‘Everyone who’s ever taken a shower has an idea. It’s the person who gets out of the shower, dries off and does something about it who makes a difference.’
—Nolan Bushnell, co-founder of Atari, Inc.
SO YOU’VE GOT an idea – perhaps with a lot of doubts and questions to go with it – but an idea nonetheless. Now what? Well, you can’t actually do an idea but you can do a project that realises that idea. And what we’re looking for specifically is a project you can do in 30 days, because that’s a project that you won’t put off. With a 30-day project, you can find out quickly whether this idea suits you and whether it’s of interest to other people, all without spending months of your time (or your life savings).
If you’re secretly wishing you could just get paid for having ideas, unfortunately that doesn’t really work. Ideas in themselves are not that valuable. You have to turn them into something tangible of value to people so that you can get paid for it. It’s the execution that matters.
The technique you’re about to learn for how to turn any idea into a 30-day Play Project is a deceptively powerful one because it makes almost any kind of idea doable and testable in the shortest time possible.
This makes almost any idea doable and testable in the shortest time possible
What if you’ve got an idea you want to put into action but it’s big … too big? Perhaps you want to open a chain of restaurants or create your own fashion label or build the next Facebook or revolutionise the school system?
These are the kind of things you might imagine requiring you to quit your job or to get some serious funding, hire a whole team of people, rent some premises or build a huge software platform. Or that simply require masses of time and energy, which you don’t have right now.
So how do you even start something like that? And without quitting your job, finding a pot of money or magically clearing your diary?
Chances are that your answer till now has been not to start it at all – to put your idea back in a drawer and get on with your life. Well, not today. While other people let their good ideas fade away, we’re going to find out how to make them doable – so that you can start today.
To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with having big ideas – a multi-million-pound business, a series of bestselling books, a national movement or just making a great living from something you love. It’s a useful skill to be able to take an idea and envision just how huge it could become. But … you also need to be able to do the opposite; to take your big idea and chunk it down into a project you can start right now.
Imagine you wake up tomorrow morning to find an envelope on your doorstep stuffed with enough cash to allow you to quit your job and launch your biggest possible idea.
Even then you would be better off starting small.
Why?
Because starting small gives you the greatest possible chance of making something people really want – and therefore the greatest chance of being successful and making money. You might think you know right now what your intended audience or market will like, but the only way to know for sure is to create it, give it to them, and find out what they make of it. And that’s best done with something small.
History is littered with stories of people and organisations who think they know exactly what is going to be popular, so they launch it on a grand scale to be met with nothing but the sound of crickets. Even the biggest companies with the best market research in the world get this wrong. New Coke, anyone? Segway?
Get your idea right while it’s still small and it will grow quickly
Don’t make the same mistake. Start something small, test it out with people, improve it, then grow it and scale it towards your original big vision. Get it right while it’s still small and it will grow quickly. That’s the snowball effect. And some of the most successful companies today started in the very same way. As the founder of CDBaby, Derek Sivers says, ‘Even elephants are born small.’
The multi-billion-dollar company Dell started as a college experiment
MICHAEL DELL’S PARENTS wanted him to become a doctor so, despite a growing interest in computers, he enrolled as a pre-medical student at the University of Texas. Michael’s passion for computers proved too irresistible though and he started buying old PCs, upgrading them and selling them to other students. Before long he was also selling them to small businesses in the city.
With an emphasis on affordability and good customer support, his dorm-room business boomed (and his shared room started to look like a computer lab). His parents were furious when he told them he wanted to drop out of college so he agreed that if he couldn’t make it work as a serious business over the summer he would go back to studying.
He registered a formal company and in his first month of business Dell sold $180,000 of PCs. He never returned to university. By the end of his first full year of business he had made $6 million in sales. Fifteen years later he was a billionaire. Dell told Forbes in 2011 that when people ask him today, ‘How do I be an entrepreneur?’ his answer is simply, ‘Go experiment and do something.’
Starting small has two additional big advantages: firstly, it allows you to check you actually enjoy this project before throwing everything you have into it – no point selling your house to open a café to realise that, while you love sitting in cafés, you hate running one! Secondly, unlike trying to realise your original grand vision in one step, starting small avoids the kind of overwhelm that makes you want to put your project off for another day.
The best way to start small is to use a little trick from the tech startup world that will change the way you think about starting a business forever. It’s called the ‘Minimum Viable Product’, or MVP.
The Lean Startup movement, spearheaded by entrepreneur and author Eric Ries, is a method for rapidly creating successful startups on a minimal budget. Its advocates include tech startups, such as Dropbox, Instagram, Etsy and Airbnb, and some more traditional businesses, like Toshiba and General Electric.
Having been through two failed startups of his own before reaching success with a third, Ries realised that conventional business approaches didn’t work well for startups because of the innovative nature of their products and the fast-moving world they operate in. Planning out your business for years in advance and investing considerable time and money in creating a complete product before customers get to try it too often resulted in failure. A new approach was needed.
Lean Startup focuses at the beginning on the concept of a Minimum Viable Product. And the MVP is a really useful idea for you even if you have no interest in software, the startup world or creating a company. The principle works just as well for freelancing, writing, stand-up comedy or launching your own event.
What Lean Startup suggests is that at the start of a business, you focus on creating the minimum product (or service) that someone could find useful, then you get it out into the world as fast as possible and get feedback from people that you can use to go back and make it better. Try to choose an audience who are willing to give helpful feedback and will be forgiving if they find glitches in what you’ve created. Even Google does this when they release new software as a beta version and ask for feedback before they go any further.
This avoids you slaving away for months or years on something that completely misjudges what people want. Instead, create something as fast as possible, get it out there and see how you can improve it.
How minimal can you get? Take a lesson from the story of Zappos
ZAPPOS SHOES IS one of the world’s largest online shoe retailers and was bought by Amazon in 2009 in a deal worth around $1 billion. But the founder Nick Swinmurn didn’t start in the way you might imagine, by building an expensive ecommerce system and buying a huge stock of shoes.
Instead, he went to local shoe shops and asked the owners’ permission to take photos of shoes and put them online on a simple shop (originally called shoesite.com). When an order came in he took payment, emailed the receipt manually, went to the shop, bought the pair that was ordered and boxed it and shipped it himself by hand.
This of course does not make for a profitable, scalable business but it was a great MVP. And it allowed Nick back in 1999 to prove that people were willing to buy shoes online without trying them on. Once he’d done that, he could show investors that the principle worked and get the funds to buy stock and build the automated systems he needed to make the business work.
That same year Nick left a voicemail for young entrepreneur Tony Hsieh to ask for $500,000 funding from his investment firm Venture Frogs. Tony reports on Inc.com that when he heard Nick’s message he nearly deleted it until he heard Nick mention that shoes are a $40 billion dollar market and 5 per cent of that was already being sold by mail order. Nick got his investment and the rest is Internet history.
So your focus in the next 30 days is to create and release the Minimum Viable Product for your idea – your first speech, your first project with a client, your first training programme, your first live event, your first version of an app with just the features that make it special, your first ten blog posts (that could turn into a book), your first five-minute stand-up routine.
Most importantly, focus your effort, and any money you’re spending, primarily on the things that are valuable for your user, reader, customer or client. Don’t waste time at the start on a beautiful logo, complex website or getting some details right that your first users won’t even notice. That’s what makes it ‘lean’.
If you’re technically minded or just like to go large on any project, be wary about jumping into building an enormous dedicated site or app. First, prove that there is demand for the thing you want to create. And the best way to do that is to create it using someone else’s platform. If you want to create the ultimate social network for stay-at-home dads, start by creating a group on Facebook and inviting people in. Or use one of the configurable social networking systems like Ning.com.
Or, if you want to build a niched dating website, you can use a white-label dating site system. White-label systems allow you to use their platform, configure it to suit your own needs and apply your own branding so that it looks like your own dedicated platform. Many of the national newspapers’ own dating sites are run in this way. It’s much easier than diving into the technicalities of building your own. And it avoids an expensive investment before you can even start.
If you want to run a retreat in some exotic location, you don’t have to build your own retreat centre. Partner with a hotel or resort. And if you have no experience running retreats but you have some great content to share with people, partner with someone who has run retreats before and is looking for someone to bring fresh subject matter.
Building the ultimate electric car
WHEN ELON MUSK decided to build the coolest electric car ever made, the Tesla Roadster, he partnered with British manufacturer Lotus to help create the body. Building the world’s fastest electric engine was a difficult enough task without the additional work of designing a good-looking body for it to power too. Tesla created its initial prototypes by modifying models of the legendary Lotus Elise. Then, as Tesla worked on creating the model of car they could sell, they worked with Lotus Engineering to create their own unique body for the car. The end result was a car so remarkable it won multiple awards and brought the young company into profitability for the first time.
So what do you do if your idea is to open a restaurant or a coffee shop or write a book or release your own line of clothes or change the world? How do you do that in 30 days, even as an MVP?
Well, you don’t attempt the whole thing in 30 days. Instead, find the heart of your project idea – the nugget that really matters – and do that as a Play Project. Here’s the key though: make sure your project centres on the part you love most about your idea that will also be interesting or useful to others. Strip away the rest.
Do something that excites you – the part of your idea that matters most to you. Often people think they need to create all the trappings around their project first. For instance, people who want to start a business will spend 30 days setting up a website or writing a business plan or designing a nice logo when what you really should be doing is the actual work that excites you.
So, for example, if you dream of being a professional declutterer, your project shouldn’t be to set up your website in the hope of getting clients. If you’ve not done this work before, your project is to go do some decluttering for someone. Call up a friend and say, ‘You know that messy room of yours? Can I come round and sort it out with you in one day in exchange for lunch and a testimonial?’ If they say no, keep calling friends until one says yes. It won’t take long.
This means you jump right into the thing you love and start doing it. You’re getting experience, you’re finding out what you like and don’t like about it, you’re building your confidence in it and you’re walking away with your first testimonial. Better than spending 30 days fiddling with your logo, right?
Note: if writing business plans, building websites or designing logos is the most fun thing you can imagine, then make your project all about that! Go write business plans for five friends or design ten logos for people and see if you can get paid for it; you could start by offering your services on fiverr.com.
Let’s look at some other examples so that you can get the feel for how to nuggetise your idea:
The humble beginnings of one of the most influential books of all time
DALE CARNEGIE’S CLASSIC book How to Win Friends and Influence People has sold 30 million copies but it started as a short talk. That talk expanded to 90 minutes and Carnegie gave it multiple times to students urging them to, ‘go out and test it in their business and social contacts, and then come back to class and speak about their experiences and the results they had achieved’. This was Carnegie’s MVP.
Using everything he learned, Carnegie created a ‘Set of rules printed on a card no larger than a postcard. The next season we printed a larger card, then a leaflet, then a series of booklets, each one expanding in size and scope.’ This led eventually to the international bestselling book and also his company Dale Carnegie Training, which has lasted over a hundred years and trained 8 million people in more than 90 countries.
You can read the whole story in a chapter titled ‘How this book was written – and why’ in How To Win Friends and Influence People.
Of course, jumping straight into action like this might be a bit more scary than just playing around with your logo! Hmm, I wonder if that’s why most people don’t do it.
That’s why it really helps to connect with others who are going through the same process (you can find ways to do that at screwworkbreakfree.com).
OK, it’s time for you to write down your project. A 30-day Play Project is a deceptively powerful thing. Put your focus on creating something valuable in 30 days, use the deadline to keep you focused, share your results at the end and you’ll be amazed what can come out of it.
An important part of this is to produce something tangible from your project that you can share. That might be an online sales page for the first product you’ve created, a report on your first project, client or event or a blog with a dozen new posts exploring your topic. Building this habit of sharing what you’re creating is a key part of the New Entrepreneurialism. We’ll look at this in more depth on Day 5.
So now, fill in the boxes below to declare your project.
| My Play Project |
|---|
| My 30-day Play Project is: |
| What I will be sharing on the thirtieth day of my project: |
| What’s most exciting about this for me is: |
Throughout this book you’ll see prompts to share what you’re working on with others. When you give up the myth of the lone entrepreneur striving against the world and instead get into the habit of connecting with others for mutual support and learning, you multiply your chances of success.
Who can you share your project with that you know will give you some encouragement (i.e. someone supportive, not that super-critical friend or family member who likes to pick holes in everything)? Take a moment to tell them now. Alternatively, you could share your project with friends on Facebook or elsewhere. Making a public commitment makes it more likely you’ll follow through and you might even get some encouraging words or tips for your project right away.
You can also share your project with others following this book: simply post it to Twitter or Instagram with the hashtag #screwworkbreakfree. (You can follow me on Twitter as @johnsw and on Instagram as @johnwlondon.)
You now know how to generate ideas, choose the best ones for you and turn them into something you can launch in 30 days. You’re already way ahead of most people. You’re ready to make something happen.
Tomorrow we get started for real. You’ll find out how to get started quicker than you would ever think possible and after that you’ll see how to make progress on your project in just 20 minutes a day.