Four questions to help start your side business

Video Transcript

When most people think about starting a business, it's this overwhelming huge thing. I run an 8-week build sprint called No I want to give you the four things that I tell people to start with in the very first week. It's called our foundation mode. Before we get into that, my name is Nick Haramus.

I've spent 25 years building businesses, learning lessons, failing, sometimes succeeding, and documenting everything that I've done so that you can take your idea and turn it into a business faster than I ever did. For now, let's get into it. I like to call the things that we're going to talk about next, the four anchors. And these four anchors are really really simple questions that anybody building anything needs to answer to figure out if you are even building the right thing.

It's really easy to start with this big idea. I have an app that is going to compete with Airbnb. That is a very cumbersome place to begin. So I like to bring this down to the most simple versions of the thing that we're trying to talk about.

And so those four anchors are as follows. The first anchor is who is the one primary user. And most people go wrong here right off the bat. If you're targeting everybody, you're targeting nobody.

If you're targeting 45 year olds, you're targeting a vague group of people. So, let's think about who you're targeting. I want to know how old they are, what they eat, where they hang out, who their friends are. I want to know what platforms they're on.

Is it LinkedIn, Snapchat, Tik Tok, Instagram? You have to be so specific. And the gut feeling when I start the program with people is but Nick, there aren't enough people in the world for that. And that's just not true.

If you are building a business in London, you have hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions of people in London and surrounding areas that you can target. And your business doesn't need to win everybody over to succeed in the beginning. It needs to take your core ideal customer profile, your ICP, and it needs to nail down a few of those people into your flow. So, if you're building a product, think about a specific primary user.

And if you're telling me broad, you're telling me too broad, nail it down, thin it out, niche down, and make sure that you understand the exact person you're trying to target. And I even go so far as to tell people to find that person on LinkedIn. Connect with them and use that person's name and image as the person you are building for in the following 8 weeks. The second is what is the one job that they need to do.

So often we think of apps and business platforms and ideas as these very complicated processes where you have to do this thing to do that thing to go there. And the truth is the best products do one thing. When Twitter launched it just asked what are you doing? When Facebook launched it was a very specific thing.

When Uber launched it did one very specific thing. Only later on when you have proven product market fit when you've proven that the thing that you're trying to build works for one user then you can start expanding but in the beginning one job you need to move person from A to B in as fast a way as possible and test that single critical user journey. The third anchor is what is the one context they are in. So where is this person when they're having the problem?

What are they doing? Are they at work or are they at home? Are they running? Are they cycling?

Are they with their kids? Are they in a good mental mindset? Are they struggling and in strife? This informs the way you're going to build your product, the way you're going to market your product, the copy that you write, the way that you move people through the journeys quickly or slowly.

The context matters more than you would think when you're trying to put it into a simple user journey that you can iterate on top of. You don't need to solve all the problems. You don't need to pick all the contexts. You need to find one context.

Airbnb as an example wanted to have people who were traveling find a air mattress in a room. That's how they started, one context. And then the fourth anchor is what is the one measurable outcome that proves that the thing you've done worked? Often people will tell me that they want to track everything.

And here's what I've learned from experience. If you track everything, you notice nothing. So in the beginning when you're moving from an idea to a business, you have to pick one thing. Is it new user acquisition?

Is it how many users complete the journey? Is it how many users register and put their name in once they've registered? You have to find the particular metric that you want to move. It could be something more ethereal.

That doesn't matter. But pick one and try and solve that one in the critical path for the context that the user is in for the specific user. And once you've answered those four anchors, then you're ready to move on and get building. That is the first mode that we focus on at No It's the foundation mode.

And after that, we've got reduction and design and build and skeleton and a whole bunch of other modes that we work through in 8 weeks. But it all depends on a good solid foundation and the four anchors that you are trying to build in your idea to prove that you have a business. If you're interested in working with me, the next cohort of No Bullship starts in October. There are 20 seats maximum.

So apply now. Tell me why your business needs to be built today by you. No bill, just shipping.