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by
Pat Flynn
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January 9 - January 19, 2019
Frank Lloyd Wright, a famous architect, said, “An idea is salvation by imagination.”
Good ideas are common, but those who are willing to take action and execute those ideas are far more rare.
I can’t predict everything that will happen in the future, but as John F. Kennedy once said, “There are risks and costs to action. But they are far less than the long range risks of comfortable inaction.”
“Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.” — Japanese Proverb
When you choose to live the life of an entrepreneur, you choose a path of freedom. You choose to live life on your own terms and can shape it into whatever you want it to be. In fact, everyone is capable of this freedom, but it is the entrepreneur who has mentally turned off autopilot and has taken control of his or her own future. This is why, when I hear about an entrepreneur who is unhappy in life, it makes me wonder how they have arrived there in the first place.
Not all businesses are created equal, and not all ideas should be built by the people who dream them up. It’s when your idea supports your lifestyle goals that it becomes worth exploring more.
The truth is if you don’t have a passion for what you are doing, your energy will eventually fizzle out. It always does.
What’s happening in your life five years from now that makes you respond like this?
After all, as the American writer Robert Penn Warren told us, “History cannot give us a program for the future, but it can give us a fuller understanding of ourselves, and of our common humanity, so that we can better face the future.”
“Building a successful business is no longer about B2B or B2C. It’s about P2P, those people-to-people relationships.”
As Steven Pressfield, author of The War of
Art describes: “Fear is good. Like self-doubt, fear is an indicator. Fear tells us what we have to do. Remember our rule of thumb: The more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it.”
What can you bring to the table that no one else can? What is your unfair advantage?
Bonus Exercise! If you’re on Twitter or Instagram, I’d love to see a video or picture of your plane, and if you’re up to it, its first flight! Only if you’re comfortable sharing it, of course. Use the hashtag #WillitFly, and if you want to make sure I see it, also include my name, @patflynn, somewhere in your message. I look forward to seeing you take flight, and feel free to click into
the hashtag to see other people in the community take flight, too!
“I can give you a six-word formula for success: Think things through—then follow through.” —Sir Walter Scott
Now, I will say that naming your project is extremely important. As Seth Godin says in his book, Purple Cow, “Giving something a name makes it more real.” You need this to be very real in your mind in order for you to have the motivation to follow through, so give it a real name, but don’t stress over it. It can always be changed, and there’s a good chance that it will, especially after you learn more about what this idea will actually become, the customer it will serve and how it gets validated.
The word idea is actually rooted in the Greek word idein, which means, “to see,” so we’re going to take all of those thoughts in your brain, every single light bulb moment you’ve had, and translate that into something visual. Once you can see, you can do.
The one I prefer is called MindMeister, which you can find at MindMeister.com. You can create a few mind maps for free before you have to start paying, and they also have a great-looking interface so it’s easy to use. You can also connect to your maps on the go with their mobile application, which has come in handy for me in the past.
Don’t think. Wait a second…isn’t
Grand Moff Tarkin, “You may fire when ready.”
This exercise consists of writing three iterations of your target idea:
One page One paragraph One sentence
Every second you waste thinking about a hater or troll is a second you’re taking away from those who matter and can benefit from what you have to offer.
“If you can define the problem better than your target customer, they will automatically assume you have the solution.” —Jay Abraham
(Link to interview and transcript found here: http://mixergy.com/interviews/patrick-flynn-smart-passive-income-interview/)
you don’t have to go big in the world to experience success. You just have to be big in somebody’s world.
(Link to “1,000 True Fans” http://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/)
That’s what you want to be—a breath of fresh air to your audience. As you move forward into this next exercise, try to think about how you can be a breath of fresh air. What do you need to bring to the lot in order to give oxygen and life back to your audience, which may be tired of the same old stuff or looking for that missing puzzle piece?
Let’s start with Twitter. Twitter is a fantastic resource, not just for seeing what your favorite celebrities are up to, but also for finding top influencers in your niche. The number of followers a person or profile has is a relatively decent indication of their authority in a space, because people typically choose to follow accounts they find interesting and useful. It’s not a perfect barometer, however, because some of the numbers could be skewed as many accounts go inactive, and some people even go as far as to purchase followers in order to increase their perceived authority, which is
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the
previous two months only. This ensures that any accounts we come...
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The results page can be a little overwhelming, but also extremely interesting, especially with the images that you might find on the page. Before you get sucked into a wormhole and lose your place, click on the “More options” tab at the top, and select “Top Accounts.”
I’d shoot for collecting at least 20 from Twitter, but if there are more that seem to be influencer material, by all means, add those to your database, too.
Some of these
others, so I recommend you explore around and collect names of influencers within each of these platforms who seem to have collected a large, active following:
Facebook Instagram LinkedI...
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The other much less obvious search engine happens to be my favorite:
iTunes.
There are two ways that we can search through iTunes to determine who may have some influence: Looking at the top ranked and rated podcasts related to your niche. Finding who has been interviewed on shows related to your niche. To get a quick understanding of the top podcasts in iTunes, open up the iTunes Application on your computer. You could use your mobile device to conduct this same research, however using the desktop platform opens up other functionality that will come in handy during this research. Tip: If you don’t have access to iTunes, you could also search through the Stitcher app
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This will give you a huge matrix of podcasts people have created related to your niche. Like with Twitter and other social media platforms, iTunes’ search functionality comes with its own secret algorithm, but in general the ones with the most authority are at the top:
What’s something about [topic] that frustrates you? If you had a magic wand and could change anything related to [topic] what would it be? What problems are costing you the most money right now? What’s the most important activity related to [topic] that you do? Is there any frustration associated with that? What related to [topic] takes up the most time? Do you use anything to help you with [topic] already? What do you like about it? What do you wish was better? What’s something related to [topic] that you have to keep doing over and over again?
“Intuition and experience are poor predictors of which products and businesses will be profitable…To get an accurate indicator of commercial viability, don’t ask people if they would buy—ask them to buy. The response to the second is the only one that matters.” —Tim Ferriss, The 4-Hour Work Week – Income Autopilot II: Testing the Muse
The benefits of using a crowdfunding platform to validate your idea are:
You get the exposure from the existing audience that those platforms have. They are trusted marketplaces where people are comfortable using the platform to pledge and pre-order items. The platforms enable you to communicate with people about your project, even after the pledge period ends so you can keep them informed about the project build and other news. You can begin to build a following. It’s possible to generate a sizable amount of income, even beyond what your pledge goal might be.
Step 2: Hyper-target (a.k.a. The Hand Raise). Once you gain access to an audience, whether that’s through one of the strategies mentioned in Step 1, or through the audience that you’ve already built, the next phase in the validation process is to hyper-target. This means getting people in that larger target market to self-identify as someone who wants or needs your particular solution.
like to metaphorically describe this phase as getting a targeted portion of that audience to “raise their hand.” Why a hand raise? Because raising one’s hand is simple. It takes almost no energy to perform, but there is so much meaning behind it. A hand raise signals “me!” or “yes!” As a public speaker, I’ve learned what an amazing tool a hand raise can be within a presentation. A lot of speakers will start a question with the phrase “by a show of hands,” or “please raise your hand if,” in order to quickly and easily survey an audience and identify certain groups within it without much effort
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There are several methods you can choose to directly interact with your prospects. One-on-one is always going to be the most effective, but there are a lot of ways to interact in this manner. The following one-on-one methods are ranked from most effective (top) to the least effective (bottom), but also most time consuming in the same order. In person A video call, like a Google Hangout or Skype conversation A phone call A private message (i.e. on a forum or social media channel) A direct one-on-one email You’ll have to strike a balance based on what works for you, but also what works for your
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In addition to a normal greeting and thanking them for their time, you could ask a question like, “So how long have you been doing __________?” That question’s answer could lead to a few other natural follow-up questions from there. Again, this is you building a relationship with this person in a very short period of time, so keep it about them first.
Quick tip: If you’re planning on speaking to prospects one-on-one, make sure you refer to them by name right from the start. Additionally, if you have some time before your calls or interactions, try to get to know the person via their social media profiles and find any connections that you may have. Perhaps you went to the same school or you’re both parents. These little connections can speed up the relationship building process quite fast in a conversation.
