Million Dollar Weekend: The world inside, and the world outside

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I had been listening to podcasts on building side hustles for years. But it wasn’t until I read Noah Kagan’s book, Million Dollar Weekend, that I had a strategy to START RIGHT NOW.

This post is a review of Kagan’s awesome book. The book is a quick read, but not because it’s lacking in content. It will light your mind on fire, and you won’t want to stop

The three main ideas I’ll pull from this book here are as follows: 1) You must start NOW, or at least really soon, 2) Spend no money on your startup, take in prepayments instead, 3) Experiment, experiment, experiment.

Let’s start with the first one first, because it’s the easiest to describe without getting too philosophical. But don’t worry, we will get philosophical below!

1. Start NOW

Though this is Kagan’s first step, it is probably the hardest part of the book to follow. It’s surprisingly scary to go ask someone to give you something for your crackpot invention, and so much easier to sit back and plan. For years.

Kagan tells the story of when he was slinging internships at a college campus.

    Then one day my intern Kenny suggested we do a student discount card.

    Conventional wisdom said don't bother trying, and most people would have just accepted that reality, but growing up with my crazy salesman dad had toaught me never to take conventional wisdom at face value.  My dad taught me to always test things out for myself.

    Basically, I figured it wouldn't cost me a penny or much time to see whether local businesses would be interested, so right then and there I told Kenny, "Come on, let's go to town and ask a few shopkeepers if they'd be willing to participate and offer discounts."

    Kenny paused.  "You mean, like, right now?  Just walk the streets and ask whoever we find?"

    In my head a thought balloon popped up:  "NOW, Not How!"

    "Yes, NOW!" I responded.

This is the core philosophy of the book. True entrepreneurs start first, and plan later.

The point is that, if you sit on the couch planning how your new startup will take over the world, you will be sitting for a long time, and end up talking yourself out of it.

If you shoot from the hip, you will get feedback on your idea very quickly, and be able to learn how to make the next pitch better.

“Overthinking seems like the ‘smart’ way to launch,” says Kagan, “but it’s far less effective. Super-successful people do the opposite – they take action first, get real feedback, and learn from that, which is a million times more valuable than any book or course. And quicker!”

2. Spend No Money

This is truly a novel strategy from Kagan. The essence is that, before you decide that online lifestyle coaching will be your next side hustle, and spend $20,000 for a course, you need to validate your plan first.

In computer programming, sometimes we call this “fail fast”. You don’t want to spend your resources building something that the customer doesn’t want, because you will waste a lot of effort. If your plan is shown to fail fast – like, in the span of one weekend – then you know that it’s a stinker! It won’t bring in a million dollars!

According to Kagan,

    *The Golden Rule of Validation*

    Find three customers in forty-eight hours who will give you money for your idea.
    Success means moving quickly and spending no money.  And that's what makes the Golden Rule of Validation so effective.  Here's why it works so well:

    - *You'reallowed only forty-eight hours.*  Limitiations breed creativity.  Having a tight time limit will cut off the doubting wantrepreneur inside you and force you to iterate fast and be creative until you find something that works.

    - *Get your first three customers.*

    - *Collect money up front.* The _promise_ of payment is not valdation.  That's polite rejection.  Getting customers to hand over their dollars makes it real.

    The point is, if you can get someone to give you money quickly just by describing a product or solution, you're good!

When you come up with an idea, quickly sketch out how much it should cost per person. Then, reach out to 3 people, and ask them to give you money NOW for the product. A family member, a friend, and someone else. You will deliver the product by a set future date.

If they pony up, not only do you know that people are willing to pay for your idea without even seeing it, but you also have a bit of operating capital with which to fund the initial product offering.

If you’re nervous that you might not be able to deliver, you can always add a caveat in the sales pitch that you’ll give the money back if something goes wrong.

This is a special advantage we have in the 21st Century. Most people in the Western world are now comfortable giving some online outlet, like Amazon, a bunch of money up front, and then waiting up to a few weeks to receive the product. The “spend no money” strategy leverages this new cultural habit to your advantage. And, with services like Venmo and PayPal, you can do the whole thing without leaving your home.

You might even get money rolling in! And you might get a bunch of NOs! That’s good too, because of the third important strategy: Experiment often.

3. Experiment, Experiment, Experiment

Kagan notes that one trait entrepreneurs tend to have, is the willingness to fail over and over in pursuit of a venture that sells. In that sense, the concept here is not new. But Kagan’s emphasis on this practice brings it to light for those of us who grew up in a cave.

Kagan says it best here:

    Any analysis ahead of action is purely speculation.  You really do not understand something until you've done it.  Rather than trying to plan your way into the confidence to act, just start acting.

To find a business idea that will bring in cash, you need to try things to see what will sell. You can’t come up with an idea, believe with all your heart it will work, then go all in with that belief. Maybe this works for one in a thousand people, but it is absolutely not guaranteed to work.

What is guaranteed, is that your idea of what’s great is probably not identical to what others think is great. You need to prod people, and cause them to cough their true feelings up to you.

The experiment gets your prospective customer to tell you what they want. It also informs you of what they don’t want.

According to Kagan, the mental barrier, Fear of Rejection, gets easier to overcome the more times you do experiments. And, he says it won’t take a thousand rejections – probably only around half a dozen until you strike gold.

Philosophical tangent

First of all, reading this book almost makes me feel very stupid, because the path to success seems so clear and obvious.

But second, Kagan’s ideas resonated with some ideas about the world that I keep coming back to.

I used to work for Lyndon LaRouche. Yep, the same. The core of all his writings, at least those since around 1980, revolve around a model he developed about how human minds interact with the rest of the universe.

LaRouche presents the concept of the “Theorem Lattice”.

In Euclid’s presentation of his Elements, you start with a set of axioms, postulates, and definitions. Basically, assumptions taken for granted, from which all future theorems are derived. For example, one of the postulates is that if two lines (A and B) cross a third ©, and the interior angles on one side of that third line add up to 180 degrees (= two right angles), then those two lines A and B will never meet. In other words, they’re parallel. Later on in Book 1, Euclid uses this postulate to prove that the angles in a triangle will always add up to 180 degrees.

In this way, Euclid combines his axioms, postulates, definitions, and derived theorems into a self-consistent architecture – the Theorem Lattice. All modern math textbooks do the same thing, by the way.

LaRouche says that a person’s concept of the universe, or “world view”, has the form of such a theorem lattice. However, a person’s world view is never an exact representation of the real universe. For example, right now my youngest kid thinks that any plastic card he finds is able to buy a new toy. Oh, were that the case…

So, in the case of an experiment, a person is comparing one theorem in his world view’s lattice (a hypothesis), with what really happens in the universe. If the result of the experiment doesn’t equal the hypothesis, well then that person has to change his axioms! LaRouche goes further, and says that you technically get a brand new theorem lattice, with new theorems that can’t be mapped exactly onto the old theorems.

For a geometry example, it was shown around the time of Karl Gauss that there are surfaces on which you can draw triangles whose angles don’t add up to 180 degrees. If you try to draw a big triangle on the Earth, with one corner at the North pole, and the other two on the equator, the sum of your angles will always be greater than 180 degrees. So, that means the parallel postulate can’t be true, at least on Earth. Later, Einstein and others proved that it is not true in the real physical universe.

When you come up with a hot sales idea, and then act like that baby will sell like hotcakes, you’re relying on a theorem derived from the basic assumptions of your world view. When you ask someone to give you money for that product, you’re challenging the real universe to either agree or disagree with your world view. If you can’t sell that product to anyone to save your soul, you’ve just proved you have some wrong axioms in your theorem lattice.

The special thing that we humans are equipped to do is to change our minds! We can ditch the product idea and try something else!

Whether Kagan’s system is underpinned by such deep philosophical/theological beliefs is not covered in his book. But, the idea that you need to run repeated experiments, and use the feedback you get to design the followup experiments, implies this kind of world.

Conclusion

If you have any inclination to become a rich person, I’d recommend you buy and read Kagan’s book. Every time I open my copy, I can hear Rabbi Noah yelling at me whatever words I read. “This is the fear in you worrying about too many things. Momentum is your friend, and we can sweat the details later.” and other such gems.

The one book that moved me from desiring to acting is this one. Million Dollar Weekend. Please go buy it now.

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