My First Million: MFM Mini - The Burrito Trick: How I Got My First 20 Customers

Hubspot Podcast Network Hubspot Podcast Network 6/27/21 - 4m - PDF Transcript

All right.

Quick break to tell you about another podcast that we're interested in right now, HubSpot

just launched a Shark Tank rewatch podcast called Another Bite.

Every week, the hosts relive the latest and greatest pitches from Shark Tank, from Squatty

Potty to the Mench on a Bench to Ring Doorbell, and they break down why these pitches were

winners or losers, and each company's go-to-market strategy, branding, pricing, valuation, everything.

Basically all the things you want to know about how to survive the tank and scale your

company on your own.

If you want to give it a listen, you can find another bite on whatever podcast app you listen

to, like Apple or Spotify or whatever you're using right now.

All right.

Back to the show.

Here's a mistake that I've noticed a lot of people make when it comes to business.

They make big plans, and big plans aren't bad.

They're just like a sneaky form of procrastination, right?

Because a big plan means you're putting off action until, number one, you finish writing

up the plan, and number two, the big plan usually takes place.

It plays out over weeks or months from now, and it's usually leading up to a big launch

that's a few months from now, and so I'll tell you a story about how we almost fell

under this trap, but got out of it.

Okay.

So, a few years ago, we were making an app for high schoolers, and so the engineers had

built like a simple prototype.

Honestly, it was pretty crappy.

It wasn't even in the app store yet.

We were playing with it, and we kind of liked it, but we were a bunch of 30-year-old Harry

dudes, and so we said, we don't know if high schoolers are going to like this the way we

like this.

So, I told our two growth guys, I went to Tyler and Jason, and I said, all right, so

those guys, the engineers, they're building this thing, how are we going to get users?

And Tyler and Jason, they're smart guys.

So they grabbed a marker, they said, all right, we're up for the challenge, how are we going

to get users?

And they went and started brainstorming a growth plan.

And so they thought, you know, they went to Whiteboard, and they're writing down, we

could Facebook ads, we could, oh, these Instagram influencers, we could get them to shout us

out, we could do an influencer program, we could create a referral system or referral

program, ambassador program inside these high schools, and anytime you hear the word program

or committee, you know, just run the other way, it's usually, that's for things that

are mature.

And so if you're working on an early idea, you don't really want to be baking up full

programs just yet.

And so these were all good ideas, they weren't bad, but they were things that would take

us weeks or even months to set up, right?

Even Facebook ads we couldn't do because the app wasn't even live in the store, it takes

a week to get approved, you know, for a new app in the store.

And so we thought, okay, well, what are we going to do?

Do we just sit around and wait or what?

So we were at lunch, and these guys were telling us the ideas, and then we all kind of had

this realization.

We have a framework, or we had a framework at my startup, which was called the one month,

one week, one hour, one day, one hour framework, right?

And so anytime we'd have a plan that was like, this will take us a month to build this, this

will take us two months to build this, somebody in the room, it's their job to say, dude,

that's an awesome idea, love that idea, I think it's going to be great.

You know, what's the one week version of that?

What's the one day version of that?

That's something we could do today that we could ship that makes progress towards that

and future.

And it's basically saying, how do I grab the rope and tug?

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.

Do you like these mini episodes? Tweet your feedback to Shaan (@ShaanVP) & get more short stories like this on his newsletter www.shaanpuri.com.
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