they actually believe in the idea words are cheap money is not so if someone says yeah I like your business idea that that means jack all what matters is are they actually paying for it have they pre-ordered the thing would they be willing to be your first customer for a 50% discount with a money back guarantee anything like that now the other way to get busin
ess ideas is to also look to your own problems if you you find something is a problem for you chances are it'll be a problem for other people as well and there are four prompts that Noah gives us that I fully agree with that help us figure out what our own problems are so firstly what is one thing this morning that irritated me secondly what is one thing on my to-do list that's been there for over a week thirdly what is one thing that I regularly fail to do well and fourthly what is one thing I
wanted to buy recently only to find out that no one made it and these sorts of prompts help you think about like the problems in your own life you should sort of become a magnet for problems like as you go through life anytime you find something annoying what an aspiring entrepreneur or an actual entrepreneur does is they recognize oh I'm finding this thing annoying I have just identified a problem and a problem with a solution is a business assuming people are willing to pay for that solution w
hereas what most people do is like they will just come across a problem and they'll be like oh it's yeah it's just a thing oh yeah it's really annoying that we have to fill out these like feedback forms in in our lectures and that's where the audio will stop what I used to do in med school was oh man it's really annoying that we've got to fill out those feedback forms and lectures I wonder if there would be a more efficient way of doing that if we found the right person we could build a solution
to this and when I was in med school I was unsophisticated with this I was like oh how might I build this I knew how to code I knew how to make websites and apps and stuff so I would default to like just trying to build the thing I've wasted years of my life chasing business ideas where I was like I found an idea I'm going to build the thing and I didn't find any customers to pay for the bloody thing and I really if someone had told me this when I was 13 I would have literally saved seven years
of my life chasing down random rabbit holes because I I was afraid or didn't realize I could speak to people and actually just ask them for money the main thing is that honestly the way you start a business these days is that you try and get people to pay for the thing before you make the thing people come up to me and they're like hey Ali I've got a bit of an audience I want to make an online course and I'm always like okay cool I know that the Temptation is there to build the course and then
sell it in that order but you should flip that around you should sell the course and then build it so if for example you're thinking you know maybe your audience wants a course on how to build the perfect productive desk setup you could go out and spend like a month or two or three trying to create the course that would be a terrible idea instead what you should do is pre-sell it you can whip up a landing page in like a Google doc in maybe half a day you can send it out to people in your audienc
e and be like hey potentially working on this course about how to have a productive desk setup if this sounds interesting you can pre-order the course here it'll be released in the next month and I'll give you your money back if you don't like it 50% off something to that effect because based on how the pre-sale goes if enough people want to buy it then it gives you an idea it lets you validate the market so it's about finding a problem finding in someone who's willing to pay for the solution to
that problem talking to those people quite a lot getting money from them and only once you have done that do you know that okay this is a business idea worth pursuing and now you can start to build the thing cuz you already have paying customers this is the thing that I wish I had known when I started my entrepreneurship Journey this is the thing I wish is a message that could be hammered into the heads of every single aspiring entrepreneur out there I give so many talks these days around the w
orld it's super fun and there's always like half of the audience are aspiring entrepreneurs and they're all stuck in this thing of like ah I need to have a good business idea or oh I've just been building this thing but like I haven't built it yet and I need to make my MVP first and then all of it is a total waste of time if you speak to people who are second time Founders people who have started multiple companies you'll find this they spend the majority of their time just talking to customers
the more you talk to your customers the more you validate the idea actually has a market the more you understand what problems they have the more you can start to see huh maybe I thought this thing should be red but actually this thing is blue the more you try and ask them for money to pre-sell the thing that you haven't even built yet the more likely you are to succeed in the business honestly I think you should totally read the book it's absolutely amazing Noah's done a smashing job of it and
if you like this video and you want to see a way deeper dive into this I actually have an interview with Noah keun on on the Deep dive podcast that will be linked right over here thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next video bye-bye
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