Fraser Doherty MBE - 48-Hour Start-up: From idea to launch in 1 weekend

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Fraser Doherty 2016

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Source ISBN: 9780008196684

Ebook Edition August 2016 ISBN: 9780008196721

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There are only two people that I need truly to thank for making my career as an entrepreneur a possibility. As a boy, I pitched thousands of business ideas to them. As a teenager, they patiently listened as I explained yet another hare-brained concept after another.

They never said no and they never discouraged me. Never pressured me to walk a more familiar path and always let me seek out what I thought I was born to do.

All along the way, they did everything they could to make my dreams a reality. Waking up at 4am to drive me to the fruit market on a Monday. Or the farmers market at the weekends. Or to a supermarket pitch far out of town. They stuck labels onto jars, served customers behind the stall and mucked in at the office.

They were there to lift my spirits when almost every one of my ideas failed, and to celebrate when a few of them worked. They were even willing to make an appearance on Korean TV, all to support their exhausting son.

I couldnt have done any of it without you, Mum and Dad.

Depending on the type of business you are hoping to start, doing so on a weekend may or may not be practical; for example, if you rely on getting materials from suppliers they may only be open on weekdays. To keep it simple, I have written 48-Hour Start-Up over the course of Day 1 and Day 2. Its up to you whether you do yours during the week or at the weekend.

FOREWORD

For anyone with a dream to start up on their own, there are endless airport bookshops filled with build a billion-dollar company manuals. But what if your dream isnt to build the next Apple? What if your dream is more realistic?

For many of us, the most important thing that we are searching for in life is freedom. Freedom from the monotony of jobs we hate. Freedom to make a living doing something we love, to work the hours we want to work and to do business in whatever way feels right to us.

For me, starting a business to get rich somewhat misses the point. The adventure that I have had in growing my business the fun I have had, people Ive met and places Ive visited are the things that I treasure more than the material possessions Ive been able to buy.

The idea that starting a business can be your route to freedom and adventure to doing what you were born to do can, for some people, be a slightly overwhelming prospect. A lot of people labour over their ideas, scheming and planning for years on end with a worry that their idea isnt quite right yet, that maybe they need to do more market research to be completely sure that it wont be a total flop.

More than anything, this fear of failure stops people from pursuing their dreams. We hold ourselves back from what we deserve in life because we worry that if things dont work out as they should and we end up with egg on our faces, people will laugh or worse, that they wont give us another chance.

Having met hundreds of people who struggle with this very real fear, it got me thinking: what if the risk of taking that plunge could be taken out of the equation? Is there, maybe, a way of starting a business that can allow people to dip their toe into the water, rather than jumping in at the deep end and risking everything? Perhaps if this were possible, I figured, more people would be willing and able to follow their hearts.

Maybe its your dream to start a business and for it to become your new full-time career. Maybe you just want to try something out for a bit of fun on the side. Or perhaps you already have a business but want to find a way of testing out some new product ideas without betting the farm.

Whatever reason you have for taking on this experiment, I very much hope that the experiences, tools and tricks I have included in this book help you to get closer to your goals. Im pretty confident that if you put in the focus and energy required, they will.

There are lessons I have learned and tools I have found that can make the process of going from idea to first customer a whole lot quicker. Although the businesses I have started and indeed the business you will start are all very different, many of the steps we all go through are almost exactly the same.

Because starting a business is a road thats been walked before, youd be crazy to try to figure out every step of the route from scratch and on your own. Feel free to look at this book as a cheat sheet; the basic essentials you need to know about the key steps of developing an idea and getting it to market quickly.

By hotwiring the whole start-up process in this way, youll be able to do in days what most start-up entrepreneurs spend months on. Sure, you wont build a billion-dollar company in a weekend, but youll be amazed at what you can achieve with a methodical process and, above all, two days of complete focus.

The progress you make in your first two days will most likely give you the confidence to take your idea even further. And, of course, the story of every successful company in the world began this way someone overcame their fears and took the first step.

CHAPTER 1

Is it possible to come up with an idea for a business and be up and running, selling a product to paying customers, all in the space of two days?

This was the question that first started my journey with the 48-hour start-up, a slightly crazy experiment that I took on in the spring of 2016, without any real idea of what the outcome would be. I wanted to give it a shot, to see if the above challenge were possible to achieve, with all of the modern tools available to us entrepreneurs and by applying the many lessons Ive learned so far in my exciting, challenging and at times downright bizarre career in business.

Throughout my adventures as a young entrepreneur, Ive had the pleasure of speaking at literally hundreds of entrepreneur events around the world. No matter how different the culture of the host country might be from my own, I have always felt at home in the company of other entrepreneurs. We are a sort of dysfunctional global family of people who just happen to think the same sort of way people who dont want to work for someone else, but who want to make a mark on the world in our own particular way.

Were a group of people who like coming up with ideas, sometimes inventing products that hitherto didnt exist in the world. In my experience at least, were also a group of people who tend to feel that life is short that we ought to make the most of every second we have. For all kinds of reasons, we see starting a business as the best way of doing that an opportunity to make a career for ourselves, maybe work with our friends, do something we love and perhaps in some small way change the world. What more could you want from your work?