Day one of the no bullshit 24 day startup build. I can guarantee you one thing, at the end of the 24 days you will have a bullet proof system that will help you find great ideas, build a bullet proof execution framework and create rail guards to figure out if this product has the signals for success and if not how to quickly move onto the next one. With that being said, lets kick off business idea generation.

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Idea generation

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In 2020 there is an abundance of ideas across the internet and around you. You don't need to sit around for your ahaa moment, trust me that's a sure way to fail. What you need to do is manifest an environment where you can find problems, trends and business models that support this.

Find trends and then problems and then solutions. This should be the path every founder should take to minimise their chance of failure and skyrocket their chance of success. A rising tide lifts all boats, hell even Amazon was not built because Bezos was struggling to buy books on the internet, he created amazon because the investment fund he was working on saw him go through future trends, and in that he saw that the internet was growing at a ridiculous pace, so he decided to attack that

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Whilst not everyone gets to work in a hedge fund, you can still set yourself up for success in 2020/2021 and this is exactly how you can do it without going full time.

Use the DPSC framework to verify what business you want to work on. We'll get to this in a second

Here are some quick but very effective ways to find bullet proof ideas, weather that's an online business or not.

1) Communities

2) Trends

3) Reviews

Here's the breakdown of the best places to find business problems

Communities are a fantastic way to find problems people care about.
1) Trends.co
2) Visualise Value
3) Trends.vc
4) OnDeck
5) Softwareideas.com
6) Explodingtopics.com
7) Glimpse

These are gold minds for you find and discover potential million-dollar problems and ideas. They are a combination of communites, data ports and newsletters that share what is the next big thing and provide you the know-how of what to build and how to build a business and become a business owner.

Getting to the business plan will come in the later days, but for now we're focused on creating great ideas and a looking for places to find them.

Another fantastic way to make this happen is to document your entire day for 1 week. After 1 week upload your entire day schedule and tasks you've done into a word cloud. Assess what things you've done multiple repeated times and therein lies opportunity.

This can be done completely part-time and doesn't matter if you're a college student or a full-time worker, you will have access to the above communities as well as the ability to find inefficiencies.

I will reiterate that there are no billion-dollar ideas, but only billion-dollar executions and that is fact from looking at history.

Last point to make before we move onto day 2 is to realise that in startups velocity is EVERYTHING. Money respects velocity not intelligence and you need to set yourself up so that you can test, assess and scale/move on

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At the end of this, what you should be able to do is write down 10 problems you're passionate about, co-relate 2 ideas/solutions per problem

In the next 24 days you will learn the exact process on a day by day process to take absolutely thin air and come up with an online business idea, a business plan, a defence system, a content marketing engine, a distribution plan, strategies for digital marketing all with an initial investment of whatever the above memberships amount to which is less than $99 per year for some of them.

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Day 2: Idea Evaluation

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Using the DPSC Framework we can categorize problems we care for and ones we don't.Set up an excel sheet, y axis have your "idea" or unique business, on the x axis have Data Trend, Problem , Solution & Competition each to be ranked out of ten

You want to work with the markets, a rising tide raises all boats. Timing is historically proven to be one of the biggest reasons startups succeed. Even Bezos used the fact that the internet usage was growing at 400% YoY to do something in this space

Lets look at an example of the above

Data Trend = Home Delivery Take off via COVID= 40% MoM

Problem = Lots of last mile delivery logistics issues with overwhelming increase in trend

Solution = Build effective partner delivery network that powers local stores to deliver within 3 hours

Competition = Shippit , Sendle etc—-

Do you know how to sell it = <Do you personally have an idea on how you'll find and sell to customers>

Problem cost = <How much are they paying competitors right now?>

Knowledge gap = <What is the knowledge gap between solution and target audience knowledge in that space on achieving that solution. e.g knowledge gap for most shopify apps is extremely high as the audience is VERY non-technical>

Do you feel the pain = This is not a necessity but it genuinely helps when creating a solution to a problem, understanding the pain will help you build a unique solution and also will help you curate a pitch thats shorter than 6 words. If you can do both, feel the pain and describe it in 5 words, thats a win.

Map each idea of yours out of ten to see which idea holds the highest weight. I would put highest weightage to the selling column, as none of the above metrics matter if you personally don't know how to sell the product/solution to your end users.

For e.g you might uncover a fantastic opportunity around mining trucks, but without having any contact in that industry or know how, it'd be significantly incredible for you to build and sell something of value to that audience

What you're looking out for is a result of 3-5 solid business ideas that have a core focus in a growing trend, that solve a very big problem customers are currently paying for where competitors are still brick and mortar based where you come in as the new age digital behemoth. Lastly you're looking out to create some core intuitive guesses on who you'll sell your product to and most importantly how you're going to reach them.

Problem cost is an important metric to be aware of, because you don't want to jump into an environment where you're trying to educate customers on a problem they didn't know they had. There's nothing wrong with this, it just takes a lot longer to get revenue. But more so, if people are already aware of the inconvenience it's costing them you've got a benchmark of where you can price your product i.e atleast cheaper than x

Knowledge gap, we're in a knowledge arbitrage world. There's a reason why there are so many online gurus, educators and course creators (nothing wrong with the latter 2). What you need to do is evaluate how magical your solution is to the audience you're building for. Canva makes no designers, designers. No code tools make non-programmers, programmers - yes not to the purest effect but these products save you 100s of hours and pain in knowledge gain to give you super powers. The higher this metric, the better the chance for success as the "wow" / "superpower" factor is bigger

People often over complicate this, the above can be further broken down into this:

• Improves convenience
• Improves quality of life
• Saves money
• Saves time
• Solves a problem

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Day 3: Defining the north star and product pitch

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What is the core problem you're solving. There needs to be just one. Use various tactics to get there, the 5 Whys strategy works well here. Use the Shawshank Effect Framework to attain this answer as well, what problem is so big for customers right now that they're willing to crawl though a mile long pipe of crap because the end outcome is so so victorious.

Every solution is a replacement of another, make you're aware of what your customers will be replacing when they use you, as this will be your base standard and this will be your comparison stick. Uber to Taxis and AirBnb to Overpriced, unauthentic boarding.

Build your North Star from the very beginning because this is what will steer the entire ship and the direction of your product, distribution and business. The North Star is the one core problem you're trying to solve or the freedom you're trying to give to people, spend a whole day or a week on this if you need to but it's important to get it right.

Some strategies you can implement to evaluate your North Star:

• Use the 5 Why's technique in talking to potential customers/yourself to ask why you're solving this or why someone will use your product. Usually after asking why to their answers again and again you'll lead to their core intention. Remember, people buy with emotion and justify with logic, the goal here is to find that emotion
• Understand what magic means to them with their current solutions. e.g Using an accountant means, not having to worry a single day about running out of cash, is that the magic? Not having to worry about running out of groceries and have them autodelivered to your home, is the freedom of mindspace the magic?
• If you could strip away every feature your competition or product will include, and had the option to only have 1 feature and 1 feature alone, what would that be? (Remember this is not meant to be easy)

The goal of understanding your North Star is to prevent over engineering on the first version and building out truly what's needed. This lets you curate an experience that is focused purely on helping customers achieve this piece of value. Yes I fully understand that this is not possible under all products, in some products e.g Notion, the completeness is the north star.

The second section of this day is understanding your pitch, you need to create your pitch and keep it dead simple, this is by far the hardest and also something that will be a forever thing. There are ofcourse strategies you can implement to make this happen and save yourself some serious time:

• We're the <x> for <y>, you're leveraging the education a parallel business spent millions on educating consumers on their business model to explain your business
• We solve <problem> by <what you do>, We solve poor taxi services with 1 click driver access
• <Emotional pain alleviation>, e.g PagerDuty - Notify you about server troubles
• <solution> for <audience>, e.g Ironclad, Digital contracting for legal teams
• <fix> for <old way of doing it> by <implementation>, We're automating manual reconciliation using AI

Once you've somewhat worked out your pitch, send your pitch to a few friends and ask them to guess what this means, the goal of a pitch is to get people interested enough to ask you more about it, and when they ask you more, the need to continue your pitch, not be completely lost. Let them complete it for you. e.g We're building self driving cars..."ooh cool, so you mean like what tesla is doing, but I can install it in my car?"

What you get with the above technique is you start digging into user wants and needs, this way helps you also massage your pitch futher and make it more targetted if it needs to be

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Day 4: Understanding how & who to sell

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Always always find out where your customers are and how to sell to them. Founder of wavvee said this well when he mentioned, that distribution is half if not more than half the battle.

Remember, 60% of market are not problem aware, 20% are problem aware, 17% are gathering information, 3% are actively buying now

If you can't sell to your audience, no matter how great your product is, it doesn't matter. Sales is a transfer of emotions, and if you're not able to share your enthusiam with someone else, you won't be able to get them to see your business the same way you do.

Create your customer persona, understand who they are, their daily habits, tasks, profession, wants, goals and professions. There's enough information in the world about customer persona's so I won't go too deep into it here (I've covered it in more detail in day 18), but don't take this section lightly. The reason you're creating "persona's" is to humanise your customer. Humanising them lets you live their life and by doing so you start to find gaps, these gaps are exactly where your solution will fit. As the saying goes "Sell them dreams not features"

Understanding who your customer is, is absolutely vital, do not go to the next step without nailing your exact buyer persona niche. And no - you can't sell to everyone, you need to sell to someone specifically. No one has enough money to sell to everyone, even coca cola.

Understand where your customers currently shop, where they go to make decisions (comparison sites etc), figure out what criteria matters for them in making a decision (reputation, price, branding). These points will help shape your business model, approahc and unique value/bragging proposition (more about this on day 6)

I repeat you NEED to nail distribution or your Go To Market strategy, atleast building a blue print of exactly where you're customers are going to sit and when they'll most likely buy along with why is going to be very key. You can't go ahead with this as without sales you've not got a business. This involves a heap of trial and error, yes but having a general idea is important.

Not all products are built equal, leverage prebuilt distribution outlets wherever you can. Leverage markets like the Slack App Marketplace, Atlassian Marketplace, Google Chrome Ext Marketplace, Xero/QB Marketplace, Zapps Marketplace, or Shopify's app store.

Knowing where they're looking is going to be crucial as this will be your very first distribution channel, you want to go to where buyers are currently discussing and as a result you will form your original message to cater to this audience ,Reddit, Facebook Groups, Ads, Instagram or Review sites

Here's a map outlay you can use to measure out what channels you can try:

Channel - Stage - Target

• Cold Email (early days) - Early stage founders, Early adopter customers / LinkedIn email scrape
• Facebook groups (early days) - Communities with your audience
• Communities (early days) - Slack groups, Discord chats
• Early PR + Distribution (early days/later days) - On trend content pieces (You will fail at remote work without this)
• Product Hunt (early days) - Launch on PH to get early adopters
• Launching on integration directories (early days) - Boost SEO as well as find warm traffic
• Engineering the product for growth (early days/later days) - Product led growth
• SEO (inbound) (early days/later days) - Content marketing
• Epic Pieces (early days) - Sky scraper technique (explained in day 22)
• Betalist / Betapage (early days) - Early stage founders
• Interactive SEO (Calculator) (early days) - High intent traffic and users
• Competitor Bad Reviews (early days) - Find pain points and users complaining
• Partnership networks (Appsumo, Stacksocial) (later days) - Established network of qualified buyers
• Quora (early days) - No SEO but good impressions
• Viral Referral (later days) -
• Reddit Subreddits (early days) - Viral, hit and miss
• Google Ads (early days) - Unit economics based
• Podcasts & Newsletters (early days) - Everyone's looking for guests
• Twitter Ads (Quote promotions) (early days)
• Meetups (early days) - 2020 lol
• Review Sites & Directories (early days) - Early adopters leaving reviews help bring new users
• TikTok (early days) - Sh*t goes viral

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Day 5: Validating ideas - presales

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Market first, build later. Now you know the problem you're trying to solve, who exactly will need this and where they'll most likely buy it from.

This will be a big section all together but here's some quick wins on getting atleast $1k-$3k in pre-sales before you start or go any further.

Build a website using unbounce, carrd or even converkit's landing page builder, your goal is to get emails (which I qualify as attention) and revenue (which is the ultimate validator. Remember No CC No Bueno)

Post your problem as a thesis and breakdown how you'd solve it on forums, indiehackers, hackernews, reddit, facebook groups, slack groups. Imagine you're building a new investment app, start your title with "2020 is the new 2009, how to not look back in 10 years with regret - Investing"

Define problem, Inflict FOMO, Drive Desire and ask them to add their email address or sign up to your ideology. Look in to AIDA marketing or read Julian's guidelines on landing page hooks

With emails, create a 5 day email sequence educating users on the problem you're solving and how you're solving it, teach them something, become an authority. With Investing, walk them through a 5 day investment process to save $1000 in 5 days. At the end of they day, pitch your product, but a clear CTA on your offer "$49 for lifetime deal to our product - keen?"

You can do the same via Podcast interviews, FB Ads or Working with high traffic blogs to post your Ad or VideoAsk there

What you're looking for is commitment as a layer of validation, commitment with their time, reputation or money (Money being the best indicator)

Rush, but take your time

Be sure to define customer cohorts, find the right early customers with similar needs. Too spread out here will hurt you. Play this as a kickstarter game, don't bill them till they get massive value, but pre-charge them so you know they're keen.

Use any questions and reservations you get during this time to build out your FAQ page as well as other resistance alleviating assets

If you've liked what you've read so far, Day 6 onwards is where it gets super fun, and its only the cost of 6 coffees

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Day 8: Wireframing to your Ahaa moment

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‍Okay you've got a TONNE of information about problem, ideal solution, competition and what customers are really struggling with when it comes to this problem.

To this I bring you to the AAARRR framework Awareness, Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, Revenue in light

Awareness - User learns of your product, blog or AdAcquisition - User installs or downloads app, Visits websiteActivation - User signs up, or is active for some timeRetention - User comes back and uses app oftenReferral - User leaves rating, talks about product, excited to useRevenue - User is willing to pay for product

For any of that marketing stuff to work you need to focus on Activation and Retention - getting your customer to their magical moment will be pivotal to onboard them.

Carrd does a beautiful job at this, they don't even ask me for my phone number, email or anything, I kick off by building a page - which can be done in seconds, and upon deploying it, they ask me for my info - i.e the ahaa moment is reached in less than 2 clicks.

Look at cohere.so as another example, they show you a demo within their own webapp and you get to the ahaa moment ASAP. So wireframe and prototype your product so that it gets your customers to the ahaa moment as SOON as possible. They need to feel the magic without a heavy upfront investment

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