📚 A&B #179

50 Powerful reading tips, Million Dollar Weekend part 2, and more.

February 04, 2024

👋 Hey everyone,

Here are a few popular posts you may have missed:

🤓 Course Update:

I’m finishing up the landing page for the course as well as collecting more testimonials.

Here’s what Morgan Housel (bestselling author “The Psychology of Money” and “Same As Ever”) said about my course:

Enroll now and join 160+ readers here! 👈

📚 Book Summary:

This week’s book is “Million Dollar Weekend” by Noah Kagan.

A LOT of people emailed me last week saying they loved the first few lessons (read part 1 here), so here are three more lessons from the book:

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1) Find A Growing Market

Imagine for a moment that you’re a professional surfer.

The product or service you’re selling is your surfboard. And the market you’re in is the wave.

Even if you’re a pro surfer with an amazing board, you will still have a hard time surfing if you don’t have any good waves to ride.

That’s why it’s so important to choose where you go surfing (or in this case, what market you do business in).

For instance, Noah started AppSumo in 2010. During that time there weren’t many software apps, but the market was growing extremely quickly and continues to grow even today.

An easy way to see if a market is growing or not is to search for it in Google Trends and look at the growth over the past few months or years.

Another handy tip is to the check out Facebook Ads Library. Type in the keyword of whatever business category you’re thinking about to find existing and competitive products.

Use these two tools to get an idea of the size of the market you’re thinking of entering and then move on to step two.

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2) Validate Your Idea In 48 Hours

Now that you have a possible million-dollar idea, it’s time to the test.

A lot of ideas seem great in theory, but you’ll never know if they can go from idea to business until you actually test people’s willingness to pay.

The goal here is to find 3 customers in 48 hours who will give you money for your idea.

Don’t worry about building a business or a product right now, we’re only trying to validate our idea.

You can ask friends and family but try to get out of your comfort zone and ask people who won’t just buy from you because they love you.

Also, the promise of payment is not validation. That’s polite rejection.

You want to get cold hard cash (or collect the money using PayPal, Venmo, etc).

The best part is that you don’t have to even build anything. Just tell them about your product or service and then say you’re offering a presale discount.

You can simply text or email people about your offer, or if you’re feeling fancy, set up a quick website.

For example, Noah’s former intern Justin Mares wanted to test his idea for a bone broth product.

So he paid a designer on Fiverr $5 to come up with a logo and bought the domain bonebroths.com for $12.

After setting up the page, he bought $50 off ads to drive traffic and see if people would buy anything. To his surprise, about 15 people placed an order.

Fast forward to today, Justin’s company Kettle & Fire is now a $100 MILLION company. Not bad for a $67 investment to test his idea.

One last tip from Noah: The goal here is to test your product as soon as possible to see if people will actually buy it. Don’t overthink any designs, names, logos, etc. The idea is the most important part.

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3) Start Collecting Emails TODAY

Noah is a popular guy. He has 1+ million YouTube subscribers, 250k+ Instagram followers, 150k+ on TikTok, and 130k+ on Twitter.

Which of these platforms is his most valuable?

None of them. It’s actually his 100k email list.

Why?

Every time he sends an email, 40,000 people open and read it. Compare that 40% engagement rate to the typical 1-5% engagement rate of social media platforms.

Having an email list gives you a direct line of communication with your audience and it’s used by people of all ages around the world. “Email is the king and queen of communicating with customers,” writes Noah.

A recent stat shows that 89% of people check their email every day and over 4 BILLION people have an email account.

Another advantage is that your email list can’t get shadow-banned or taken away from you. The same can’t be said of social media accounts.

Noah shares that one of the top regrets of every entrepreneur he knows is that they wish they started their email list sooner.

Even if you don’t have a business, you should still be collecting emails so that when you do want to start one, you’ll have a group of people who are interested in helping you.

My advice is to put your email subscribe link in your social media account bios and at the bottom of your website.

Then just email people once a month about what you’re working on or the best books, podcasts, or content you consumed (that’s what I did and still do to this day haha).

PS: If you want to start collecting emails today I recommend using Beehiiv. It’s free up to 2,500 subscribers. Use my link to set up a free account.

✅ Actionable Advice:

1) See how big the wave or market is for your business idea:

Use Google Trends and Facebook Ads Library

2) Validate your business idea in the next 48 hours:

Text or email friends, family, and whoever else you know about your business idea.
You want to get at least 3 people to pay you.
- This is just to validate the idea, you can create the product later, or if it doesn’t work out, refund their payment.

3) Start collecting emails TODAY:

Add the email subscribe link to your social media bios and to the bottom of your website.

📖 Reading Lesson:

50 Powerful reading tips from the smartest readers I've come across.

💎 Weekly Gem:

My friend Neil Pasricha’s monthly book newsletter.

Neil is a bestselling author and one of the most passionate readers I know (he reads 100+ books a year). Every month he shares a list of what books he’s read and which he recommends.

Plus when you sign up you’ll the first 50 pages of his #1 bestselling book “The Happiness Equation” for free.