Million Dollar Weekend

I took a lot of highlights with this one. Motivational, inspiring, and practical. I will be coming back to these notes over and over as I embark on my business ventures. Don’t be afraid to ask for what you want. In fact, develop your asking powers like a muscle. Also, don’t try to figure out how to do something before you start. Just start and figure out how along the way.

Summary and Highlights

Ordinary people start profitable businesses every single day.

You do have problems, and so do your friends and every other person in this world. That’s all you need to generate million-dollar business ideas.

Choose the three you think will be the most fun to work with.

In the early mornings, evenings, and weekends. Once you’ve validated an idea, and you’re pulling in enough to cover your minimum monthly expenses—aka the Freedom Number—then you can quit.

I’ve started a few different businesses. They do okay and then I lose interest

But how will it scale? Focus on starting. Then figure out how to scale.

You will never feel 100 percent ready to start. You just need to start. Don’t buy another book or watch another video until you’ve worked through THIS process and started your million-dollar business.

Marketing is easy when you have a product people want.

Find a problem people are having that you can solve.

Craft an irresistible solution whose million-dollar-plus potential is backed by simple market research.

Spend NO MONEY to quickly validate whether your idea is the real deal (or not) by preselling it before you build it.

Derailed by the same two fears:

FEAR OF STARTING At some point people are told entrepreneurship is a huge risk, and you believed it. You figured more preparation, more planning, and more talking to friends Would help you overcome your insecurities. But that inaction only breeds more doubt and fear.

The best way to learn what we need to know—and become who we want to be—is by just getting started. Small EXPERIMENTS, repeated over time, are the recipe for transformation in business, and life.

FEAR OF ASKING Soon after starting, the fear of rejection emerges.

You have some impressive skills, an amazing product, every advantage in the world, and you’ll never sell a thing if you can’t face another person and ask for what you want. Whether you want them to buy what you’re selling or help in another way, you have to be able to ask in order to get. Once you reframe rejection as something desirable, the act of asking becomes a power all its own.

Everything you do in this book, and after, should be viewed as an experiment

Experiments are supposed to fail.

And should they fail, you just take what you’ve learned and try again a little bit differently.

Most people never pick up the phone, most people never ask. And that’s what separates, sometimes, the people that do things from the people that just dream about them. You gotta act. And you gotta be willing to fail.

Business is just a never-ending cycle of starting and trying new things, asking whether people will pay for those things, and then trying it again based on what you’ve learned. If you’re afraid to start or ask, you can’t experiment.

And if you can’t experiment, you can’t do business.

Business is an amazing opportunity to learn about yourself, play with ideas, solve your own problems, help other people, and get paid all the while.

Approaching it this way will free up your imagination, make you less judgy and critical of yourself, and allow you to open yourself up to playful experimentation.

Limiting time to a weekend forces you to become inventive, focuses your attention only on the things that matter, and shows you how much more you can do with limitations.

The most powerful growth tool today for solopreneurs is a system of content creation, audience building, and email marketing.

You’ll need a different approach and different system to organize your days—one that optimizes for your overall happiness above all else. (Or why do any of it, right?)

There are two mistakes one can make along the road to truth . . . not going all the way, and not starting. —Buddha

Focus above all else on being a starter, an experimenter, a learner.

Defining yourself by the things you do each day (the process) will get you to where you want to be quicker and more joyfully than measuring yourself against others.

The Magic of NOW, Not How.

Fully embrace what I call the NOW, Not How Habit.

1. Most people: Overthink first, act later.
2. Every successful entrepreneur: Act first, figure it out later.

Any analysis ahead of action is purely speculation.

A simple mission to hit a monthly revenue number is the most effective form of early motivation.

You first need to choose your Freedom Number.

What can YOU do in your business to make money this week? Today? Right now?

If you commit to nothing, you’ll be distracted by everything.

The Freedom Number helps us not get lost in abstraction or complexity; it reminds us the mechanics of business are simple.

Choosing your Freedom Number.

Start by choosing a short-term monthly revenue goal—your Freedom Number—and make it a number that doesn’t scare you.

Who you are, what you have, and what you know right now are more than enough to get going.

Love rejections! Collect them like treasure! Set rejection goals. I shoot for a hundred rejections each week, because if you work that hard to get so many noes, in them you will find a few yeses, too.

The upside of asking is unlimited and the downside is minimal.

Be persistent. almost every no you get can eventually become a yes. Persistence will reveal that most noes are actually a “not now.”

Follow Up! Studies show that if you initially get a no, your follow-up ask is TWICE as likely to get a yes.

Selling is helping.

If you believe your product or service improves the lives of your customers, sales is just education.

If you believe your product or service can fulfill a true need, it’s your moral obligation to sell it.—Zig Ziglar

Three Ws of business:

• Who you are selling to
• What problem you’re solving
• Where they are

Sell ideas to a small early adopter group before you’ve built the product (or spent a cent) in order to validate that there is a market that will pay.

When in doubt, solve your own problems. If you are willing to pay for a solution, it’s likely others are, too. And at least you’ll have one happy customer—yourself.

Minimum viable product or MVP. Create the simplest possible version of what you’re offering and start selling it right away.

That way, instead of endlessly refining something in a vacuum, you use feedback from actual customers to incrementally develop an offering people absolutely want to buy.

Create opportunities within the context of who they are, what they know, and especially who they know.

Validation process begins with potential customers in the entrepreneur’s orbit. Actual people with names. Tribes you belong to or are interested in, most of whom are already self-organized online.

Who do you have easy access to that you’d be EXCITED to help?

The better you understand your target group, the better you can speak to them. The more specifically you can speak to their problems, the better and easier you can sell or test products.

This process prioritizes communication with people, through starting (taking the first iteration of your solution straight to customers) and asking (engaging them in a conversation to determine how your solution can best fix their problem). Business creation should always be a conversation.

Become a Problem Seeker

The best entrepreneurs are the most dissatisfied. They’re always thinking of how things can be better.

Your frustrations—and the frustrations of others—are your business opportunities

The crucial first step toward entrepreneurship is to study your own unhappiness and to think of solutions (aka business opportunities) for you to sell.

What’s the most painful (aka valuable) problem you can solve for people . . . That you also have passion for and/or unique expertise in . . . For the largest niche possible that you belong to and understand.

Focus on your Zone of Influence here (your existing community):

Solve Your Own Problems

What is one thing this morning that irritated me?

What is one thing on my to-do list that’s been there over a week?

What is one thing that I regularly fail to do well?

What is one thing I wanted to buy recently only to find out that no one made it?

Keep a notebook close by and jot down things that bother you.

It’s easier to sell to a large group of people who’ve already spent money on a product or service.

Bestsellers are your best friends. Accessorize an existing product.

Write down all the bad, crazy, and nonsense ideas that come into your mind.

Studying the marketplaces where people are TRYING to spend money

Search Engine Queries

It’s much easier to sell something when people ALREADY want it. There are 3 billion Google searches every day, giving you a direct line to customers’ thoughts and needs

AnswerThePublic.com will find the most googled questions around whatever keyword you input.

Is the potential solution a vitamin (a nice-to-have) or a painkiller (a must-have)?

r/SomebodyMakeThis

Two key questions to answer to make sure it’s a million-dollar opportunity:

Is the overall market dying, flat, or growing? You want flat or ideally growing! Is this a million-dollar opportunity? To figure that out, we have to know the number of potential customers and the price of your product.

I use Google Trends and Facebook Ads to answer those questions.

Evaluate the size and growth potential of my target market.

Is the market growing or dying? Search Google Trends.

How many potential customers are there? Use Facebook Ads to research your market size. They let you type in the keyword of whatever business category you’re thinking about and see the approximate audience size.

You can also use the Facebook Ads Library to see every single active ad running on Facebook for your keyword and location, which is super helpful for uncovering competitors and getting ideas for your own marketing efforts other groups you could think of targeting.

Other categories to search:

• Locals
• More niche
• Demographics-based

Step 2. Is This a Million-Dollar Opportunity?

Pick a price point you think will be ideal for your customer.

1. Multiply that by the number of ideal customers.
2. Does that equal at least a million dollars? Yes or no?

evaluate that

1. Google Trends: Flat with some growth

2. Size of market: 2,500,000 people

3. Cost of your product: $50

4. Total Value: $125,000,000

5. Million-dollar idea? YES!

Don’t be a wantrepreneur and waste time calculating revenue to the exact cent or fretting about the optimal price point

All you want is to know if the business idea is worth pursuing

Now that we know it’s worth it, let’s confirm how exactly you’re going to get your million dollars.

Step 3. The One-Minute Business Model

Realistically you’re not going to get 5 or 10 percent of this market, BUT now let’s see what it would take to generate your own $1 million in profit.

Revenue – Cost = Profit. These determine if

you can make your first million dollars

Revenue (all the money you make) – Cost (how much it costs to make it) = Profit (what you get to take home) This is obviously extremely basic, but that’s the point. It’s all you need to calculate in order

to assess whether you can get to $1 million

What we are looking for are rough estimates. Momentum is your friend, and we can sweat the details later

divide your target profit by the profit

1. This is ONLY the number of people we see via Facebook.
2. This is for only one beard product. If you find success with beard oil, you can easily repeat the process many times with other

grooming products

This is only the first sale to these customers

It’s far easier to sell to an existing customer than it is to acquire new ones, so once we’ve built up a decent customer base, we can make

1. even more products to sell to them.
2. Plus, you can likely sell a subscription to increase the amount you sell per customer.

PRO TIP: When you’re launching a business, always ask yourself: is this going to be a one-off purchase, something

customers buy here and there when they want to consume it, or can you make it a monthly recurring sale?

It’s always better to be in the reorder business

Step 4. Pivot and Evolve—Your Revenue Dials

Almost every successful business had to pivot or change course along the way

Maybe you chose the wrong market to begin with. Or maybe one feature of your offer turns out to be the thing people want. Just keep your eyes open for adjacent opportunities.

The easiest way for me to reach my goal was to increase the average order value by selling longer-term subscriptions to businesses

six Revenue Dials you can use:

1. Average order value: Increase the amount someone purchases.

2. Frequency: Increase how often someone will buy your service.

3. Price point: Increase or decrease your price point to affect total sales.

4. Customer type: Approach a more lucrative/wealthier customer segment.

5. Product line: Add additional products to make the business more attractive to start.

6. Add-on services: If you’re selling a product like cookies, can you offer a service like setting up birthday parties

or cooking at the person’s home?

The hard part is not choosing which business idea. The hard part is getting customers. And that’s where you’ll focus first.

1. Pick one business idea.
2. Make sure it’s a million-dollar opportunity.

Confirm your business idea is profitable

start with the problem that is most exciting for you to solve yourself

When you have money from customers, fulfillment is easy. Be worried when it’s the other way around

you’ll never know if they can go from idea to business until you actually test your target market’s willingness to pay.

Validation is finding three customers in forty-eight hours who will give you money for your idea.

benefits of Validation

1. You don’t waste time.

2. You save money.

3. You find out if you can actually get customers for your idea.

4. You get money up front.

5. You light a fire under your butt to get moving.

the Golden Rule of Validation:

Find three customers in forty-eight hours who will give you money for your idea.

why it works so well:

• You’re allowed only forty-eight hours. Limitations breed creativity. Having a tight time limit will

cut off the doubting wantrepreneur inside you and force you to iterate

1. fast and be creative until you find something that works.
2. Get your first three customers. Your first customer is a friend, the second customer is someone in your family, but your

third customer is HARD

Collect money up front. The promise of payment is not validation. That’s polite rejection. Getting customers to hand over their dollars makes it real

if you can get someone to give you money quickly just by describing a product or solution, you’re good! You’re not trying to invent demand; you’re trying to see how

EXCITED people are about what you’re helping them with.

Three Methods to Validate ANY Business Idea

1. Direct Preselling

make real contact with real people, tell them what I’m selling, ask for money, and see how they react

Actively preselling your first few customers is the best way for entrepreneurs to launch a business.

create a spreadsheet with ten

rows

These are going to be your Dream Ten prospects: ideal people you want to validate your business idea with.[*]

Here are the columns to use:

Name

Company

Phone

Email

When contacted

When to follow up

Notes

Make it easy: start with your best friends who might be interested—your Zone of Influence. Too often, people make it hard by going outside their spheres. They do this to avoid rejection, when in reality your network

wants to help you succeed

Check out your Facebook friend list, your Facebook groups, your favorites on contacts, LinkedIn Connections, former colleagues, past clients, text message lists, people from your church or synagogue, your Twitter followers

and others who fit your ideal customer

By the time you’ve done this you should

have filled out at least ten lines, your Dream Ten.

BUT if you’re thinking, Dang, I don’t know ten people who can buy this, then maaaaaaaaybe you should a consider a different business idea

Hoping and praying that a thousand people in

the world will magically buy it is living in la-la land, as my father would put it. Go after markets and businesses where you have influence so it’s easier to succeed

Scripts for Preselling Your Idea

Validation is a conversation. Not a sales pitch, but a chat to learn about the

customer, see if you can help them and if they’ll actually pay you

For this reason, with your Dream Ten, I really recommend you turn the ask into an exploratory conversation, to allow for more learning.

These people really know you and they’ll be happy to give you time, so use it to extract what most excites them about your product or not so you can tweak it.

process to validate your solution with your Dream Ten can be broken down to a three

part framework:

1. Listen
2. Options
3. Transition

First, Listen

get customers talking about their problem.

Here are three questions that will help you in this process:

• What’s the most frustrating thing about what’s currently going on?

1. How would having X make your life better?
2. What do you think that X should cost?

Finish with summarizing what the person

said. For example, Daniel would say, “So you want an easier way to learn how to use your computer.”

PRO TIP: Use what or how questions to encourage a more open dialogue versus

why or yes/no questions, which can limit your learning

It’s crucial to really listen and write down their problems, because you’re looking for the pain they’re feeling and how valuable it would be for them to give you money

The bigger the pain, the bigger the opportunity!

Next, Options. Now that you’ve uncovered the problem, it’s time to suggest options that can solve their problems—and what they’d pay for it

You’re looking for excitement and a willingness to pay. Eye rolls and lower energy

from your prospective customer are indicators of low interest

Now, Transition. You know their problem and you know an option to fix it that they are excited about. Now it’s time to transition to the sell.

If they pay you, that’s Validation success

Often you can distill your offer down to three parts: Price + Benefit

• Time. Strung together, they form an offer sentence.

Other examples:

• For $25, I will teach you how to save an hour a day on your Mac, in

just twenty minutes

For $69, I will teach you how to write better in two hours

For $10, I will send you a PDF with ten mind hacks that will change the

1. way you think in ten minutes.
2. For $180, I will provide six months of tasty jerky to your office this week

PRO TIP: Presenting your offer as a

comparison can make it easier for your customer to understand. “We are like X but Y.”

For example, we are like your competitor but twice as cheap

When you validate, you have to get comfortable with potentially selling a product before you’ve actually made it. Clearly explain when it will be delivered. Because people are fine with giving you money in advance, as long as you set clear expectations

money:

“Sign up now while it’s still at a discounted price, x percent of y dollars [and you’ll be grandfathered in at that price forever]. This offer is only good today.”

PRO TIP: Always follow up by sending an email to your first customers asking for feedback. Feedback is a gift you can continually use to improve yourself and your business

Of course, success won’t always be so immediate when you use direct preselling to validate—in fact, you’ll get rejected a whole lot—and this is another instance where the technique shines.

That’s because every rejection is an

opportunity; you can use it to take a deep dive into customer problems

When I get shot down while validating, I have a simple four-question script that flips the no into new knowledge, new ideas, and maybe even new customers

Why not?” It’s really easy to get scared from attacking this one head-on, because what happens if their criticism is right? But that’s exactly

1. what you want to know!

2. “Who is one person you know who would really like this?” Always, always, always ask for a referral! Be specific about what kind of referral and use a number; this

3. makes it highly effective.

4. “What would make this a no-brainer for you?” If they don’t want your product, maybe they’d want something related to it. If they don’t want to pay for your dog care app

what about dog walking? A dog hotel? Dog dating?

What would you pay for that?” One of the hardest things in a startup is setting prices. Getting potential customers to say what

they’d pay is pure gold!

PRO TIP: Active communications—calls and texts—work a lot better than

passive ones, like posting on Facebook or Twitter and waiting for replies. Try to Direct Message (DM) people, or whatever enables you to get the fastest response time possible.

2. Marketplaces

A classic way to validate your product is to use marketplaces—sites like Facebook Marketplace, Craigslist, Reddit, or whatever you have locally. The

3. Landing Pages

One really popular approach is to set up a

simple landing page using a cheap or free service. Currently Instapage, Unbounce, and ClickFunnels are popular landing page tools. Find the latest landing page tools at MillionDollarWeekend.com

Then they run a bunch of ads to send

people to the site and see if people actually will enter an email address to get on the mailing list, or even preorder the product

The reason I don’t love this approach is you have to spend time setting it up and buying ads, and when you buy ads, you have to become an

ad expert. The whole experience is slow and costly. Two things I hate.

The key is: If you go this route, don’t overthink the design, the name, the

language, the ads, or any of that. Just focus on seeing if you can get people to buy your product!

Your challenge is to get at least three paying customers within forty-eight hours. Grab your Dream Ten list that you made earlier.

Text, call, direct message, or email—the

more real time, the better!

Free Bonus: Grab my six ways to enhance your offering at MillionDollarWeekend.com

Grow It

Make Money While You Sleep

Social Media Is for Growth

Email Is for Profit

1,000 true fans”—all built by connecting with people whose particular challenges and interests overlapped with my particular skills and passions.

A community who already knows you

who follows you, who is rooting for you is one of the most powerful forces in business, and it’s created through generosity.

Adding value without expectation. Helping them with their journey without asking for an immediate return

Sometimes it’s helping

them by boosting their self-esteem with a simple compliment

how do you find your unique angle to start building up your community?

understand how their special sauce is the unfair advantage that will make them shine

He thought his problem was that he didn’t know the process. But the mechanics come down to figuring out how to embrace and

amplify your uniqueness in a way that attracts people to become friends and customers

What’s your unique angle in thirty seconds or less?” In other words, why would anyone care to read his newsletter?

He defines who he is

Why you should trust him

1. What he is passionate about, and
2. What unique thing this prepares him to do for you.

Write out your unique angle.There are no right answers here. You can change these any time you’d like.

1. Who are you

2. Why should people listen?

3. What are you passionate about?

4. What will you do for people

Pick a Platform

With your unique angle, you need to reach an audience, and the best way to do it for FREE is through social media.

You can choose any FREE platform:

1. Photographers love Instagram to showcase their newest cool stuff to the world.
2. Consultants love to stand on a soapbox at LinkedIn.

Journalists, marketers, and others like the few hundred characters of Twitter.

Designers can show off their work at Dribble

Authors can start a blog for free on WordPress.com

You need to know three things to choose:

1. Which site has the audience you want to connect with?
2. What medium do YOU enjoy creating content in?

What disproportionate results will you get compared to the work you

put in?

let’s break down how I chose my platform. To start, I eliminated the ones that don’t work for me.

Instagram: I don’t take a lot of pics

Podcasting

growing that audience relative to the work involved was near impossible

A limited number of people listen to podcasts, and currently, discovering new podcasts is nearly impossible

LinkedIn: Great audience of businesspeople, but it’s incredibly noisy, and going viral on it is really tough.

Blogging:

The work of posting

doesn’t drive as many viral shares anymore because more of the audience is spending their time directly on social media

Twitter

the audience isn’t growing—their monthly users have been flat for years

Going viral works there, but getting people

off the platform and buying on yours is tough

TikTok

1 million followers there or 100,000 on YouTube? Not equivalent. I’d take YouTube every time.

start with just one as an experiment.

The key principle is to start right now to build your audience and then move them to your email list

Update your bio.Choose your one platform, and using the unique angle pitch you wrote out before, clean up and rewrite your profile/bio on that platform to reflect who you are and how you help your ideal

customer

Core Circle: Start with a very narrow audience. Ali started with the medical school exams for British

people. Your niche within a niche can be the most obscure thing imaginable, as long as it makes you and your audience passionate

Medium Circle: As you move bigger, your content should overlap

somewhat with what concerns your Core Circle, but it should appeal to a broader audience. Ali started talking about studying and productivity in general, since that’s required for all students.

Large Circle: Here you go for the largest audience possible that’s still related. Some of Ali’s most watched videos are about his salary—made possible by his medical video fame—or the latest Apple product—which he

uses to increase productivity. All the circles should still include your core audience but keep expanding your circle of influence

To get started, identify a value that a specific group of people—your Core Circle—want and become a reliable source of information for

them. Here’s a formula you can use—outcome you’ll deliver + target market.

example

Core Circle: How to clean your evaporative cooler + in the Southwest

USA

1. Medium Circle: How to choose laundry detergents + for new homeowners.
2. Large Circle: The ten best

vacuums + for a family

Once you have your outcome and market figured, you need to find a unique viewpoint in your niche.

To come up with your unique viewpoint, ask yourself a few questions

What is something everyone thinks is true—but you think is wrong

What is something nobody in your target market is talking about—but should be?

What are the biggest mistakes people in your market are making—but are totally blind to?

Think back to your validation days: Who are the customers you want to appeal to and what’s the outcome you can create content for? What’s the unique point of view in your content they’d be excited to hear about?

Formula = Outcome you’ll deliver + the target marketCore Circle:  

Medium Circle:  

Large Circle

Be the Guide, Not the Guru

titled “How I . . .” rather than “How to . . .”

The goal here is to document what YOU do, not what you think everyone else should do

When you position yourself as

someone who is on a journey and document your process and your progress, you become relatable, and that is what audiences long for

Some of my most popular videos feature me failing, often. It’s fascinating that people want to see what’s really going on, not the highlight reel

we think they want

Jerky. I ask my audience to challenge me to do something difficult; then I go out and do it

Getting your audience involved helps them feel like an integral part of the show, which

boosts the chances they’ll engage with your videos, which pushes your content up the rankings—and attracts even more subscribers

CHALLENGE

Post one piece of content.Now it’s time to post content publicly.Now, this piece of content can come in any format. You know I LOVE me some YouTube, but as you’ve seen, different niches work on different platforms. The

content you create can be a YouTube video, a Twitter thread, or a blog post

1. Your Unique Angle—the secret sauce nobody else has

2. The Platform you’re going to

3. post on

4. Your Content Circle—the narrow audience who you’ll laser-target

5. Posting it TODAY

This last step is obviously the hardest

one. Don’t worry about scripts, camera equipment, or even if it gets any views. The important part is taking the first step at building your community

The email was FUN. It wasn’t pure utility. Sales have

repeatedly been shown to go UP when the people selling are enjoying themselves

promoting interesting people, exposing my passions

interacting with my followers, and just all in all having fun being myself

Now you’re going to lead this audience into your own ATM—your

email list—so that you are in regular personal contact with them and can convert them from an audience to customers

How to use a piece of useful free content to get people excited to sign up for your list

How to create a simple, effective landing page and publicize it far and wide.

How to automate your email system so it’s sending out emails to new subscribers twenty-four hours a

day

Email is the most valuable channel because it allows you to own the distribution and the

communication with your customers, and not be at the mercy of another platform’s fickle algorithm

six reasons why email is the best:

$65 million a year in total transactions. And you know what? Nearly 50 percent of that comes from email.

I’m not hoping the platform gods will allow me to reach them

Eighty-nine percent of people check it EVERY DAY

You own your email list. Forever

Even if you don’t have a business at this very moment, it’s great to start building your email list NOW—so when you do want to have a

business, you already have a trusted group of people who WANT to help you out

the importance of having a list of people who want you to win. Sheer size is not the metric to use to

evaluate an email list. It doesn’t matter if you have 100,000 subs if none of them care about you.

What percentage of your list opens every email because they feel like they know and trust you? A healthy email list has a 20 percent open rate. Target that.

s, how can you get your first subscribers? Let me show you.

Set Up a Landing Page

Your audience needs somewhere to go to actually join your email list

The way companies, marketers, entrepreneurs, and content creators

do this is by sending their audiences to a landing page

Give me your email, and I’ll give you a bonus resource: one free tip each week to improve your sleep. Simple.

A landing page is a simple web page with an image, a few words, and a box where people can input their email address to get future updates

This is where you can offer them the

bonus content, aka Lead Magnet (see the next page), you just created.

CHALLENGEBuild your landing page.You can set up one like Julien’s for free

with SendFox.com (a service I helped build).There are also other services like Mailchimp.com, Webflow.com, and ConvertKit.com to create landing pages

Getting Your First 100 Email Subscribers

0 to 10—The Dream Ten

What’s the easiest way to start building your list? Use your existing network.

Yes, your Dream Ten. These are people

who know you and care about you. The members of this highly engaged audience are waiting to visit, subscribe to, and share your website and content

My mom, my brother, and my other close friends are on my mailing list. Always look at what assets and networks you have available before you reach out to randoms.

Here’s a template you can use

Hey [name]!I just wanted to let you know that I’m starting [description of your new business

I’m going to publish [one article per week/a weekly tip] on how to [subject].Is this something you are interested in?Here’s an easy way to sign up! [Insert landing page address] Or you can just write back with “Yes, dude, I’d like to,” and I’ll do it

for you!Hope things are great![Your name]

11 to 50—Lazy Marketing

Now that you have a landing page, you’ve got to publicize it. Obviously you’re already doing that by putting it in your calls to action inside your videos, TikToks, or wherever you are

promoting yourself online (and in their corresponding descriptions).

you can go a lot further by putting a link to it in every point of contact you have with others.

That means putting the landing page address in your

1. Email signature
2. Biography on Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook

list

(When you add your landing page to your email and your social bios, you can measure the traffic and conversion rate you get from these mentions with Bitly.com or Linktree.com, website

address shorteners that track clicks

CHALLENGEUpdate email signature and social media bios

Put your landing page address in your email signature and your social bios. Send me a link to your new landing page at twitter.com/noahkagan—I’d love to hear from you!

post a modified version of that email above in Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, Reddit groups—or wherever you’re active.

Hey EveryoneStarting a “weekly” newsletter about [subject].Go to website.com to join the newsletter.

Use targeted referrals to grow your list. Ask

your family and friends to refer one specific person who they think would like your newsletter

Write an insanely detailed blog post dissecting the success of

Use social media and pretty much everything else to get that post in front of his ideal customers

Put a call to action (CTA) at the end of the post telling readers to sign up to receive a download of growth hacks he’d put together

Using a Lead Magnet gives people an incentive to join your email list vs. just asking people to sign up

four examples of Lead Magnets

A checklist that can be used to properly perform something

A template for determining

An advanced guide that goes further into the details of a subject of one of my videos

A unique book that provides substantial value but is offered for free

One of the best ways is to give a short, relevant tease of the bonus or resource you’re offering within the YouTube video and tell people where they can learn more

CHALLENGECreate a Lead Magnet

create your first Lead Magnet using the process we’ve just outlined above. You can use your piece of content from the previous chapter as a base or start something new. Don’t spend more than two hours on the first iteration. If you want to turn it into a big thing later on, great. But start SMALL.Go to MillionDollarWeekend.com to get Lead Magnet templates! (See what I did

if people like your stuff, they want more.

At the exact moment your customer is interacting with or just found your business, they are MOST excited about it

So that’s when

you want to funnel them into other experiences with you instead of letting them go

set up an autoresponder and hit them up right away

send them your BEST stuff so you know they’ll have a great experience when they’re dining at the email restaurant of you

Every email provider has an autoresponder. Again I recommend SendFox.com, but you can use Mailchimp.com or ConvertKit.com as well

three-step progression of emails that I’ve found works best:

1. Welcome Email

SUBJECT: You’re awesomeThanks for joining OkDork. You are

awesome!Over 17 years of working online I’ve learned some things:

• #30 at Facebook and helped launch mobile, status updates, and more

#

1. 4 at Mint and led growth to 1 million users within 1 year
2. Started AppSumo, which is now an $85M/year business

And now, I want to help you on your journey to living the life you want

What could I write to provide value to you?Love you,Noah “tacos” Kagan

1. Connection Email

SUBJECT: Connect with me on LinkedIn

Howdy amigo,Send me a connection request on LinkedIn to help share our relationships, see behind-the-scenes thoughts on marketing, startups, and more . . .Hugs,

Noah

1. Content Email

SUBJECT: Starting an 8-figure business with $50I started AppSumo in March 2010.In one weekend, with $50, I launched

version 1 of the site. It was simple.12 years later, Sumo Group has grown into an 8-figure business.Starting a business can be hard. But I want to show you an easier way:Here’s how I built AppSumo.com for

$50.Enjoy,Noah

Second, with the Connection Email, you’re explicitly asking them to connect with you on social media, by following you on Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and so on

CHALLENGESet up an autoresponder.I happen to think SendFox.com (I helped build it) is pretty darned good, but there are a bunch of others that I recommend, like ConvertKit.com and

Mailchimp.com

The Law of 100

Whatever you put yourself to, do it 100 times before you even THINK of stopping

This stops you from succumbing to what Seth

Godin calls “the dip,” the moment in a long slog between starting and when mastery sets in where you start hating the work and you want to quit.

Lean in and commit to 100 reps. (Think of this as doing reps and practicing as opposed to failing or succeeding.) This changes your mindset and makes it much easier to sustain forward motion when

things get tough

set up a system that helps you get your 100 reps done without thinking about the results.

Once that’s done, you can decide whether

you want to give it up or not

The Law of 100 is about the power of consistency—the only way to get to greatness.

CHALLENGEThe Law of 100.

Commit to doing 100 emails, posts, or whatever action will move you closer to your goals. To live up to your commitment, use the Law of 100 Grid below to track your progress—and don’t break the chain!

five exact questions to create your own marketing plan

1. What is your one goal for this year?

2. Who exactly is your customer and

3. where can you find them?

4. What is one marketing activity you can double down on?

How can you delight your first 100 customers?

If you HAD to double your business with no money in thirty days, what would you do?

Set a single hyper-focused exact goal

First off, you need to set a goal. That means choosing a number

email addresses

monthly Freedom Number

1. 1,000 YouTube subscribers
2. $1 million in net revenue
3. Fifty clients

how much and by when? Now add a time frame.

without a time frame, there’s no urgency

“I want to be worth $1 million in three years.”

Create your Marketing Experiment List

Before you paddle quickly in the wrong direction, we MUST quickly try different marketing experiments to figure out which

ones we can double down on

The best way to do this is by using an Experiment-Based Marketing list to plan and track your marketing strategies

WORK BACKWARDS FROM YOUR GOAL!

If you could use only two of the marketing activities, what would they be?”

1. Who is your ideal customer?
2. Where are they?

Who is your ideal customer?

Think about what’s in common with

your existing customers. Certain age? Common interest? Specific gender? Certain hobbies? From a specific area?

CHALLENGE

Who’s your customer?Describe to me who your ideal customer is.The MORE specific the better. Think about their gender, age, location, and anything else that makes them unique.

Next, where can you find more of these ideal customers?

Look where you found your previous ones and ask your existing customers!

exact message I still send to people to this day:

Hey Maria,Thank you so much for being a customer.Where’s the one specific place you’d

expect to learn about my product? Now make a list of these places where we can find more of these people.

list of generic marketing ideas to get you going:

• Contacting your network: The

1. number one place you should look for customers is in your own existing network. The benefit is that people already know you, so making the sale is easier.

2. Paid ads: Reach out to potential

3. customers on search engines like Bing and Google, so your name will appear when certain keywords are searched.

4. Social ads: Target your audience through ads on social channels like Twitter and Facebook, Reddit, TikTok

5. or LinkedIn.

6. Content marketing: Create and publish content (blogs, podcasts, videos) with the goal of generating interest in your product/service

7. Cold outreach: Speak directly to potential customers. This could mean picking up the phone and calling potential customers or sending cold emails to prospects.

8. Target market blogs: Sponsor

9. posts and content on popular blogs within your target market.

10. Influencer marketing: Identify and build relationships with individuals who have influence over your target market (for example, high

11. profile bloggers or Instagrammers).

12. PR: Pitch the press and bloggers in your niche to cover your story.

13. SEO: Search engine optimization is another reliable way to grow your

traffic, but it takes time. Do some keyword research on sites like AnswerThePublic or SpyFu to discover what people in your niche are talking about. Create hyper-targeted content to drive traffic.

1. Giveaways: Round up some epic prizes, create a sweepstakes page . . . and promote the shit out of it.
2. Collaborations: Appear on other podcasts/shows/newsletters/YouTube

channels

After you figured out your marketing ideas lists, we need to estimate expected sales from these ideas.

Setting your expected sales is one of the most important parts of your strategy. These

targets will give you something to measure against and help you identify where you can double down in the future.

So how do you go about setting targets for your sources?

The most important aspect of this process is

not to worry about being exact. It’s to make decent guesses so you can have a framework to prioritize and double down on your sources.

When setting your targets, the trick is to use your BEST GUESS; it doesn’t have to be a super-accurate number. It’s all to help you PRIORITIZE

your marketing activities. Over time, you’ll get better at this.

Here’s an example for thirty days of sales:

Marketing Experiments

Expected Sales

1. SEO: Write four blog posts

10

2. Contact everyone in my network

25

3. Call my aunt Rhonda

1

4. Post in Meetup group

5

5. Post flyer

9

Total

40

This spreadsheet helps you prioritize your time by focusing on the largest expected sales items first.

Another option is to add a column for Time: how long it will take you to do the different activities. You can use this to see which

activities will not take much time but still get sales.

Also, you can consider including cost if you’re doing ads, but I encourage people to not spend money on marketing at first. Exhaust your free options.

CHALLENGEWhere are your customers?Now list at least five places your customers are and how many sales in thirty days you think you can get from them

3. Double down on what works.

There’s a golden rule to marketing tactics I want you to repeat after me:

Find what works and double down on it; find what doesn’t work and kill it.

there’s nothing wrong with experimenting and trying new channels—but you need to set time limits to stop if something isn’t working. I find thirty days is more than enough to get results from your marketing experiments.

That’s why for an entrepreneur it’s important to have a lazy mindset. If something’s too hard and not working after a good try? Give up and move on!

Double down on the experiments that work the best.

rest: I stopped doing every other channel and went all in on YouTube.

CHALLENGE

What marketing strategies can I double down on?Let’s update your original marketing experiments sheet with actual sales. This should make it obvious which experiments to double down on and which ones to kill.

BUT instead of focusing ONLY on your new

customers, let’s take advantage of the ones you already have

4. Make Your First 100 Customers Happier

How would you double your business if you COULD NOT get any new customers?

This will help you think of ways you can overdeliver to your current customers. Because the biggest growth lever in business is customer retention and referrals. If you’re just starting out, every referral can literally double your business.

examples

replied to every YouTube comment. This made the audience feel special and connected to me.

gave my personal phone number to every customer even when we were making $20-million-plus a year

I personally write to customers to see what they like and dislike about us

What made you interested in buying Imgur?-What other websites/services would you want big discounts on?-Any suggestions or things you would have wanted to see on our website, appsumo.com?

Feel free to spread the word

The other key is to keep overdelivering and make your current customers as happy as possible. The benefits of this are twofold:

• Happy customers will refer your business to their friends

Happy customers are more likely to spend more cash and buy your new products or services.

The longer you retain customers, the more opportunity you have to earn more revenue from them.

every step of the way you can get feedback to make your product or service even better

Ask your customers this: “What is one thing we can do today that will make you twice as happy with us?”

CHALLENGEMake your customers happy.Ask one customer: “What is one thing I

can do today that will make you twice as happy with us?”

In your MDW journal, answer these five questions:

1. What is your one goal for this year?

2. Who exactly is your customer and where can you find them?

3. What is one marketing activity

4. you can double down on?

5. How can you delight your first 100 customers?

6. If you HAD to double your

business with no money in thirty days, what would you do?

reasons I became an entrepreneur. To live my life, my way

the first step to getting all you want in the world is allowing yourself to want it—and facing the fears necessary to be able to get what you want.

CHALLENGELet’s share your story of

success to help others

Send an email to noah@MillionDollarWeekend.com or post on social media and tag me @noahkagan

Bringing Out Your Dreams

In a j-o-b, you must accept the system you are in. As an entrepreneur, you get to design your own system

The challenge of your business—and your life—is designing a system that optimizes for your overall happiness

Dream Year Checklist

start by writing down how you’d love this year to turn out for you. This Dream Year isn’t just “I’m gonna have a nice

house and my business will rock it.” Include the specifics—where you’re living, what you’re doing, how you feel, where you travel to, etc.

This is to inspire you about all the things you can do in your life. Then really dial in the ones that feel important to you

This is a DREAM YEAR. That means dreaming big and not worrying about the how. All you’re doing right now is creating a vision for the year that fills you with excitement

Once you have a clear picture of your Dream Year, then you can focus on making it come true.

Instead of being reactive throughout the year and getting thrown off course, you have a chance to focus on what would be an incredible

year for YOU and to write it all down.

CHALLENGEWrite out your Dream Year.Make the checklist detailed and

specific

Turn Your Dream Year into Goals

Now that you have created your Dream Year, it’s time to take your dreams and choose

and organize them into your goals. This is your life, so PICK the things from your dream list you’re MOST excited about. Another key thing is consistency—it’s a GOOD thing if you’re continuing goals from previous years. Also, I prefer to have fewer things to accomplish but

I’m very excited to do them.

Categorize them into four sections: Work, Health, Personal, and Travel.

But feel free to change or add to these however you’d like, it’s YOUR life!

Here are the ones I picked from the above

year:

Work:

• $30 million for AppSumo
• 500,000 YouTube subscribers

Finish Million Dollar Weekend book

Health:

• Bike across America

• 75,000 push-ups

Personal:

• Complete pilot’s license and fly to Albuquerque

• Either donate all the money you make or spend it on yourself and friends

• Get a nice house in Austin

Travel

1. Do one week of solo travel
2. Visit a mountain biking city (Asheville, Sun Valley, Jackson Hole, Sedona)

• Trip with parents and brother

Key things about your goals:

• Don’t worry about doing everything in your dream year. Really think about which ones would excite

1. you. My rule of thumb is if you’re hesitating on the dream, then it shouldn’t make your goals list.
2. I don’t always accomplish everything on my lists every year. And that’s okay. This list is to help you

prioritize your time, which we’ll talk about next. You can schedule and make sure you are working toward the things you really want to do

Over the past ten years I’ve tried to set super-aggressive goals, but I’ve

found that it’s better to aim for more sustainable goals. It’s more impressive to find and stick with something than burn out after being impressive for one year

This list works for you, not the

other way around. If midyear you realize something doesn’t matter, change it. I aim to review and update this list only twice a year

The best way to make sure you accomplish your goals is to see them often

Find one person to send your yearly goals to.This can be someone who invested $1 in you early on, a friend . . . anyone you trust to check in with you regularly and

challenge you on your BS as they help you follow through on your promises

CHALLENGE

Yearly goals list.Use the four categories to flush out your yearly goals.Work  

Health

Personal  

Travel

Coloring Your Calendar

If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.—Benjamin Franklin

1. Put everything in a Category.
2. Assign a Color Code to your categories.
3. Schedule with color your key weekly priorities.

Perform a weekly Sunday accountability (p)review.

1. Blue = Work
2. Green = Health
3. Purple = Personal
4. Yellow = Travel

questions I use to prioritize my time:

1. How do I pick what to actually do

each week?

Every Sunday, I spend fifteen minutes looking over the past week and setting my tasks for the next one

2. How do I know if these tasks are moving me in the right direction of my goal?

3. What if I want to be lazy, do I need to schedule it?

4. How can I double down on activities that move me toward my goals?

Never Entrepreneur Alone

Great entrepreneurs have great entrepreneurial communities. There’s no such thing as self-made. Everyone is team

made

three ways to meet the right people to help you on your business journey

1. Get an Accountability Buddy

We make better choices and work harder when someone else is observing our behavior. Researchers call it the Hawthorne effect. I call it my number one productivity hack.

Find someone you respect, probably a peer working toward similar goals, and establish this Sunday ritual to help each other on your journeys

CHALLENGEAccountability buddy.My accountability buddy is:

Find one person to send your weekly goals to. For the past ten years, I’ve worked

with Adam Gilbert from mybodytutor.com every week on my yearly goals. Accountability is a superpower. Go to MillionDollarWeekend.com and join our newsletter. I’ll try to connect you with an accountability buddy.

You found an accountability buddy, but how can you meet others to help you succeed at business? Here are two ways that work!

2. Target Prefluencers

I always make an effort to connect with ambitious people BEFORE they make it. It’s so

much easier to connect with them, help each other, and build actual relationships.

Here are three principles to help you find Prefluencers:

1. Who’s doing work you’re impressed by?
2. AND who doesn’t have a ton of attention and is likely to reply?
3. AND what can you do to help this person?

CHALLENGEConnect with a Prefluencer.The easiest way to connect with anyone is to compliment them first WITHOUT asking for anything in return.The Prefluencer I’m reaching out to

Send this message:Hey [first name],LOVING what you’re putting out. [Insert specifically what you liked or how it impacted your life]Keep going!

From here, the person will likely respond and you can open up a dialogue to talk about working together or helping each other in the future

relationships like the above script is just sending a compliment without any expectations.

3. Build Your VIP Network with Referrals

After meeting someone new, Andrew would send them a thank-you email. In it, he would include:

• Highlights from the chat he found interesting

1. Follow-ups and to-dos
2. Request to meet more people

When he got a new list of people to meet, Andrew would send an intro email with three

key points:

1. Short blurb about himself
2. Value he could provide (that is to say, what’s in it for them?)

Why he was excited to meet them

Telling someone why you are interesting

how you can help, and why you want to meet works like gangbusters. If you fail to include these points for the person you’re reaching out to, expect to be ignored

CHALLENGEAsk your friends for one referral.

1. Tell me the first person that comes to mind. Who’s the most

2. impressive friend you know?

3. Send this message to that friend:

Hey <friend>You are the most impressive friend I

know and I’d love your help in expanding my network.I love: VR, 3D printers, email marketing.Who’s one person you think I should connect with?If no one comes to mind, no pressure

I like asking for just one person to make it easier to think about. And then say no pressure on the other person vs give them an assignment of having to introduce me to someone

After you’ve had a great meeting

with that person, thank your original friend and ask the new one for a referral.