Dan Norris - The 7 Day Startup: You Dont Learn Until You Launch

Contents

Join Other Entrepreneurs
and Build Your 7 Day Startup

Theres a lot covered in this book, and many of these topics are better discussed with a community of like-minded entrepreneurs.

If you are serious about implementing what you learn in this book, Id love to have you in my private community. Its where I hang out with entrepreneurs who get shit done.

Every day, we dissect different topics around entrepreneurship, startups, and online marketing.

Visit https://7daystartup.co/membership to check it out. Ill see you there.

by Rob Walling

I first heard about Dan Norris when he emailed to pitch me on a guest post called 13 Pre-Launch Traffic Strategies for Startups.

No wait thats not right.

The first time I actually heard about Dan Norris was on the Tropical MBA podcast the hosts mentioned Dans (now defunct) startup Inform.ly.

Umm thats not right, either.

It was when Dan launched his podcast

His blog

His email newsletter

Or when he put himself in the hotseat on Jason Calcanis This Week in Startups.

I think youre starting to get the picture The scary truth is that Dan Norris is a hustler.

In fact, there are few who can match Dans sheer volume of hustle , be it when cranking out podcast episodes, blog posts, or putting himself out there on other peoples podcasts (mine included). Ive always admired this about him.

Its this hustle that enabled him to iterate, pivot, and brute force his way through multiple failed startup attempts and arrive at a standout success, WP Curve. And he went from spending six months to find his first paying customer to spending 7 Days.

Ive worked with thousands of entrepreneurs over the years through my podcast. Without question, the biggest mistake people make is obsessing over their idea and not focusing enough on finding people willing to pay for their product.

The 7 Day Startup is based on the hard knocks Dan has endured while launching idea after idea. He architected this book to get you from zero to paying customer in 7 Days and hes distilled his lessons into relatable stories and actionable takeaways to get you started as quickly as possible.

I know what youre thinking: 7 Days?! Has all this hustle rotted his brain? No one can launch an idea in 7 days.

And to that I offer a story:

When I interviewed Dan I, too, was incredulous at the thought of getting an idea out the door in 7 days. My email marketing startup, Drip, was as minimally viable as you can imagine, and it still took months to launch.

Dans response to my pushback?

I think its worth considering whether or not Drip is a good idea for a first time entrepreneur whos bootstrapping. [In my book I have a] list of criteria for good ideas and one of them is the ability to build and test quickly.

Drip might be a good idea for a 3rd or 4th time entrepreneur, but it may not be a good idea for a first time entrepreneur because it might be too hard and too competitive to build something like that.

Well said, sir.

If youre a third- or fourth-time entrepreneur, I would hope you have it dialed in by now. Everyone else: youd be well advised to listen to him.

I wish you all the best on your journey,

Rob Walling

Fresno, CA

August, 2014

You Dont Learn Until
You Launch

Its fine to celebrate success but it is more important
to heed the lessons of failure. Bill Gates

In 2007, I was one year into my first business. Flying back from my honeymoon, I finished the book Think and Grow Rich . It advised thinking of a financial goal for the next 12 months, and saying it every day. I thought of $100k as an annual wage, to pay myself from my business profits. The maximum I could draw at the time was $40k, which was about half of what I was earning at my previous job a year earlier.

I said it to myself every day throughout 2007.

But I didnt hit the goal. I didnt even hit half of the goal. Not in 2007, or 2008, or 2009, or 2010, or 2011. In 2012, my wage dropped so far it fell below zero.

In June 2013, I had nothing left and was two weeks away from giving up on entrepreneurship for good and getting a job.

Flicking through the limited opportunities in my area, I considered moving my family back to the city. Id thought of myself as an entrepreneur for the last fourteen years, and Id ridden the roller coaster of business ownership for the last seven.

What the hell was the point?

In the year 2000 I was a long-haired twenty-year-old, struggling through a business degree at university. Bored out of my brain, I needed to choose an elective to make up for the courses I had failed, and stumbled across a brand new subject called Entrepreneurship.

I dreamed of launching and running my own successful startup.

The objective was to come up with a business idea and plan how to make it happen. I figured it made sense to choose at least one course that taught me about starting and running a business, since that is what I was studying.

At that time you used Dogpile or Hotbot to search the web. There wasnt much there; all the good stuff was in the library. One day I came across a publication called the Ultimate HR Manual. As a Human Resources major, I hid it behind a stack of musty books in the never-used frog anatomy section. It couldnt leave the building it was too powerful.

The manual held all the secrets for managing human resources. It outlined exactly how to hire and fire, how to recruit amazing talent, how to manage change, how to build a team, and how to train. It was the holy grail of HR.

I needed a business idea for my course, and after I discovered the HR manual, it dawned on me:

What if I put the HR manual online ?

I could create a site where business owners could access all the forms and processes required for best practicing HR, including position descriptions, employee surveys, HR Audits, and training programs. That would be cool! Wouldnt it?

My first business idea was born.

Over the next six months I mapped out the idea and planned exactly what topics to include, how to deliver the documents, how to charge, and even how to employ writers.

This was going to make me my first million. HR managers were already paying thousands for HR staff, so I figured they would certainly pay a few hundred dollars for every document they could ever need. As far as my research revealed, nothing like this existed.

I was proud of my planit was organized, meticulous, and thorough. Nervously submitting the assignment with hopes of earning a great mark, I waited and waited for the results. Finally, the day came. I opened the assignment and saw an A. BOOM!

There was one problem: I didnt launch the business.

Sure, I had created a beautiful business plan after spending countless hours in the library deep diving into painstaking research.

But launching a business wasnt in the marking criteria.

Looking back, the timing was perfect. I had this idea just after the first dot com crash, and services like this became mainstream a few years later. HR documents and policies were easy to share and buy online. In hindsight, Im sure it had the potential to be a seven- or eight-figure business.

I will never know for sure. You can never predict what happens after you start a business. Long-term plans and detailed documents are pointless. Most businesses go on to do something very different from what they set out to do. Today, this is called a pivot.

I learned a very valuable lesson from my failure to launch.

That lesson is: You dont learn until you launch.

The term business can mean different things to different people. If you buy a lawn mowing franchise, you are technically in business. But you are really just working for yourself.