The 7 Day Startup: You Don't Learn Until You Launch

by Dan Norris

“It’s fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.” Bill Gates

“You don’t learn until you launch.”

“A startup is a human institution designed to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.” Eric Ries

A startup is a bit more exciting. It has: 1. High impact potential. 2. High levels of innovation. 3. High levels of uncertainty.

“Things may come to those who wait … but only the things left by those who hustle.”

Hustle for an early stage startup is generally about spending your time on the things that are most likely to bring you customers.

Once you launch, you need to get more people paying you. You have to relentlessly pursue your best method of getting customers, and not the stuff you naturally gravitate to.

Email Opt-In/Beta Signup Totals Do Not Indicate Purchase Intent

People don’t know what they don’t want until they are forced to open their wallets.

Making overly generous offers is only testing whether or not someone wants to pay you the heavily discounted amount. It doesn’t test your real offer and is therefore a flawed experiment.

“Validated” doesn’t mean the business will work. Achieving “product market fit” doesn’t mean the business will work.

If you have a conversation with a friend about your business idea this month, and next month you are having the same conversation, you are a wantrepreneur.

“The world always seems brighter when you’ve just made something that wasn’t there before.” Neil Gaiman

There are a lot of things that matter in making a successful business: 1. The Idea Matters - A bad idea, executed well, will not make a good business. 2. Execution Matters - A good idea, executed poorly, will not make a good business. 3. A Founder’s Ability to Get Customers (To Hustle) Matters - A great idea, executed well, will fail without customers. 4. Timing Matters - Speaking hypothetically about an idea is pointless if the timing is wrong. 5. Luck Matters - In fact, it matters much more than most entrepreneurs would care to admit.

If you want to be an entrepreneur, you need to be passionate about growing a business.

It makes no sense to start a business that is going to have you doing work you don’t enjoy.

Startup founders should have the ambition to grow their business into a larger company. If you don’t have that ambition, what you are creating is not a startup.

Your idea is not a solid startup idea if you don’t have the capacity to make use of a profitable, growing business model.

You need to be able to see a point where you can hire in staff or systems to replace you, and still continue to generate a profit. At that point it becomes a real business.

Not “I think what I’m doing is valuable,” but a third party validating that there is value there.

Focusing on short-term launches or projects won’t build assets. Assets are built over time by ignoring short-term distractions in favor of a bigger, long-term vision.

A list of customers that pay you every month is an asset. If you focus on short-term projects you’ll make more money initially. But if you turn down projects and focus on providing recurring value, you build a valuable asset.

At the idea stage, give some thought to whether you are building a business for a small group of people or whether it can grow into a large market.

How you are going to generate leads for your business? What will make you, and your company, unique?

Choose an idea that you can launch and modify quickly. Then when you start getting real data from paying customers, you can innovate and get the product just right.

Playing the visionary is a privilege reserved for second- and third-time entrepreneurs. It’s fun, but it’s fraught with danger.

Solve problems where people are already paying for solutions.

Everyone might be saying that your idea is great, but look at whether or not they are currently paying for a solution to the same problem.

Day 1 Task - Brainstorm a bunch of ideas and evaluate them against the checklist. Choose the idea that stands out as being the best option for you.

A common MVP mistake is over-emphasizing the “minimum” and under-emphasizing the “viable.”

A much better MVP would have been:

Every entrepreneur should try to build MVPs like this.

The key is to forget about automation and figure out what you can do manually.

Day 2 Task - Write down exactly what you will launch on Day 7. What will your customers get, what is included, and what is excluded? If necessary, write down what is automated and what will be done manually in the short term.

Nintendo started out making playing cards. Tiffany’s started out making stationery.

Every single one of the top 25 brands in the world are 12 characters or less.

Day 3 Task - Come up with a bunch of potential business names and evaluate them against the criteria above. Choose whichever one makes the most sense to you and run with it. Grab the best domain you can for that name.

“A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week.” General George S. Patton, Jr.

Create a site designed to capture email addresses before you ultimately launch in four days’ time. 2. Create a site that “pre-sells” your product before you launch it. 3. Create the actual sales page that you’ll use on launch day.

It’s imperative that on Day 7 you have a page with a payment button on it, because that is the only way you’ll learn if people want what you are offering.

“SeedProd Coming Soon,”

Dane Maxwell’s CopyWriting Checklist

Day 4 Task - Build yourself a website!

Day 5 Task - Build a list of what marketing methods you are going to choose. Put together a rough plan for the first week or two of your launch.

focus on the One Metric That Matters (OMTM) at different stages in your business.

Save your excitement until you land people you don’t know as customers.

Day 6 Task - Create a spreadsheet that covers the first few months in business, the number of signups, revenue, estimated costs, and monthly growth.

Dan Andrews of Tropical MBA53 has said that it takes 1,000 days to build a business. Launch day is just 1 out of 1,000.

Day 7 Task - Launch and start executing your marketing plan.

What are you working on today that will make you indestructible tomorrow?

“The only way to win is to learn faster than anyone else.” Eric Ries