I need to be honest, I’ve been here for 12 months, I found the forum before hearing about the book, what a life-changer.
I have been working on and refining the same business idea for the last 12 months. Or at least that is what I would like to tell myself.
[there is a TL : DR at the bottom]
Last November/December I started spitballing ideas with an acquaintance of mine who runs a consultancy business and has been moderately successful in doing so. I thought this was a great idea, someone who is a little more seasoned than me, a couple of years older than me (I’m 24) and someone with a little bit of capital behind him.
We spent a few months fleshing out the idea and brainstorming, we would meet once a week or so and it was the same format, discuss ideas, how its going to scale and how friggin awesome it was going to be when we were big. We spent new year’s eve discussing how we were going to be in London drinking champagne in an expensive bar the same time next year after this idea has made us both very wealthy.
All he did was talk a big game and never actually got round to doing anything. At no point did we have a realistic discussion of how we would get our first customer. Those discussions revolved around “well, we get seed money, go to a software developer get it all built and then let the customers roll in through adwords”. Yea right.
The plans revolved around how awesomely brilliant our service could be when we are massive and have full reign to do what we pleased with the development of the site.
When I realised that he was doing nothing, I stopped scheduling meetings, I spoke to him socially but didn’t talk business, strangely enough, I haven’t heard from him since, it was just 2-3 months of mental masturbation.
I then went off and studied copywriting (Gary Halbert’s 30 day challenge, do it if you haven’t already, it’s awesome) and then put up a test page, basically a landing page with some copy describing what my business was going to offer and asked people to sign up to a mailing list to hear when the site was going live. People signed up at a rate of 4% on Adwords traffic that averaged at a CPC of 55 cent (37p, I’m British)
I made a revision to the site and created an explainer video with GoAnimate (recommended), paid someone of Fiverr $80 to do graphic design, created a logo and a colour scheme etc. Using this new logo, colour scheme and explainer video I re-designed the landing page into something that was far prettier and more engaging. This time people signed up to the mailing list at a rate of just over 8% on the same keywords and roughly the same CPC.
This was back in the beginning of April.
Between April and now, I have been writing a business plan with the intention of getting seed investment. This was to pay for a beautifully polished, very nicely working, very pretty fully automated version of the service I want to offer.
I’ve spent 4 months writing a business plan and am no further forward with the actual business. I was so focused on the kick-a$$ features that would set me apart from the competition and the automation that would make life so easy that I ended up entirely focused on funding. Somehow I expected to gain funding then suddenly have a business with customers.
Life has thrown a fair bit of shit at me in the meantime, depression, loneliness not helped along by meeting someone incredible that I really thought I could have been the one but over the last two or three weeks its clear things aren’t going to work out. So right now I feel really low but my business is what is going to drive me forward and lift me out of this.
[TL : DR]
Don’t rely on other people to give you motivation like I did, don’t focus on funding, and don’t focus on launching a kick-a$$ first product that is going to wipe the floor with the competition. Focus on getting your first customer. Boil your idea or service right down to its simplest form; say you spot a need for a car wash in your local area, you do your research and determine that you need to get funding for the $100k+ for an automated car wash machine, the land etc and you spend months writing a business plan and then even longer hunting down someone with the capital to fund you. You are just increasing the risks, say someone gives you the money, you still don’t have a business, but you now have an impatient investor on your back expecting a quick turnaround on their investment, what happens if no one actually cares about having a dirty car?
If you want to start a car wash get out there with a bucket and a sponge. Get customers. Get cashflow and scale or fail from there. Even if you take funding in the future, you are a much safer bet as you have an established customer base and a proven demand.
In short, I have wasted 12 months of my life thinking that I am moving forward with the business when I am not. Ask yourself a question; say you magically wind the clock back to the moment you had your idea for your business, honestly, how long do you think it would take you to get back to this moment with the progress you have made? My honest answer is that I could be back in this situation with about 3-4 weeks of work from first having the idea. But it’s been 12 months, that means I’ve been chasing my tail for 11 months.
[/TL : DR]
The service that I am going to supply would have needed approx. $200k funding for the development. In the last two weeks I have had a complete change of outlook, I am going to focus on finding and providing value to a customer. I have boiled my idea down to its simplest form, I have found 3 or 4 plugins for wordpress that can be cobbled together to allow me to provide a very basic version of what I want to do.
Today I’ve hired a freelance indian developer on Upwork to combine the plugins together into what I need them to do, he has estimated $400 so I have budgeted $800 for it, but still, I will have something that will allow me to get a customer for minimal expenditure, sure it’s not got anywhere near the features that I want it to have, but it is still on par with the competition and allows me to get to market and get customers. I’m going to have to do an awful lot of legwork in the organisation of it as it doesn’t have the automation that I want, but until I have a load of customers that isn’t a problem.
I have accomplished more in the past two weeks than I have in the previous 4 months. I could be here this time next year waiting for my business to be funded, but now I am on track for beta testing in December and a launch date of 1st Jan.
You are a wantrepreneur until your first sale
I have been working on and refining the same business idea for the last 12 months. Or at least that is what I would like to tell myself.
[there is a TL : DR at the bottom]
Last November/December I started spitballing ideas with an acquaintance of mine who runs a consultancy business and has been moderately successful in doing so. I thought this was a great idea, someone who is a little more seasoned than me, a couple of years older than me (I’m 24) and someone with a little bit of capital behind him.
We spent a few months fleshing out the idea and brainstorming, we would meet once a week or so and it was the same format, discuss ideas, how its going to scale and how friggin awesome it was going to be when we were big. We spent new year’s eve discussing how we were going to be in London drinking champagne in an expensive bar the same time next year after this idea has made us both very wealthy.
All he did was talk a big game and never actually got round to doing anything. At no point did we have a realistic discussion of how we would get our first customer. Those discussions revolved around “well, we get seed money, go to a software developer get it all built and then let the customers roll in through adwords”. Yea right.
The plans revolved around how awesomely brilliant our service could be when we are massive and have full reign to do what we pleased with the development of the site.
When I realised that he was doing nothing, I stopped scheduling meetings, I spoke to him socially but didn’t talk business, strangely enough, I haven’t heard from him since, it was just 2-3 months of mental masturbation.
I then went off and studied copywriting (Gary Halbert’s 30 day challenge, do it if you haven’t already, it’s awesome) and then put up a test page, basically a landing page with some copy describing what my business was going to offer and asked people to sign up to a mailing list to hear when the site was going live. People signed up at a rate of 4% on Adwords traffic that averaged at a CPC of 55 cent (37p, I’m British)
I made a revision to the site and created an explainer video with GoAnimate (recommended), paid someone of Fiverr $80 to do graphic design, created a logo and a colour scheme etc. Using this new logo, colour scheme and explainer video I re-designed the landing page into something that was far prettier and more engaging. This time people signed up to the mailing list at a rate of just over 8% on the same keywords and roughly the same CPC.
This was back in the beginning of April.
Between April and now, I have been writing a business plan with the intention of getting seed investment. This was to pay for a beautifully polished, very nicely working, very pretty fully automated version of the service I want to offer.
I’ve spent 4 months writing a business plan and am no further forward with the actual business. I was so focused on the kick-a$$ features that would set me apart from the competition and the automation that would make life so easy that I ended up entirely focused on funding. Somehow I expected to gain funding then suddenly have a business with customers.
Life has thrown a fair bit of shit at me in the meantime, depression, loneliness not helped along by meeting someone incredible that I really thought I could have been the one but over the last two or three weeks its clear things aren’t going to work out. So right now I feel really low but my business is what is going to drive me forward and lift me out of this.
[TL : DR]
Don’t rely on other people to give you motivation like I did, don’t focus on funding, and don’t focus on launching a kick-a$$ first product that is going to wipe the floor with the competition. Focus on getting your first customer. Boil your idea or service right down to its simplest form; say you spot a need for a car wash in your local area, you do your research and determine that you need to get funding for the $100k+ for an automated car wash machine, the land etc and you spend months writing a business plan and then even longer hunting down someone with the capital to fund you. You are just increasing the risks, say someone gives you the money, you still don’t have a business, but you now have an impatient investor on your back expecting a quick turnaround on their investment, what happens if no one actually cares about having a dirty car?
If you want to start a car wash get out there with a bucket and a sponge. Get customers. Get cashflow and scale or fail from there. Even if you take funding in the future, you are a much safer bet as you have an established customer base and a proven demand.
In short, I have wasted 12 months of my life thinking that I am moving forward with the business when I am not. Ask yourself a question; say you magically wind the clock back to the moment you had your idea for your business, honestly, how long do you think it would take you to get back to this moment with the progress you have made? My honest answer is that I could be back in this situation with about 3-4 weeks of work from first having the idea. But it’s been 12 months, that means I’ve been chasing my tail for 11 months.
[/TL : DR]
The service that I am going to supply would have needed approx. $200k funding for the development. In the last two weeks I have had a complete change of outlook, I am going to focus on finding and providing value to a customer. I have boiled my idea down to its simplest form, I have found 3 or 4 plugins for wordpress that can be cobbled together to allow me to provide a very basic version of what I want to do.
Today I’ve hired a freelance indian developer on Upwork to combine the plugins together into what I need them to do, he has estimated $400 so I have budgeted $800 for it, but still, I will have something that will allow me to get a customer for minimal expenditure, sure it’s not got anywhere near the features that I want it to have, but it is still on par with the competition and allows me to get to market and get customers. I’m going to have to do an awful lot of legwork in the organisation of it as it doesn’t have the automation that I want, but until I have a load of customers that isn’t a problem.
I have accomplished more in the past two weeks than I have in the previous 4 months. I could be here this time next year waiting for my business to be funded, but now I am on track for beta testing in December and a launch date of 1st Jan.
You are a wantrepreneur until your first sale
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