How To Start a $1M SAAS With No Code + AI in 2hr 19mins

Summary

Highlights

• Learn how to come up with viable startup ideas and cost-effective testing methods. 🧠
• Explore techniques to brand your startup without breaking the bank. 🎨
• Discover the process of building a no-code MVP and why less is more. 📲
• Understand the importance of selecting the right business model and scaling strategies. 📈
• Uncover the secrets to effective sales and customer acquisition. 🔍
• Delve into creating scalable marketing strategies and leveraging AI. 🤖
• Find out how to use no-code automation to streamline operations. ⚙️
• Gain insights into raising investment and navigating the startup ecosystem. 💸

Key Takeaways

• Start simple: Focus on delivering value with minimal features to quickly generate revenue. 💡
• Iterate and learn: Test your idea with real customers to validate assumptions before full-scale development. 🔄
• No-code power: Use drag-and-drop tools to build apps and automate processes without a tech background. 🖱️
• Mindset shift: Embrace a growth mindset, prioritize action over perfection, and learn from every step. 🧠
• Pitch smart: Create compelling, clear, and concise pitch decks to captivate investors' attention. 🚀

Overview

How To Start a $1M SAAS With No Code + AI in 2hr 19mins Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 over the past 15 years I've been focused on one thing building startups from scratch I also served as the Director of an accelerator program based in Los Angeles partnered with Google and today I've trained more than 600 Founders who have gone on to raise more than $56 million in funding I've also been invited as a guest lecturer to speak at prestigious universities such as UCLA Princeton Pepperdine and several more I've also sold startups and failed startups so I'm here today to tell you everything that you need to learn how to build a startup how to launch a startup
• 00:30 - 01:00 how to grow a startup and how to sell a startup I'm literally going to teach you all the strategies and tools that you can use to go from idea to revenue generating business without having any technical skills and yes 100% for free but I can tell you right now that if you're not even able to sit through this entire video from start to finish and it's very unlikely that you're going to become a successful entrepreneur now here are the topics that I'm going to cover in this video first I'm going to teach you how to come up with killer startup ideas from scratch I'm then going to teach you how to test any startup idea cost effectively of course
• 01:00 - 01:30 and then I'm going to teach you how to build a brand without expensive designers then we're going to jump into how to build a website without any coding skills at all leveraging no code I'm going to teach you how to shift to the entrepreneur mindset it's completely different from what you have at a 9 to-5 job we're then going to jump into how to build your MVP or the first version of your app leveraging these no code tools we're going to talk about how to pick the right business model for you we're then going to jump into how to sell then we're going to talk about how to get your first paying customers then how we can build scalable marketing strategies
• 01:30 - 02:00 you're going to see that those things are completely different we're going to talk about how to use AI to accelerate your business of course without getting lost in thousands of tools how we can use no code automation to scale our business how to find a co-founder this can be gamechanging then how to create a pitch deck which is the modern version of a business plan how to get investors and how to get them to write that first check for you how Equity works and how it can be a powerful tool to motivate your team we're then going to talk about how to sell a business and finally as a bonus module I'll be talking about some of the largest mistakes that you can make and how to avoid them because we have so much to cover let's Jump Right
• 02:00 - 02:30 In okay so first and foremost how do you come up with a killer startup idea well you've actually been sold three big Lies over the past decade probably that are stopping you from getting started the first lie comes from movies like The Social Network where Mark Zuckerberg suddenly gets this amazing idea for Facebook he runs to his studio apartment and starts building it it's this idea of a light bulb moment that just lands on you and you have this perfect idea but I'm sorry to tell you that that is not the way that most great startups are built and frankly unless you want to
• 02:30 - 03:00 stay sat on your couch for the rest of your life waiting for that light bulb moment there is a much better way you can actually actively generate startup ideas and then select one of them to get started with and in this section I'm going to break down three ways that you can do that actively instead of just waiting the second big lie is that you have to come up with this groundbreaking revolutionary idea that completely changes the world we've kind of bought into this narrative because of big headlines on Tech crunch but that honestly couldn't be further from the truth Sam par for example the founder of the hustle builds built and sold a
• 03:00 - 03:30 newsletter for $30 million nothing revolutionary it's just a newsletter and years later he even convinced his friend Shan puy to launch his own called the milk road that was also sold for eight figures so a much better strategy for you is to come up with an existing business model or concept and just have a nice twist or focus on a specific Niche revolutionizing the world is overrated now the third and final lie is that you have to have a perfect idea and a perfect plan here's the truth you will be if not completely a little bit wrong
• 03:30 - 04:00 at least once you go to market with that idea so starting off with a rough idea and going to Market quickly is always going to beat overthinking overanalyzing researching the entire market for months and months and months coming up with the perfect brand name for this thing instead of actually just going to the market and testing it which is what we're going to teach in the next module but to test an idea we need an idea so let's talk about the three active methods that you can use to come up with your idea and decide which ones to start with the first method is is all about
• 04:00 - 04:30 writing down problems every single day you want to probably write about three problems a day for about 30 days you'll probably have 90 problems they could be as simple as complex as you want so it could be like I left my keys at home or it could be this AI algorithm is difficult to understand and they could be happening to you they could also be happening to other people that you know who are complaining about their problems you could also go and research online problems that other people are having the goal at the end is to have 90 problems and then to think about 90 solutions that could solve that problem the second one is based on Trends so you can go to the internet and find
• 04:30 - 05:00 Consulting companies that are basically making all their predictions you can find a couple trends that you believe are definitely going to happen then when you can start doing is figuring out like okay what kind of businesses are going to be built if this trend is correct and then you want to write down a couple of needs that would come up if that trend is right and each one of those needs you got it can be converted into a startup idea and yes the goal is to come up with a bunch of ideas because then we're going to want to filter through and come up with just one that we're going to work on we're going to talk about that later now the third strategy I called the rora strategy because a rora fish is
• 05:00 - 05:30 a fish that lives off of larger fish like sharks or Turtles for example and they basically eat the food that's left behind and although that might sound a little silly some of the large companies that you know today like Airbnb Uber or maybe Tinder are leaving huge million dooll opportunities because of the demand that they're already generating the concept here is basically to create complimentary goods and services for these larger and growing companies
• 05:30 - 06:00 that they would probably never go after so for the idea of Airbnb you could come up with something like a subscription box for small shampoos for all the hosts to be able to easily get them delivered on a monthly basis they're probably buying these things already so the goal with this strategy is to come up with 30 different businesses that you think are going to continue to grow over the next 10 years and then you basically Target their audiences okay so once you've done that you have a bunch of startup ideas so how do you pick which one you actually want to execute on first well let me actually show you on this board right now so so first of all I would
• 06:00 - 06:30 actually rank them so it's like you want to figure out which ones are in the top ideas that you have and then you can select one of those top ideas so basically we're rating them from 1 to 10 based on different criteria the criteria that I like to use are as follows the problem is this a really big problem is this a small problem how severe is it how often is it happening to these individuals how good are the customers are they easy to reach are they easy to convince how quickly do they make a decision how well is the founder fit for
• 06:30 - 07:00 this specific idea so founder fit I would put as one of the big criteria and you can select the criteria you want I might have things like ease of execution like do I have the resources do I think I can actually pull this off then based on these scores you're going to have a short list so at this point based on the short list you might know exactly which idea you want but if you still have a hard time deciding which one I would actually grab your passion like how much passion do you have for this let's make that one Circle then we can have another Circle be the uh skills that are required to execute on that and we can
• 07:00 - 07:30 make this another Circle then the resources do you have the resources how easy is it to get access to those resources for you right now those might be money those might be uh team members and basically right here my friends is where you will be able to make a decision on which idea is best to take action on so the idea here is to pick an idea that we can learn the skills and the process of launching a startup with we want to figure out cost effectively if we are right or wrong about this idea whether we need to change it a little bit for it to fit the market properly or
• 07:30 - 08:00 whether we are completely off that's exactly what we're going to talk about in the next section okay so now let's talk about how to test any idea cost effectively now it doesn't matter what you think it doesn't matter what I think it doesn't matter what anyone thinks about your startup idea the only thing that matters is what your customers say they want but more importantly where they put their money and just like Mike Tyson says it everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face and that's pretty much exactly what happen happens
• 08:00 - 08:30 when you bring a product or idea to Market there's almost no likelihood that you're going to be 100% right about all your assumptions so the most important thing is to quickly test and validate your startup idea before you dump years of your life and all of your savings into it but what are you actually looking for when you test your startup idea and how do you actually execute on that I'll get into the what specifically in just a couple of moments but first let's talk about what we're actually looking for you see there are actually three huge pieces of the puzzle that make all the difference and we have have to figure out early on why because it'll
• 08:30 - 09:00 bite Us in the butt later unless we figure them out early on the first one is the ICP what does that mean it means ideal customer profile so basically who are you going to be going after remember you have limited time and money to go after different segments and some customers are going to be way better than others they'll have the money they have the problem they're willing to pay to solve it some people are going to be very difficult to reach very difficult to convince they don't have the money to pay for for it yada yada so early on we
• 09:00 - 09:30 have ideas of different segments of the market or different ideal profiles that we think would be interested in buying this product so we're going to want to test out who that person is and whether or not we are right or wrong identify the right one number two is the problem so if we've identified the individual then let's talk and figure out the problem does the ICP that we've chosen actually have the problem that we are trying to solve are they already trying to solve it is this a problem that they would be willing to to pay for to solve
• 09:30 - 10:00 if we can't identify the very clear problem and more importantly the outcome that they want in using your product then it's going to be very difficult to get them to pay anything and the third thing we absolutely need to get right is are people willing to actually pay for it this is the difference between a money hole and a revenue generating business and if we don't get these three pieces of the puzzle right early on it doesn't matter what else you do it doesn't matter how beautiful your product is because if it doesn't solve the problem provide the outcome and no
• 10:00 - 10:30 one will be willing to pay for it if we're after the wrong individual we're going to be convincing people all day long and it's going to be a huge waste of our time so these are the three things we absolutely need to figure out and of course if we don't know how to monetize it well we do not have a business well my friends you'll be glad to know that there are two methods that have been used in Silicon Valley for half a century that allow you to test these different things out the first one is called customer Discovery now this is a process through which we set up interviews or conversations with our
• 10:30 - 11:00 future potential ideal customer profiles and we find out a little bit more about their life and we start asking them questions about their life their current process so we can understand if they are actually facing the problem that we believe they are facing now the biggest mistake people make when they're told hey go and talk to customers is to actually talk about their product this is not a pitch at all this is a conversation that we're having to just understand how people currently live their life to see whether or not they're the right person to talk Target with the
• 11:00 - 11:30 product or service that we have in mind and if you talk about your product early on people are going to give you the mom treatment everyone's mom is going to tell them that they are beautiful and nice and that's really nice but it's not going to help us figure out the harsh truth behind whether or not this startup is going to succeed another key rule here is to not ask if would you could you is to really focus on past Behavior because past behavior is the best way to determine future Behavior so instead of being like would you pay for a tool that did this that the other what we're going to ask for is tell us about the last
• 11:30 - 12:00 time that you faced this problem tell us about the last time you XYZ what was the biggest problem in actually doing that did you try to solve this problem or not maybe the problem you think isn't even the problem that comes up but how do you find these people and how do you book interviews with them well that would be through Linkedin prospecting you could also do it by going to forums and finding where people are talking about these kind of problems and have a conversation but these conversations are fundamental and they connect directly into sales which we'll talk about later
• 12:00 - 12:30 on in this video now how many of these interviews should you do well you probably want to start off with probably three per category or per profile that you have like different customer segments and then if you find demand specifically behind one of them you want to probably have five or 10 additional interviews to kind of confirm that people are saying similar things now one big problem with customer interviews is that people say one thing but they do something completely different all of us have this problem in life so the second strategy to test and validate your startup idea is called the smoke test so
• 12:30 - 13:00 what is this why should we do it and how do we actually do it well the concept is that you build a landing page that really describes your offer as if you had built the entire product and Company out and you were ready for customers to come and buy because we're going to use that to test people's actions on that page through what we call a CTA a call to action so a call to action could be a fake download button that shows us people would download this app if we had built it it could be a fake Buy button if we had a product that we were trying
• 13:00 - 13:30 to sell it could be a sign up for the weit list early on the goal is to test people's actions instead of just their words and we want to do this because most people build entire products then launch them they hear complete crickets and worse than that when they actually go out there and get customers to use the product they've built the wrong product for that customer and now it's so complicated to unbuild rebuild it's a pain in the neck and we want you to avoid that that so we want you to build
• 13:30 - 14:00 as close to a great product the first time and then we know we're going to have to adapt it but at least we are way closer to the truth the first time around so the value of building the smoke test is to generate the demand and have it lined up for when you actually launch the product as well as building a product that is way closer to what the customer actually wants versus what we have in our head but probably the most important part of this is really getting your offer right so let's talk about how we want to structure that offer in a way that is enticing now of course to build
• 14:00 - 14:30 this out you're going to need a logo you're going to need a color palette and other things that have to do with branding and content we'll talk about that in the next module right now I want to focus in on the value proposition which is essentially the offer and how to structure that on a onepage website now the first section you're going to have is called the hero section and it's basically a section through which you are delivering the core promise if you don't get any other parts of this right you need to nail this part because every single person who clicks and goes to your website sees this first page only
• 14:30 - 15:00 about 50% maybe 20% scroll to the bottom so this section is all about the core promise you're going to have a m main headline here that's probably two maybe three lines in large text and this has to be the ultimate outcome and you want to write this in very plain English then you want to have an image over here that's going to essentially help visualize the promise here so it has to add to this and this together is the
• 15:00 - 15:30 promise now another thing that you're going to have as well is a sub text under this one here this is going to be smaller text which is a little bit more focused on talking about the product and what it can do for people so this is the actual promise like the outcome with this and then underneath it is the thing that delivers that outcome so for example at we are NOCO we teach people how to launch their startups so this might be launch your startup with no code and AI right the end goal they're looking for is to Launch lach their startup right uh or build a revenue
• 15:30 - 16:00 generating business with no code and then here I might have some of the elements that showcase what that looks like so it might be some Learning Materials like uh the coaching sessions that we have it might be some people the community that people get access to the discount it might just be kind of a bundle package that's shown here and then underneath we talk about the description so the description is basically talking about the product so it's like the no code startup which is the name of our program is a online program for your cust customer uh non-technical entrepreneurs to launch
• 16:00 - 16:30 their startup cost effectively so this is the most important thing that everyone will see it is called again the hero section and make sure that you get this right for your startup now underneath the hero there is the next section which is the benefits section so basically the benefits are kind of like um the smaller outcomes that people get from using your product again you are selling the outcomes you are selling the benefits in using your product you're not talking about features you're not talking about your product prod so the way I usually structure this and this
• 16:30 - 17:00 would come right underneath the hero section would be essentially to have three of the benefits right I would have a little title very concrete just one quick line that explains what you would get um and then underneath you could have an additional description if you wanted so if we're talking about the outcome being launch your Revenue generating business then this first one could be test your idea cost effectively this one could be something like build the first version of your app with no code tools and this one would be learn
• 17:00 - 17:30 proven strategies to get paying customers now we can get into the actual features which are the things that are going to fulfill the benefits here so this next one is features so again this section is going to be something a little bit similar usually I see it as um it could be just a couple of icons it could be let's say six it could be also four on one line um similar structure usually icons instead of illustrations but you can pretty much choose what it is you want to make it very simple so
• 17:30 - 18:00 that people can really understand each one of these features has to link back to one of the benefits because remember the features are only interesting to people because they're the actual things that allow people to get the benefits and so again we are selling benefits we're selling outcomes these are really to show them how we're going to deliver those now the next section might be a how it works not every single product needs this um but if it needs explaining you might have to create a section for it basically this section I would create as just a simple section it might be
• 18:00 - 18:30 like 1 2 3 and it's like you sign up you connect your data and then um you know you basically that data is organized uh for you and you can check out your analytics I don't know this is basically just bring them through make it as simple as possible people don't really know what you do you need to make it as easy to understand as possible you can also um write underneath some subtext if you'd like uh again not every single product needs a description of how it works but I thought it was important to put there this comes underneath the
• 18:30 - 19:00 featur section afterwards let's talk about what we are going to have right after that well here we're actually going to have a section called CTA now CTA is the call to action again you have to determine which call to action you want to have you want to have a whole section with a button that's going to be your CTA a CTA is pretty much a button right uh there's going to be text uh large text here there's going to be a small description here of what people are clicking to get so it's uh join today it is uh sign up for the wait
• 19:00 - 19:30 list um honestly I would go mainly for something that's going to prove there's demand so basically um buy or uh download the app and then it when people click on it they actually go to the next screen which is going to be like you know what if we had a buy button it might say right now we haven't yet we don't have stock uh you know sign up to be the first to receive a notification once we do or if it's an app it's we are not we are about to launch this make sure sure to be the first to get notified when we launch and here's where
• 19:30 - 20:00 we're going to capture their emails and we're going to be able to get access to a first weit list of people who want to buy our product now the call to action should also be in the hero page underneath that little description that we talked about so basically headline description underneath you have a little button as well and you can have it in different parts of the smoke test but make sure to keep the same CTA each time now one thing I didn't mention here is that if you have any type of social proof those could be testimonials those could be uh you know people who have already committed to using this Partners
• 20:00 - 20:30 uh sponsors then you might want to use them also in this but a lot of people start off and they don't have that that's why I didn't bring it up now in the next two sections we're going to show you how to build a brand and to build a website like this one that we've just shown you without having any design or technical skills but yes your main goal with the smoke test is to get people to sign up also to fine-tune your offer and to understand which customers you're going after if it seems like they're actually interested in this product through their actions and yes it's way easier to adapt your offer on a landing page than it is to rebuild your
• 20:30 - 21:00 entire product now to test out this offer you can also test out some paid ads and literally learning how to structure your offer build out a landing page start testing the demand behind it is the difference between you just sitting back and doing nothing being an idea person and being an execution person who can take action every single time they have an idea now before building out our smoke test we need to come up with branding and content so the next section I'm going to teach you how to build a brand with no designers how to build your brand without designers this is probably one of the areas where
• 21:00 - 21:30 people sink and waste the most time in the process of building their startup they spend months finding the perfect name and buying endless domain name they spend dozens of weeks trying to perfect that logo they have in mind and usually spend thousands of dollars on trademarks hiring designers and this is exactly what I'm trying to save you from today now the harsh reality is that people aren't going to buy from you because you have a Pixel Perfect logo they're going to buy from you because you have a value prop position that solves the problem
• 21:30 - 22:00 they're trying to solve and that the solving of that problem is worth more to them than the actual price that they're paying for it so your ultimate goal with the brand is to do something that is good and then to move on and the great news in all this is that nothing is set in stone and final at we are no code we changed our logo three different times so instead of trying to make you a designer in this section I'm going to talk to you about a couple of tools that you can use to actually build the first version of the brand that you're trying to launch and then I'm going to give you some tips because I've seen so many people get this completely wrong let's
• 22:00 - 22:30 talk about what you need over here okay so let's talk about the elements that you're going to need to build out that first brand for the website first thing is going to be a logo now for the logo honestly my choice here would be to go to logo. a it's an AI tool that allows you to create logos and then you can basically pick one that you think is nice you can adapt it and you can pay a small amount of money to get access to the high resolution versions of it another tool I like using is Luca l Ka and this is another tool that will
• 22:30 - 23:00 generate not only the logo but then it can also use that logo and create all sorts of branding elements and last but not least Fiverr and if you're going the Fiverr route I would find a portfolio find an exact logo that I like and just get them to adapt that logo to your specific brand name it's going to be the easiest way to really get the outcome you're looking for quickly and to be clear the logo should not take more than one to 5 days to create logo check the second element you're going to need is a color palette what are the main colors you really only need one core color and
• 23:00 - 23:30 maybe one or two sub colors but we want to create a basic color palette color palette 1 L 2 L's 2 T's I don't know here I would simply use a website called coolers the other thing you could do is to go to a website that you like and simply use the two or three colors that you find pretty inside their design palette now each color usually has a hex code h e x this is basically a code very specific to that tone of that color and so you literally just want to have three different hex codes one being the main
• 23:30 - 24:00 color that you're going to be using Facebook that would be blue for example and then you're going to want to have the two sub colors that you might use so potentially if you're using a blue you might use like a yellow but you can go and check out websites that inspire you and that's all we really have to do for a color palette keep it as simple as possible this going to take a lot of time and if you're not a designer just choose one color that's it with white now copywriting now let's talk about the copy we need to write copy behind everything that we do now that the tools that I use for copywriting would be as
• 24:00 - 24:30 follows I would actually use Claude which is just a competitor to chat GPT it is completely free as well if you're using a tool like that you're going to want to give it a role for example you are a copywriter who writes landing pages for marketing material then a goal you're going to write the hero section for my onepage website then a specific set of instructions provide one headline and one subtype and of course you want to provide it with all the details of what your company does now the second tool that I really like to create copy is actually called reloom it's a
• 24:30 - 25:00 components library and with AI it'll create the entire buildout we'll talk about this when we build the actual website but what it does is it also copyrights so it'll create a first version of the copy for the hero section for you simply by telling it what your company is that's reloom and the final one if you want to get a bit nerdier is going to be copy. a but for many people that's honestly a little bit Overkill so again we just need to write a couple of sections here check now we're also going to need things like icons illustrations
• 25:00 - 25:30 which are basically drawings we're going to need pictures potentially if we want to use a lot of Photography within our website for this there are so many existing bases that you can use I use places like icon 8 when it comes to icons and illustrations as well for photography I would go with unsplash or pexels they have lots of free images that you can use for your website that are highly professional and if you want to get a bit nerdier with all this you can use AI obviously it will be a little bit more technical but I usually use things like mid Journey for visual elements and yes you'll find all the
• 25:30 - 26:00 tools I'm talking about below inside of the description of this video and those are pretty much all of the elements that you need to build a first version of your brand now probably the most important here is to avoid perfectionism you are going to find yourself fine-tuning fine tuning and fine tuning you have to realize that it doesn't really matter how perfectly you get all these elements specifically the copywriting once you go and test this out you're going to get a much better idea you're going to learn from the market and you're going to want to anyway adapt some of the things the
• 26:00 - 26:30 imagery the copyrighting and other elements as well and that can even include your logo to the reality of this phase is that nothing is final so don't be too too worried the main goal is not to get stuck in this phase now if you're not a designer and you have a terrible eye for these kind of things here are three key tips that have helped me number one if you don't know the color palette stick to white with one color Simplicity is always going to beat Overkill number two stick to only one style illustrations on a landing page or
• 26:30 - 27:00 website so once you figured out the style you want to implement put that if it's a 3D style awesome if it's literally stick figures awesome just stick to one because if not it's going to make it look a little in congruent and the same thing stands for icons as well consistency matters and probably the best tip here is to use existing templates of designs use style guides that already are out there so you don't have to figure this thing out or which color goes well with which other one you can simply use pre-create ated elements that are going to be beautiful just to
• 27:00 - 27:30 begin with now the whole goal of this branding module is literally so you can build that smoke test or website so let's talk about how we can do that with no code and AI okay so how do you build your website with no code and AI now for those of you who don't know what no code is it's a set of tools that allow you to drag and drop to build websites and apps as well without writing a single line of code and without understanding coding language there's code behind it but you don't have to touch it you can build beautiful things now there are two conflicting ideas when we're building a website one of which is that first
• 27:30 - 28:00 impressions matter so building something nice is important but also nothing is perfect and it will always evolve and this is a work in progress so don't get too too caught up with this and it only takes looking at the first version of airbnb's website to realize that yes you can build awesome companies even if your first website is not the best so in this section we're going to keep it very simple and instead of building out a huge website with lots of different sections we're going to really focus in on building that onepage website which is the smoke test and over time you can
• 28:00 - 28:30 build all sorts of things into it like a booking system or potentially a Blog but let's keep it simple for now now remember that at this point people don't care about you they care about themselves so getting the offer right and what that offer can actually do for them is the most important thing and I know we've already talked about this but if you haven't checked it out check out the beginning of this video where we jump into the structure but if you missed it check out the section about how to test out any startup idea now for this process I'll usually use some AI tools and then perfect everything in no code tools so I'll kick it off inside of reloom inside of reloom you can pretty
• 28:30 - 29:00 much put your on line description it's going to actually create for you a full sit map which are basically the different pages again we're just doing one page for this example and then once you click on wireframe it builds it out into individual sections so as you can see from this example right here you can see every single section being populated and with this tool you can recreate this sections that you had now the most important thing here is that you are creating the structure and how it looks you can adapt that and then we're actually going to want to build it out
• 29:00 - 29:30 so if you were using reloom we can either choose to then push that reloom wireframe inside of web flow which is a website builder now this is for slightly more technical people because web flow does require a couple months to become very good at if you want to keep it simple you can definitely do it this way as well the second tool I would recommend would be card with two RS it is very cheap to build out your website and once you've created that wireframe you have a good idea of the structure of your website you want to build that structure and actual code which is why we're going towards these no code tools
• 29:30 - 30:00 card is awesome and it's very flexible it's very easy to learn as well and now if you already know that you're going to build a web app behind this product then you can start off with software if you'd like because software will allow you to build the landing page but then also you can use those learnings to be able to then build out a web app as well those are my recommendations but honestly there are thousands of website Builders and at this point even email marketing tools allow you to build basic landing pages and so the most important is for you to build out the actual structure that we've talked about earlier and then
• 30:00 - 30:30 to input all of the elements that you have inside The Branding and content section that pretty much means the copyrighting that you might have from reloom or from one of the other tools that we talked about then you're going to want to input the icons illustrations if you have photography you're going to want to fine-tune that uh call to action button and when it comes to building out a website there are three tips that really helped me along the way and I want to share these with you right now the first tip I would recommend is to highly customize this Tut Target your ideal customer profile or the person you
• 30:30 - 31:00 think you're going after don't make your copyrighting general make it incredibly specific for that person have this thing feel like you're talking directly to them and not to kind of this broad audience it's like this is for yoga teachers in San Francisco who have this problem and you're they feel understood and this is something that's going to connect with them a lot more than really Broad and general text and with that you want to make sure that you don't have jargon that everything's written very simply so very easy to understand if
• 31:00 - 31:30 there is specific jargon that has to do with that ideal customer profile that you're targeting then it's okay to use words like that for example in the startup world people kind of generally know what an MVP is so if you were targeting people who are startup Founders you might call something an MVP the second big tip I have for you is to learn how to build it out yourself because you're going to have to change this website so many times as you change the offer as you learn more about who your customer is what the benefits are that they're looking for having the knowledge to actually change it yourself will give you a lot of flexibility and
• 31:30 - 32:00 control early on number three is do not strive for Perfection you will never reach it it is okay for you to build something 80% of where you want it and then to launch it and fourth probably the most important point is to start adapting your website or landing page to the customer and to the needs that they actually have so the quicker you can fine-tune this the better it is going to be at selling your product and your offer and just to be clear building your first website should definitely not take more than 2 to 7 days if it takes you longer than that you are probably stuck
• 32:00 - 32:30 in analysis paralysis or perfectionism and this is why in this next section I want to talk about the entrepreneurship mindset how important it is for you to adopt this mindset if you want to be successful as a startup founder now probably one of the biggest differences that you're going to go through when you go from a 9 to-5 job to becoming a full-time entrepreneur is in your mindset and I used to think the mindset was super fluffy but as I've trained more and more Founders I realized how essential it is to get this part right so that you can really set yourself up
• 32:30 - 33:00 to win in the long term so I want to teach you how to build a solid mindset because early stage building a startup when you're going literally from I have an idea or no idea to First paying customers it is completely different than having a 95 it's completely different than joining a startup in the early stages and helping them grow and this stands for low-level employees but also for very high level Executives you see when you're an executive at a high level you have access to all these different teams and you you are basically a manager right if you have an
• 33:00 - 33:30 issue or you need something from design you can just call up a designer if you need some help from marketing call up marketing you have all these resources and Specialists that you have access to and when you are building a startup it's often times just you and potentially one co-founder who are trying to do everything themselves with a very limited budget and usually not a huge amount of time either so understanding how to operate in these two very different scenarios can be a change the first big change has to do with going from being a specialist to having to learn the basics of several different
• 33:30 - 34:00 skills to be able to get things off the ground and then to be able to replace yourself in those areas once you have more time and resources and so in those circumstances learning how to become a beginner again and to accept that in entrepreneurship you are a beginner and you have to learn all of these different things this is actually going to allow you to very quickly adopt this new mindset adopt this new operating system so that you can be more successful and so it's completely okay that you don't know a bunch of things but all you have
• 34:00 - 34:30 to do is add yet to the end of that sentence and basically you start adopting this growth mentality that by the way is pulled from a book called mindset from Carl DWI and yes believing that you can grow no matter where you are in your journey is so so important so that you can adopt that beginner mindset learn the skills you need and then be able to launch startups from scratch now I'm a big believer that entrepreneurship is a learned skill sure some people are more extroverted and they might be better at going out there in doing sales some people might be better at Building Products than others
• 34:30 - 35:00 and some people have a higher tolerance for risk than others but having trained more than 600 Founders I can tell you that it's more of a skill and it's a skill that you can learn through action and this leads us to a very important next point is that in entrepreneurship especially at these very early stages you need to take action over Perfection so although in your day job you might be so used to creating things to Perfection the best of your ability this is actually something that's going to slow you down because of the simple parto principle right 20% of your effort is going to get 80%
• 35:00 - 35:30 of the outcome so that last 20% from going to good to perfect is not worth your time in early stage entrepreneurship and that's because you're running a bunch of tests and things are constantly changing and a lot of the work you're doing might have to be redone completely so it's important is to take action do tasks at 80% of your ability and then move on to the next task because they're going to be many tasks that you have to do and you have no time to get lost in Endless perfectionism now one of the core reasons why this all happens is because for some reason in entrepreneurship we
• 35:30 - 36:00 take what we do as who we are so if you create a task that is not perfect that means that you are not perfect if a product you launch is not amazing then it means that you are not amazing and if we detach our production from our identity it suddenly gives us what we really need in entrepreneurship which is a mentality of the scientist we're just building things to test them out see if they work out if they they do perfect we can invest more time in perfecting them
• 36:00 - 36:30 over time but usually there's going to be a much more pressing task to go after next so you are not your startup and it's okay to deliver work at 80% of your capability I'm telling you that now you need to adopt this now another big problem that early stage entrepreneurs have is that they are constantly lost in analysis paralysis constantly doing research constantly overthinking things doing research planning and not actually executing towards their goal and that's usually because they fall in love and engage in their Vision their dream this
• 36:30 - 37:00 large company this amazing platform that they're going to build that's going to change the world instead of focusing in on that one tiny task that they can do today that's going to allow you to progress towards that end goal and that's a huge mental shift because we're always asked what is your Grand Vision what is this amazing business that you're going to build and all you really need to figure out at the moment is kind of have an idea of the direction that you're going and then take the steps that will shine light onto the next
• 37:00 - 37:30 steps meaning that right now you don't know what you're going to have to do in 3 months because you don't know the results of the experiments you're going to do between now and then and I love this quote that I heard which is it's easy to hide behind large visions and dreams it is very difficult to hide behind small individual tasks so spend more time figuring out the small tasks you can do instead of always obsessing over this Grand Vision and the strategy and the plan okay now let's talk about marshmallows yes this has to do with mindset you see there was a study that
• 37:30 - 38:00 was done where they took a bunch of kids and they put one marshmallow in front of them and they said if you can wait 30 minutes without eating this marshmallow then we will give you a second marshmallow and then they tracked how successful these people were in their life now interestingly enough the group of kids that waited the 30 minutes to get the second marshmallow actually also ended up being much more successful in life and that's because they learned how to delay gratification and this is maybe the most important piece of advice for mindset within entrepreneurship it's that the actions that you're taking
• 38:00 - 38:30 today you don't always see the result of them immediately so engaging in immediate action and expecting the results of your actions to be shown in the future AKA delaying gratification is what's going to make you win over time so be incredibly impatient in action but also be very patient in results Great businesses usually take about 2 years to build 3 years to build and they're actually sold after like 7 to 10 years so be the entrepreneur that plays the long game because it is in the long game
• 38:30 - 39:00 that you can win really big learn the process acquire the skills and you're setting yourself up to have so many shots on go that it's almost impossible that you not succeed in entrepreneurship however if you expect immediate results you will be disappointed and unfortunately this is probably not made for you now one of the most amazing quotes I want to leave you with right now is as follows the magic you are looking for is in the work you are avoiding now this is so important for entrepreneurship because often times we have to do things that we don't want to
• 39:00 - 39:30 do the obstacle is the path and often times we don't want to do things that are uncomfortable but this is literally what we have to do so if we are more of a builder a programmer we're going to have to learn how to do some sales to talk to customers if we're more of a salesperson we will have to learn how to do some of the building especially early stage or at least to be able to manage our own stack and adapt it to product Market fit so whether you're at the beginning of your journey or deep in the entrepreneurship trenches remember that the magic you are looking for is in the
• 39:30 - 40:00 work you're avoiding and with that let's jump into the next section okay so let's talk about how to build your first app or MVP with no code tools now every time I speak to entrepreneurs they often times have a mountain of different features that they're trying to fit into the first version of the app they released and this usually makes them build products that look a little bit like this one but it's so so important to know that the first product you launch the product that can get you to millions of dollars in Revenue usually looks something like this so stop
• 40:00 - 40:30 building out a million features and focus on delivering value to your customer customers pay for the value your product delivers not the product itself in fact customers don't care about your blockchain technology your AI your machine learning they really care about the outcome that this can provide for them and so the number one goal is to build the smallest product which delivers the most amount of value or outcome to your customer now because we know that your first app is not going to be your last and that it's a work in
• 40:30 - 41:00 progress and that we also know we're going to have to adapt it to the market realities we need to launch this product yesterday and in the wise words of Paul Graham who's the founder of Y combinator if you don't feel uncomfortable about the first product you launch you are launching too late so let's talk about the right and the wrong way of building an MVP okay so if we're trying to solve the transportation problem here is the wrong way of building your MVP why is that the case well cuz as you can see the first iteration is two wheels it doesn't actually get you from one place to the other quicker the half of a car
• 41:00 - 41:30 doesn't either and you literally have to spend a bunch of money to build the car so only the last iteration of this product solves the problem and people are willing to pay for however this over here is the correct way to build a startup because as you can see building a skateboard is going to be a very first version that solves the problem it's quicker than walking a bicycle is going to be quicker than the product before it and then we build a car afterwards now we can charge more and more over time for improving the product and for
• 41:30 - 42:00 delivering the better and better outcome right but each one of these products allow you to generate money and it solves the actual problem and this is the approach that you want to take when you're building your MVP so let's talk about the steps we have to do to build this MVP there are actually three key questions that we have before we even start building number one is what is the outcome that the customer wants so for example if our product is Airbnb the outcome is a rented house if the product
• 42:00 - 42:30 is an analytics platform then the outcome is a report and insight and if the product is a dating app going on a date is the outcome that people are paying for they don't care if it's an app the thing they care the most about is the ultimate outcome and figuring out how to deliver that outcome with the fewest features to build is your job so number two is figuring out the minimum number of features that you need to be able to build out that mvp or deliver the
• 42:30 - 43:00 outcome right and part of it could be a software product another part of it could also be done manually at first there was a great startup that delivered ma services at your home and all you did you logged in and you basically sent through a request and the founders would actually just then text one of their made services and see if they were available send them to destination send a confirmation by text to the customer and it was a smart way to build a minimal front end and then have a back end that was manually managed managed and then of course they built out that back end to be able to manage way more
• 43:00 - 43:30 people booking this is really the kind of thing that we're looking for early on cuz remember outcome equals money and this is the ultimate validator of your startup and step three is which tools do we have to choose right to be able to build out the features that deliver the outcome now for this we're going to be talking about a couple of tools here I'm going to bring you through the process and don't worry none of these tools require you to be a technical person or have programming skills to be able to to build they're all again going to be built with these Drag and Drop app
• 43:30 - 44:00 Builders called No code tools now once you figure these things out the first step is going to be to have a wireframe built or basically a flowchart the wireframe are all of the different screens that you think this app or this product is going to need and the flowchart is how they connect to each other you can literally build these out on a napkin right now or a piece of paper with a pen that just organizes your ideas and the way that you see this working out there are also a couple of AI tools that are very valuable and will save you probably a lot of time I use a tool called
• 44:00 - 44:30 galileo.com and there's also another tool called uard or wizard that allows you to do a similar thing on the design front now if you don't know how a flowchart works or how to create a wireframe then you can literally do two things you can ask chat GPT to actually draw one out for you you can also go and Google it and just find an example of an existing flowchart and then just adapt it to what your app does and because with no code tools you can build these things out relatively
• 44:30 - 45:00 quickly what's important in this preparation phase is to really get everything down on paper and mapped out so you can have better preparation for when it comes to building it out now I've helped more than 600 people build out their apps with no code and Ai and this is why I'm just going to give you some of the tool sets that I think will be a good fit for you now if possible and if you don't have a lot of experience building out apps then I highly recommend that you build a first version of your MVP leveraging softare as a front end or building all the design side and then air table which
• 45:00 - 45:30 stores all of the data or in other words your database and the reason why I recommend this stack is because it is easier to learn and it can also build out deeper functionalities than just a website now if you're a total beginner but you're looking to build something that's a little bit more of like a mobile app then I would highly recommend you check out Glide um it doesn't actually go into the IOS and Android store but it has a really good web experience and it's a very easy tool to learn now if your app absolutely requires for you to have deeper functionalities do all sorts of API
• 45:30 - 46:00 calls and has more complicated um workflows then you probably want to consider one of two tools the first one is bubble uh and the second one is flutter flow now heads up here these platforms usually take about 3 to 6 months to get good at before you can build a solid version of your first app but with that learning curve will come more flexibility and power so now let me give you some tips that are going to Fast Track your journey number one build a simple software product and then do some of the things that are more
• 46:00 - 46:30 complicated manually at first just for the couple first customers so you can get a much better idea of how that thing actually has to be built out and if something doesn't work you can easily adapt it instead of unbuilding everything that you've created your goal is to get as quickly as possible to revenue because that's what tells you that you're really on the right path number two expect to be wrong with the first product that you build why because most people are so in love with their ideas that they can't and don't have the ability to actually shift and pivot
• 46:30 - 47:00 towards the Market's demand instead learn how to build that first product yourself so that you have full control you're never going to be a slave to programmers bills over and over and over and you can control and find product Market fit over time this is where learning no code tools and startup methodology is so powerful it makes you a self-reliant entrepreneur and It ultimately allows you to have more shots on goal now the final thing is that Founders put way too much emphasis on the launch of their product they think Leonardo DiCaprio is going to show up
• 47:00 - 47:30 and everyone's going to be cheering champagne glasses and everyone's going to come and be so excited about their product guess what I hate to break it to you but no one cares in fact Airbnb launched like four times before they were successful so what's more important is for you to get the product in front of the first couple of customers get feedback and improve it for the next couple customers and that is how you should launch your MVP but a product is nothing without a business model which is why in this next section we're going to be talking about how to select the right one for your business okay so
• 47:30 - 48:00 let's talk about how to pick the right business model for your startup now you'll be surprised to know that there are actually only 14 proven business models in the digital world so all you really have to do is listen to this section till the end and select one which you think has the highest likelihood of being the one for you then we're going to go out there and test it and move on if we're right we're going to double down if we're not we're going to select a different one and I say that because you should only have one one business model to launch your startup sure when you've generated millions of
• 48:00 - 48:30 dollars you can have more than one and actually at scale it's proven that there are usually about two but your ability to make money with one is the most important thing for you in these early stages so let me break down each for you right now and give you a short example the first one is services or fee for service so this one is very simple a consulting firm for example they provide you with services and you pay for those Services you're either charged on a per project basis which is usually the case or sometimes it's hourly number two
• 48:30 - 49:00 Commerce selling physical or digital products right you buy them for a certain price you sell them for a certain price you make your money in between relatively simple let's move on to the next the third one is what many software businesses use which is a subscription you pay a monthly fee to get access to a service this could be something like Netflix or it could be something like your CRM and one of the great things about this is that you get recurring Revenue so it's a obviously a very popular model number four is something that is so popular now that AI has become the next big thing and it is
• 49:00 - 49:30 metered services so you basically pay per usage right you have a certain number of tokens and that's what you get access to and if you want more you got to pay more but this is the same thing as buying servers from AWS for example it's basically you pay for the amount that you use and yes you charge people more than what it costs you to run number five productized services this is basically when you take what usually is a manual service based business and you create products that are able to deliver
• 49:30 - 50:00 the value of those same services online Moz is a great example of this business model and in fact when building with no code so many of our students are trying to do that right they have skills and now they want to charge people for those skills and build it into a product it's basically taking knoow and services based businesses turning them into products that are more scalable number six is a transaction fee so exactly in the same way that Airbnb does it right you charge someone you basically help a transaction take place and then you just take a cut of that transaction so it
• 50:00 - 50:30 could also be like Kickstarter right take a 5 to 15% Fee number seven lead generation but basically here is where you acquire leads and you sell them to other providers so basically like creditcards.com you can either charge per lead or you can also charge for any lead that was closed number eight is games so it's basically either ingame purchases or actually purchasing the game itself a good example of this is fortnite for example the very popular
• 50:30 - 51:00 video game then there's marketplaces which for me is the same as transaction fees right you connect a buyer and a seller and you take a commission so think of like eBay for example number 10 is ADS so just like Google you basically sell ad placement for companies to Market their products 11 is called New Media and it's basically having a viral effect so this for me is not really a business model but it's like it definitely if you have lots of people and there's huge growth like WhatsApp then obviously you have some power because you have a lot of users number 12 is combinations so you might have a
• 51:00 - 51:30 subscription fee and then you also have Services I would call this kind having two business models but hey who am I number 13 is Big Data basically selling people's information online number 14 is licensing like Microsoft sells its licenses which is basically the right to use their intellectual property and at this point if it's not so clear which one is a good fit for you you should actually just go to chat GPT and ask it describe your company and tell it to give you the right business model for what you are trying to accomplish so the
• 51:30 - 52:00 main advice here is don't be creative use one of these and just implement it in your business and please please please only have one business model to start okay now in this next section we're going to be talking about how to sell so in this section let's talk about how to sell selling is probably the single most important skill that every single entrepreneur should learn and no matter what business you are starting you need to learn it to have control of your company but I know a lot of you might think hey I'm not really a sales guy because you have that idea of the
• 52:00 - 52:30 used car salesman guy but in this section I'm going to teach you why you don't have to become an aggressive salesperson to be able to close great business you see putting the right offer in front of the right person at the right time is ultimately what closes deals and suddenly you don't have to push your product onto people people sell themselves into your product but you need to understand a lot of the different mechanisms that go in the buyer journey to be able to sell effectively and going through the experience of selling yourself early on
• 52:30 - 53:00 will literally teach you how to build every single part of your business because guess what all the objections that you're getting while you're selling are going to be things that you have to include in your marketing material on your website all the outcomes and the benefits people are looking for again you're going to discover through the sales process and you're going to focus on those talking points when you go out and try to sell but because a lot of people don't like this topic I'm going to start off with some difficult stuff let's say that you have to do actual sales in-person sales well let me break down this very simple framework it's
• 53:00 - 53:30 actually Alex Heros if you know him it's the closer framework and you're going to see it's actually not that difficult and you can do it even if you are an introvert and even if you're not a fan of Alex this is useful information to have now this is actually a question based framework which basically means that you're asking a bunch of questions and you're not necessarily going hard on the pitching side of things so the C stands for clarify so you can ask your prospect questions like what brought you to this call today what is your goal they're basically going to explain to you what their problem is the L over here stands for label so as soon as you
• 53:30 - 54:00 know the problem you want to really label the problem so labeling you basically repeat what the person says so I understand that your problem seems to be this x right or uh it sounds like your goal is this correct now once they say yes you know that is the pain now before we actually present a solution and try to solve their problem we need to understand the pain itself right so o is overview of past pains so questions like what have you tried so far how long long have you been doing that for is that working out for you things like that basically it brings them back into
• 54:00 - 54:30 a little bit the pain that they're currently feeling and it sets you up really well to go in and start selling your solution so here we basically want to just focus on the three benefits so the three outcomes that people are actually looking for in using your product and kind of explaining why this will be able to solve the past pains that they've had then e is explain the concerns away these are basically all around objections right when you try to sell something people have all these objections around the product that you're trying to sell and this is where
• 54:30 - 55:00 you address all of these objections so usually it's it's too expensive I need to consult someone else what you want to do here is reframe the way that they're thinking about that specific concern and then once you've actually closed it comes to the r down here which is to reinforce their decision so now they've bought and you want to reinforce the decision that they've made so they can feel good about their decision so for example when people join our program I will actually send each person an individual video personalized to what they're trying to accomplish to help
• 55:00 - 55:30 them be able to drive the outcome that they're looking for a handwritten note is something that you could do you could send them a box with swag inside of it there's lots of options that you can use but with selling the most important thing is the Insight that you get from selling which are things that are going to allow you to build an amazing business right because ultimately you're understanding the problems the solutions that people are looking for and hopefully you're building a product that actually solves this problem too and and by the way don't expect to be the best at this at first go out there and start selling and then you basically fine-tune
• 55:30 - 56:00 from there again action over Perfection you can perfect these things over time and one thing that's really stuck with me is that people make purchasing decisions emotionally but then they justify them logically so make sure that the way that you sell your product is based on the outcomes because that's going to get a person in a good emotional state to be looking for that solution and then you're going to be able to close the deal by addressing logically all the concerns that these individuals have and both of those together can be very powerful but now
• 56:00 - 56:30 that you know the basics about selling how do you actually get those first paying customers right well we're going to talk about that in the next section getting your first paying customers is something that is completely different than building scalable marketing strategies which we're going to be talking about in the next section but everything that you'll be implementing in building scalable strategies are things that you are learning in this first step and one of the best quotes here is that early on in startups you are doing things that are are not scalable because it provides you with the Insight that you need to be able to
• 56:30 - 57:00 build out scalable processes now in startups when we talk about sales we really talk about first 100 customers how do you find them but then also how do you actually sell to them and if right now you're thinking well I don't know how to reach my customers then it doesn't even matter if you build this whole business out if you're not able to reach them you're going to be in the same situation once you've built out this entire product anyway why because people will not just come flooding towards your product you will have to actively go out and find to those first customers and usually it's a very manual process but again it's going to allow
• 57:00 - 57:30 you to create amazing scalable systems later now the first customers that you will ever get will most likely come from the same group of people that you talk to during the customer Discovery Journey you see when you were doing customer interviews you were having a conversation where you asking people about their problems but guess what you were also doing you were building a relationship with these people and potentially at the end of that interview you talked a little bit about what you were trying to solve with your startup so basically these people are going to be the first people that you go back to
• 57:30 - 58:00 once you have a solution to the problem that they've expressed that they have and that's why customer interviews usually builds a relationship it becomes customer development and these people will probably be the first people to test it out and to help you shape the product as well and then they will most likely also be your first sales and this is really the goal of customer Discovery it's lining up people as well who are going to be your first paying customers and if you're remember back to when we talked about the smoke test well you've built out a list of potential future
• 58:00 - 58:30 customers and now is the great time to be able to put that list to actual good use so at this point you can basically send an email to all of your early adopters and you can have a early bird special for these people so you could run a campaign saying hey for the next 2 weeks this is going to be 50% off after that the prices will be regular but thanks so much for being the first people to Believe in Us and you get this discount and then also make sure to close the deal after that time and
• 58:30 - 59:00 remember that this is only the very first step because once you deliver the product then you're going to generate some revenue and you're going to start iterating on top of that so at this point you want to shift your attention from actually improving your product and services for the customers who are paying instead of just people who say oh this is interesting now of course you're not just going to depend on the people that you have lined up already we're going to continually do Outreach at this point and this is where I use the same strategy as we used in the Outreach for the customer Discovery I would do direct
• 59:00 - 59:30 messages and adding people on LinkedIn who fit the customer profile I would send them highly personalized messages there are actually tools that can do that with AI you'll be able to find them below I would go back to those groups I would find in-person meetups or conferences where these people hang out to be able to go out there and start promoting my product you could also choose to release on product hunt or I think it's called beta list and basically promote your product to existing customers on those platforms who are looking for cool new products and I want to double down that inperson is actually the cheat code these days if
• 59:30 - 60:00 you're just willing to go where these people hang out and meet them in person and have conversations with them then you actually get direct access to that customer base now when you go out there and start selling to these first couple customers there are two main things that you want to do to improve this process number one is to classify the kind of customer that this is right so you have all these buckets hopefully you've selected your ICP but sometimes the people you're selling to are outside of this ICP we need to make sure that we are targeting the right person with the right message meaning that you should have a conversation with each one of
• 60:00 - 60:30 these individuals and you should understand if they are actually the Target customer who you believe to be the one you should be going after the second piece of advice is to go after a couple channels at first try a couple different things the first thing that you try will probably not work you can pretty much count on it so have a couple different strategies on how you expect to get your first paying customers then once you start selling you want to basically AB test you want to fine-tune the message that you're putting out there potentially the main message is what is that outcome or promise that you're
• 60:30 - 61:00 delivering um also what are the key three benefits that you're promoting you might find through selling to the first three to five people that people are super excited about one right in that case you might want to start with that one when it comes to the Outreach and response rate you want to AB test your subject lines and the messages that you send out make them highly personalized don't make yourself seem like one of those LinkedIn people who's just like hey how's it going buy from me no one wants that and also remember that you are after feedback almost more than you are after Revenue at this point because
• 61:00 - 61:30 that feedback is going to allow you to fine-tune this to generate a lot more Revenue down the line and create scalable marketing strategies so that's what we're going to be talking about in the next section in this section we're going to be talking about how to create a scalable marketing strategy now I can tell you from experience that most entrepreneurs think they are at a growth or a scalable growth phase when in fact they haven't figured out the fundamentals behind it and often times that leads to people spending $5 ,000 towards marketing agencies who guess what they won't be able to actually help
• 61:30 - 62:00 you unless you figured out those fundamentals and unless you have product Market fit you're going to have so much Market friction in marketing your product that frankly it's going to cost you two to three times the price to acquire Just One customer and there are five main questions that you have to be able to answer before you are ready for scalable growth strategies because you see this phase is really about going from product Market fit to product Channel fit which means that we are now figuring out what channels of distribution are going to be the best to invest our time in selling our product
• 62:00 - 62:30 so the first thing you need to figure it out is who is the customer and what is their problem if you haven't figured this out I wouldn't try the scale in other words who is your ideal customer profile that we've discussed earlier inside this video the second is that you have a product that delivers the outcome that you promise inside your pitch or at least partially if you don't have this you shouldn't scale number three you have gone through the manual selling process and you know exactly how to structure your offer meaning you know the desired outcome you understand the
• 62:30 - 63:00 benefits and you have tested those and you also know how to handle objections so the third one is your offer you have to have that solid before you jump into scalable marketing strategies and I put it in bold because it's super super important if you don't know what to talk about in the pitch then you won't know what to have on marketing copy you won't know what to have on a landing page that you send people towards and even if you get in front of the right people remember that if you don't have the offer down you won't convert those into to paying customers cuz you a lot of times in scalable marketing strategies
• 63:00 - 63:30 will not be in the room to pitch your product number four is the decision making process if you don't understand the process from someone discovering your product to buying it then you will not understand your sales cycle and if for example from the first time someone discovers you to the point at which they buy it takes 6 months well you can very easily go broke investing a lot of money in scalable marketing strategies number five over here is to have a proven business model so a business model that
• 63:30 - 64:00 you have tested you're already generating revenue from because now we're going to be able to make a calculation the cost of acquiring a customer versus the amount that we can make from a customer and that's usually calculated in the following way what is the cost of acquisition so this is called CAC cost of acquisition and then is that higher than the lifetime value which is the amount that you can make make uh from One customer over a given number of years which is usually 5 years
• 64:00 - 64:30 if you can't make a profit between both of these then you are running a money hole my friend and you are not ready to scale okay so now let's say that you do have the answer to all of the questions I've just put on the board well then we're ready for scalable growth now what does that mean and how do you reach that the idea here is to create a predictable process to convert someone from a lead to a paying customer and early on in the process you probably want to focus on a couple of different revenue streams why because some revenue streams have quicker return on investment and others
• 64:30 - 65:00 take longer to implement so they take longer to actually work and in the early days of your startup you actually don't have that much time you have to generate Revenue pretty quickly so for example direct sales well it gets you direct sales so it's very quick return on investment whereas something like SEO marketing for example might be something that takes 3 to 6 months to actually start bringing in leads so understanding that sometimes you just need very quick return on investment marketing strategies and then once we have these revenue streams we can start investing
• 65:00 - 65:30 in longer term return on investment strategies like content marketing SEO strategy and things of that nature now an investor called Andrew Chen talks about this concept that early on you want to focus on smaller very specific audiences meaning that your offer is super super relevant but that there aren't that many people to Target in that specific smaller area why well because larger businesses are actually not usually focused on these smaller opportunities and this is often something that early stage entrepreneurs
• 65:30 - 66:00 could take advantage of so you could invest your time into newsletters that are really specifically catered to your needs so he recommends going after these smaller opportunities so for example event marketing is one of them another one you could use is Niche influencer marketing you could also invest and start sponsoring certain newsletters that are very specific to the niche that you're in and so you're going after a smaller number of Highly targeted people and when we talk about scalability it is basically in the ability to predict hey if I invest x amount sponsoring this newsletter and this newsletter has this
• 66:00 - 66:30 click-through rate and these specific people usually convert at x amount and I can make x amount of money from them now we know how much each customer is worth to you meaning that we know how much we can invest on the front end in marketing and once we find marketing strategies that allow us to pull a profit from the difference between the cost of acquisition and the amount we can make from that customer now we can start investing $1 because we know that two is coming out of the other end so my advice
• 66:30 - 67:00 to you today is that stick to quick return on investment opportunities early on and then over time you can start investing in those long-term opportunities the other thing is that you want to test a couple out early on so some that I would recommend would be direct sales I would test out uh event marketing I would test out paid ads and creating a basic funnel for paid ads see if we can turn a profit on that funnel and then n sponsorship so it could be you know newsletter sponsorship it could be uh influencer sponsorship and once you find one of these channels that work
• 67:00 - 67:30 you really want to double down on it if you can turn a profit from this we can now scale that up so if it's events then you can start showing up in more more events if it's paid ads you can start putting more money dedicated towards investing in paid ads and then make sure to create a system around this distribution Channel and I would always advise for you to slowly test other channels as well cuz sometimes you will find a channel out of the blue that it performs a lot better than the one that you started with and once we find that
• 67:30 - 68:00 we want to invest as much of our time and energy in that distribution Channel because your goal yes it's to find the cheapest customers that you can close the quickest and because this is directly connected we're going to be talking about how to use no code automation to be able to scale your operations okay so now we're going to talk about how to use no code automations to scale your business okay so once you figured out the fundamentals of your business it's now time to create processes to scale those and use automations to automate things why well
• 68:00 - 68:30 because there are so many repetitive tasks that you might be doing over and over and over and for you to be able to avoid those tasks you can create automations now what's an automation well it follows the basic theory of if this then that let me explain okay so the basic theory of if this then that is basically provoked by these two things if this takes place then that will take place right so to really start this whole process off we have triggers and
• 68:30 - 69:00 these triggers what they do is well they trigger a specific action so for example if someone fills out this form I want it to send action this information to my email marketing tool if someone Books A Time on my calendar I want it to send an email automatically to that person with information I want them to review before that if a new lead comes in I want it to update my CRM if a payment for your new product comes in I want it to tr trigger people into the onboarding flow and there are thousands of examples of this that already work within existing apps
• 69:00 - 69:30 that you currently use now to create these actual automations there are really two key platforms that I recommend here the first one is called make so that is make.com and the other one is called zapier These are both similar Platforms in terms of what they actually do and I actually use both in my business to automate different things and both of these allow you to create the triggers and then have action take place when those triggers are triggered and yes they have Integrations to more than
• 69:30 - 70:00 6,000 different apps so basically any app that you currently use it could be Gmail it could be HubSpot it could be stripe as a payment processor it could be your email marketing tool all of the tools that you currently use can probably use a huge amount of automation now there are actually three things that I would Implement if I were you leveraging these automation tools the first one would be a sales pipeline right so basically a sales system similar to pipe Drive which would go from a lead all the way to a closed
• 70:00 - 70:30 customer and then I would create a lot of automations behind it so for example um you could have a situation where someone is jumping on calls in Zoom you could record that actual transcript of the zoom call then you could actually have tap into chat GPT with an Automation and you could have it write a personalized message following up and you could send it through Gmail automatically Al as well all through automation the second thing I would do is marketing automation right so
• 70:30 - 71:00 marketing automation would basically mean when a new lead comes in it would either go to the sales team or we would nurture it in an email marketing sequence I would have all of the data live inside of air table and then I would just create different bases for each different management tool that I'm trying to replace the benefits in this is just really having something that's absolutely curated to your needs and the awesome thing is that with automations you can also tap into AI so you could have a trigger that says once something happens I want you to go and ask Chad
• 71:00 - 71:30 GPT to do X Y or Z so really the possibilities here are endless But ultimately no code Ai and automation can create incredibly scalable systems that allow you to repeat the same things without putting in all the hard work and the biggest implication here is that you can have one person in your team do the same as three people so if you have one salesperson and you create a system personalized to your sales process then you can have that person deal with two to three times the number of leads but remember processes are created for
• 71:30 - 72:00 people so make sure that that process is first of all tested and then adapt your system around the people who are using them this is the reason why creating a customized system to your team is so important okay so in this next section we're going to talk about how to accelerate your business leveraging AI so as you've probably seen over the past 6 to 12 months we've seen an explosion of AI tools that were kind of set off by the launch of of chat GPT now at this point one big thing I'm realizing is that so many people end up in deep deep
• 72:00 - 72:30 rabbit holes playing around with thousands of tools and when it's all said and done they literally have not used it to progress in their goal that's right they're just stuck in shiny object syndrome and an analysis paralysis because there are so many tools to choose from so for this section I want to do something a little different I'm going to be talking about the different tools that I like to use and I recommend for the different stages of building a startup and also I'm going to be breaking down some of the common pitfalls that you need to avoid so that you can use some of these tools in your favor a lot of the tools that you know
• 72:30 - 73:00 require prompting and understanding prompting correctly means the difference between something that is very well trained and doing things exactly the way you want them and something completely faltering so let's talk about the three important things when you are prompting so prompting tools are like chat GPT clog 2 uh and often times when you're creating custom gpts or if you're creating custom models that you want to act in a certain way we need to prompt them right so let's talk about the three most important steps for prompting cuz this is going to help you in general now
• 73:00 - 73:30 the first thing we want to do when we prompt so let's say we're using chat GPT is to give it a roll now here we're going to use prompts like act like a and you might say SEO copywriter giving your AI a role is super important and I usually get very specific about this so I might say something like you are a sales manager with 20 years experience structuring teams writing scripts specific speically for B2B sales and I can even tell it it's trained on a specific type of sales system so for example I could say spin selling which
• 73:30 - 74:00 is a methodology so the second thing we have to do is give it a goal so here you want to be quite specific you are going to write a first version of a sales script for a company that does XYZ and uh you're essentially going to usually be feeding it a certain amount of information as well so if you say here are some past call recordings um and you're going to be training it on those past call recordings so that it can optimize that script then that's going to be super valuable But ultimately you want to give it that goal and be specific and then the third thing you want to do is to provide it with very
• 74:00 - 74:30 specific set of instructions the more specific the better so as you know with chat GPT for example you could upload all the transcripts directly you could upload images like PDFs that have training documentation that you already have in your company you could upload some information about the company itself or you could simply provide a short text about that the more data that you're going to feed it and more specific you are in all three of these the role the goal and the instructions well the better the outcome and then
• 74:30 - 75:00 guess what you're anyways going to need to test the outcome and to fine-tune your instructions throughout this entire process so if you're just using a simple tool like chat GPT make sure to be better at prompting the better you get a prompting the better outputs you're going to get and ultimately you're going to be able to now use Chad gbt for much better things and so for example if I were to ask for it to write an email for me I might say you are an email copywriter with 10 years of experi experience writing emails for marketing purposes your goal is to write a uh
• 75:00 - 75:30 three email sequence that I'm going to be sending to my customers to be able to nurture them you can even provide more context and say after those three emails I will be sending through an offer and then Specific Instructions I would like you to build these three emails around three main objections that we're getting from these customers and then you could ask for it to copy your tone and say that it should reference the examples of previous emails you've written to be able to copy that tone and then you're going to have a first version to work from and this is important because it's
• 75:30 - 76:00 going to give you a result that's closer to what you need and then again use it as an assistant you'll be able to fine-tune that email you're going to saved a bunch of time and you can put your final touches on it and then you can launch it and that brings us to a very important point is that AI right now is an amazing assistant don't expect for it to be perfect so if you use it as an assistant you're going to be happily surprised if you try to replace employees then you're probably going to be a little disappointed so now let's talk about a couple tools that you can use in the different phases of launching your s business the first one is
• 76:00 - 76:30 customer Discovery for this basically we are doing interviews with customers so we could use chat GPT for example to create a first version of the interview you could train it and prompt it and say hey you are a customer Discovery professional you need to write a first set of interview questions here is the customer that we're targeting you can also use Chad GPT or Claude AI to be able to write an Outreach message that you can then use once you start contacting people you're going to want to do direct Outreach to these people usually through platforms like LinkedIn
• 76:30 - 77:00 and having that first message that you can then AB test or see how many interviews you can actually book once you've actually booked the interviews I highly recommend that instead of trying to scramble and take notes during the interview you just use a tool like Zoom has its own like U AI assistant that can basically just give you a summary and also the full script of the conversation I would also record it uh you can also use a tool like Auto . a which is kind of a more complex um Note Taker and that can provide you with those notes and the
• 77:00 - 77:30 reason for that is because the last part of customer Discovery interview is analyzing the data to see like what are people saying like what is the general consensus and once we have notes of those interviews we can then feed them into an AI and ask it questions about that data to try to extract some insight which is ultimately what we're after now step two is branding and content usually what I will do is not even use AI I'll use existing elements out there I've talked about those like icon 8 unsplash but if you wanted to create some of these things like images illustrations
• 77:30 - 78:00 from scratch I highly recommend for image generation that you use mid Journey it's probably the most powerful you do need to learn how to prompt it quite well for the copywriting I would focus on a tool like copy AI or I would simply use something like chat GPT or CLA 2 again make sure to use that prompting system that we've talked about earlier for the logo and branding you could use a platform called Luca l a. a you could also use logo. to create a quick logo again we're trying to create something good not perfect then we're going to want to build out a website
• 78:00 - 78:30 with AI so if you have absolutely no experience you can use a tool like framer AI which is pretty powerful you can also use another tool like reloom to create the kind of wireframe in different sections and then you could push that into web flow which is a no code tool again that'll allow you to build out a very beautiful website in just a couple of minutes and frankly you don't have to always go the AI route to build your website I would also use a simple and cheap tool like card if you're just trying to get your first version off of the ground now for sales and Outreach I would use a tool that I'm going to have in the link to be able to
• 78:30 - 79:00 automate some of your Outreach in LinkedIn and there are many tools like clay or Persona if you want to do this they're a little more complex and expensive but that's another option now let's talk about building out your first software platform there are no code tools that allow you to build out first versions with AI so you could use a platform like softer. a to build the very first basic web app you could use a platform like Buzzy doai to build out a mobile app or also kind of web app these are pretty cool tools you can build certain functionalities many others you can't so if you can't do that then you
• 79:00 - 79:30 might want to check out first design tools so here I would recommend two one is called Galileo uh the other one is called UI zard that's going to allow you to create the different screens and to Showcase how you would organize those screens then I would jump into an actual no code Builder to build those out so you could use a platform again like softare and air table you could use flutter flow you could use adalo there are many no code tools out there that you can use that have plenty of AI sort of features inside of them and no don't expect to build out your entire app just
• 79:30 - 80:00 with one prompt in AI yet right now the two first platforms I talk about are the first ones that are really going in this direction but right now you're going to need to build things inside of no code Builders or eventually with full code if you're also trying to do that now there's an entire other category of tools which are AI agents right you can create either sort of chat Bots or you could create sort of voice agents that can have all sorts of very specific roles for voice agents I usually use synth flow or you could also use platforms like air. a for more chatbot you have
• 80:00 - 80:30 very specialized ones so if you were trying to get rid of customer support you could use something like Aid base you could also create custom gpts you could have things like chatbase but with all these tools the truth is that you just need to identify what your actual goal is like are you having an actual problem right like what are you trying to solve first because often times people are just checking out all these Cool Tools they're like oh this is fun but like the truth is they just get lost in tools pay a bunch of subscriptions and then they don't really get anything done for that not to be you I highly
• 80:30 - 81:00 recommend that you first identify okay what is my goal then what kind of tool am I looking for to be able to solve that then check out a couple options select one there will always be newer cooler ones coming out if you could just Master one it's going to save you a bunch of time and instead of testing a thousand things and then regularly really just using nothing then it makes a lot more sense for you to literally just learn one or two or maybe three AI tools that that can help you on a daily basis because that's going to save a lot of time and money for you and the final tool I'll recommend here which is what
• 81:00 - 81:30 replaces for me chat GPT is called perplexity doai the reason for that is because it's better at doing fine-tune searches for me and it also gives me the sources for all of those specific things that it's found online which is great CU I can then click through and see the actual source that it's used to be able to draft that conclusion another question I get often is how do you incorporate AI inside one of your software builds right inside your product it could be an app it could be a website there are three main ways that we can do that I'm going to show you this right now on the board now the
• 81:30 - 82:00 first way to incorporate AI into one of your tools is to actually just go through the tool itself so that's in the tool what do I mean by that well for example you could use a agent Builder to be able to build an AI agent trained on the material that you feed it so you basically go in they have features for you to basically build out the AI and you build out your AI now in no code tools for example sometimes you also have the ability to Simply add an AI element so you could actually add an AI
• 82:00 - 82:30 chat inside of software for example now this is really on a case-by Case basis and not all tools have ai inside of them right but if you don't have that there's a second way and the second way is through automation so basically if you want to bring Chad GPT or any other tool that has an access point to it an API or basically an endpoint uh then we can actually trigger that right so the
• 82:30 - 83:00 second way that you can Implement AI inside of one of your software builds is through automation so for example if I have a spreadsheet like uh Google Sheets then we could have a trigger uh and it could either be through zapier or it could be through make that basically says hey let's go and uh talk to um let's go ahead and talk to chat GPT or maybe we want to talk to perplexity or one of these other AI providers and ask it a question and then bring that information back into our app so for
• 83:00 - 83:30 example we could say hey could you check out this field and give me a summary so let's say for example you had the transcript of a sales call well you would be able to for example uh tap into chat GPT and ask it hey could you create a summary of this and tell me the action points that have to be done next and in fact you could then even send that through another automation inside your CRM so that your salesperson could have access to that now these are usually one-way connections but the Third Way is through API now an API is pretty much a
• 83:30 - 84:00 two-way connection meaning that for example if you connect to an API with the weather and the weather people change the weather on that API then it would automatically update in real time inside of your app so that's basically a two-way connection um that you can do with these different AI tools to bring in AI to your specific uh product and for those of you who know me you know I like no code tools and here are the three ways that we can incorporate AI inside any build even if it's built with
• 84:00 - 84:30 these beautiful Dragon drop Builders so in general with AI less is more make sure to focus on your goals and then you're going to find the tools that are best suited for that goal and your worst nightmare here is shiny object syndrome and instead of depending on AI for everything let's also talk about how to find a co-founder okay so let's talk about how to find a co-founder co-founders are by no means a must in today's world there is a a whole new generation of solo preneurs that being said having a co-founder can make a huge
• 84:30 - 85:00 difference accountability being able to split tasks and Conquer those tasks together can help you navigate complicated decisions that you have to make along the startup journey and it can also just give you a bunch of great motivation but remember having the wrong co-founder can also mean a huge catastrophe for your startup journey and based on CB insights it's the number three reason why startups actually fail so my usual advice is that if you have a co-founder that's amazing if you don't have a co-founder and you want a co-founder you can take steps towards finding one but don't rush into any
• 85:00 - 85:30 relationship with a co-founder these are 5 to sevene relationships and you wouldn't run into a personal relationship of that magnitude so easily so make sure you just have that same kind of vision when it comes to finding a co-founder for your startup okay now before we talk about how to find a co-founder let's talk about what we need in an actual co-founder well we need a couple of things first of all we need to make sure that that person has skills that complement ours right so for example if you are non-technical you
• 85:30 - 86:00 might want someone who's a little bit more or going to take responsibility for the technical side that's usually the case if you are very technical you might need someone who's on the growth Business Development sales side of things so finding someone who complements your skill sets can be super valuable it's not a must again because I believe anyone can learn anything but think about what the startup actually needs to be able to grow and Thrive the next thing you need which is probably the most important thing is that person believes in your mission your vision they also have a long-term perspective
• 86:00 - 86:30 on building a startup they're not just trying to get quick wins and be out they need to be someone who's committed to this actual mission and vision and are willing to invest time over the next couple years in building out the startup and the third thing I find very important is really just a good fit on a personal level right if this person is constantly dragging you down or if you really never agree on anything well that's probably a red flag that you might not want to be a partner with this person those are a couple tips where can we find these people now let's talk about the first way so a big mistake I see people making is going to all the
• 86:30 - 87:00 wrong places to meet Tech co-founder now the first and easiest place to go is your network right it's way better to have a friend of a friend or to have a warm introduction to the person who could be your co-founder versus meeting them out of the blue and there is absolutely no context behind that so I would really start off with your network send messages to people who you know who might know people now the second place that you can go and start building relationships is in startup up events so here a big mistake people make is that they might go to like a classic sort of networking event to meet a technical
• 87:00 - 87:30 co-founder there actually aren't that many technical co-founders to go into these so if you're looking for a technical co-founder instead of going to like a networking event for example I might go to something more like a hackathon where we have lots of technical people who are going there cuz what are they interested in building stuff cool stuff with other people around if you're looking for someone who's a little bit more on the salesy side you might go more to like a pitch competition where you can find people who are talking about their startups and even choose to join their team another place you can go is online communities either free or paid this is a place
• 87:30 - 88:00 where people were excited about building startups are already hanging out so go to these places because you're going to be able to find them there it could be things like Indie hacker which is a great place to find people it could be a place like y combinator startup school it could be a place like we are no code we have our own Community too you can join it for free there's even a platform called co-founder Labs so you can check that out as well and then the last place is incubators so these are startup accelerator incubators um a place where entrepreneurs or aspiring entrepreneurs go to meet other people and to work on
• 88:00 - 88:30 their startup ideas so really the goal here is to like just start up conversations continue conversations with people you already know who are in your network and really take things slowly because honestly actions are going to speak louder than words here uh you really want to start just dating right you want to start by working a little bit talking through the problem the vision the mission what we're working on here not just come to the table and be Des desperate to have someone build it out or desperate to get someone to sell what you've already built and again the worst thing that you can do is jump in a long-term
• 88:30 - 89:00 relationship right off the bat I startup Journey from founding to selling the company if you're taking that route usually is between 7 and 10 years so building a relationship where there's actual trust is so important another very important thing with finding a co-founder is to literally be very very clear and to communicate well with that person you need to agree on things like whose responsibilities are what what is that specific time commitment that we can provide to this startup right now in the short term and then over the long
• 89:00 - 89:30 term make sure this person's committed long term right obviously if this thing is not working out they won't be able to commit completely longterm but early on just kind of agreeing on the basics like okay what responsibilities what are you going to be doing what am I going to be doing how much time are we going to dedicate towards this these are all questions that are so important and communication has to be very clear from the beginning now the other thing that has to be clear as well when you get into one of these relationships is how the partnership actually works and we'll talk a little bit about that in the section where we talk about equity and
• 89:30 - 90:00 how Equity actually works but you want to be very clear about the mechanisms of how people own their shares and how do you give out shares well what we're trying to do here is really to be clear from the beginning so everyone understands the rules of the game and then there aren't problems later on where certain things arise and then we have to fix them and it creates all sorts of conflict between the two different Founders so if you ask me the quickest way I would go to inperson events I would also meet more people online I would start actually conversations and meeting up with that person to work on things and then if the
• 90:00 - 90:30 partnership was great then awesome we can start committing to a longest term relationship in this section we're going to talk about how to build a pitch deck now this is basically the modern version of a business plan no one's interested in reading your 30 to 40 page business plan at this point when you just have an idea maybe a product maybe even just a first paying customer the ability to communicate the message of the opportunity behind your startup is super important early stage and the pitch deck is the tool you're going to use to communicate that for you a very
• 90:30 - 91:00 disheartening fact is that the average investor will spend less than one minute on a pitch deck why because they have a stack of startups who are looking to raise money from them so your ability to communicate your message very authentically and very clearly is super super important and that's the goal of the pitch deck now the first thing to know is there are two types of pitch deck one of them is a presentation deck right basically when you walk into the room and you're going to talk to an investor it's the deck that you're going to be able to use to support your
• 91:00 - 91:30 arguments and flow of information as you're actually per pitching in person the other deck is actually called the sendable deck now this is a deck that has a lot of the same elements but unfortunately you're not going to be in the room when this is being passed around so you need to communicate the full message throughout that pitch deck and yeah you're going to have to have both of these pitch decks because sometimes you're not going to get a meeting until you send through a deck and that deck needs to tell the story as well as you do in person now all decks usually follow a similar structure that was created by people like guy kawazaki
• 91:30 - 92:00 he had the 10 slides to have an awesome pitch deck and basically these slides are as follows first you want to kind of communicate the problem then you want to communicate the solution sometimes that's presenting the product sometimes we have an additional slide that presents the product itself then we want people to understand the business model how this thing can generate Revenue then we're going to show how that plays over time so basically the market size of that opportunity now Market size is great but once we know that we need to figure out okay great well what's the go
• 92:00 - 92:30 to market strategy the marketing strategy early stage to acquire those customers then who is the team who's going to actually be executing on this strategy who are the competitors in this field and where do you position within those competitors show me a slide about financials and then probably the ask right which is you asking for money and you want that to be structured in a very specific way now that's the basic structure but there are so many places where people look like amateurs because they make some of the biggest mistakes in the book so one of the big first
• 92:30 - 93:00 things I would say is if you avoid the following mistakes I'm about to show you you will already be way ahead of the curve when it comes to presenting your startup idea when I was the director of an accelerator program I would go on stage and I would talk on a panel and then afterwards I would have a whole lineup of Founders probably about 30 people who would want to talk to me afterwards and talk to me about their ideas specifically and see whether or not they could get get into the accelerator or you know whatever I could provide any additional help now I would usually walk away from these having heard about 20 to 30 different pitches
• 93:00 - 93:30 and I would usually have absolutely no idea what any one of these Founders did and that's probably the biggest lesson I want to teach to you today your goal when you're talking to someone is really just one thing at first is to get the person to understand what you actually do and usually the way the people pitch their startups is full of lingo they blabber for a bunch and they actually didn't get the person to understand what they do in a basic way because they expect that person to know everything and usually when you're an investor you
• 93:30 - 94:00 might have a lot of knoow but you also don't know every single industry so the important thing here is to very much simplify the message so you could say my business does this and then have a second example basically where it's like in other words we do this for that right so the people going to be like oh okay I got it that's literally the only thing you have to do and everyone gets it wrong people often talk about pitching your product like you would do it to your six-year-old nephew or to your grandmother that is actually not bad advice because guess what people
• 94:00 - 94:30 understand that industry will ask you very targeted questions but people who don't understand that will also be able to talk and be like oh I know someone who's like in this industry potentially you could talk to them the more people you get to understand what you do the more likely you are to be able to get all the people and resources to build this thing into something big and now let's talk about the biggest mistakes people make in their pitch Decks that I see all the time and make them look like total amateurs let's let's go okay so I pretty much have one per slide here but I'm not going to cover them all we're going to first talk about the market size right um because people think that
• 94:30 - 95:00 investors want you to say that you have this enormous Market that's growing and you're going to get 1% of this market right and you're going to become a billionaire because this is a hundred billion doll industry and you're going to just take 1% of that industry and you're going to be rich guess what people will not believe that and it sounds inexperienced so if you are already saying that you're going to just get a tiny fraction of this enormous Market you're taking the wrong approach to the market Slide the market size
• 95:00 - 95:30 slide really has to be around showing on a small scale that your business model works and then showing how that works at a larger scale so it's much more interesting for you to tell an investor I have five first customers they each pay let's say a $10 month subscription so we're currently at a $50 a month uh Mr tiny numbers but then you could say there are actually about 100,000 of these individuals that I could Target just in my little geographic area I'm
• 95:30 - 96:00 planning on just getting a small percentage of this so maybe we're get 10% of this so let's say 1,000 customers at $10 a month so over the next 3 months we're going to hit $10,000 per month this is recurring Revenue mrr but in the us alone there's a potential for this to reach and then you know much larger number if we get there uh you know in the next 3 years we expect to be at uh 10 million mrr for example right so this really shows that hey I'm already doing this on a small scale and uh in my short
• 96:00 - 96:30 vicinity there's actually a bunch of more people that I could Target and I'm going to be targeting over the next 3 months but then after this I need your money to be able to bring it to 10 million right that's going to accelerate the process this really shows that you're doing it you're realistic about uh the uh expectations that you can hit in a short term and then explaining to them hey we need your money because of this so don't just be 1% of the market guy no we want to be a hey we're already doing this these are the number of
• 96:30 - 97:00 clients this is how much money we can make from these clients and this is how we expect to do that over X number of years just a much better approach so this is a big mistake another mistake people make often is in the ask slide so the ask slide is a slide where you say I need $10 million for 10% of my company XYZ um in this slide often times people just say I need a bunch of money and uh we're looking for investors right now that is not a good approach for a number of reasons but the more important thing is that here what we need to do is we
• 97:00 - 97:30 need to tie this ask to a very specific Milestone so if you're saying okay I'm looking for $10 million and that's going to get us over the next 18 months so usually you're talking about 18 months uh of operations to X so this is Milestone actual Milestone we'll grow the revenue to this we'll uh this that we're going to you know launch the second product so actually giving them the Milestones of what you're going to execute with that money and then you want to talk about use of funds so it's
• 97:30 - 98:00 like those $10 million we're going to use this amount for this we're going to use that amount for that and we're going to use this amount for that this is really going to give them a lot more confidence that you know where you're including your money and this is actually a much better approach for investors they want specific outcomes for that money they know that if you go from here to here then they'll be able to reinvest or they able to help you raise more money with other partners that they know as well and so their goal is to get you from here to here so promise this don't keep your promise
• 98:00 - 98:30 vague you want to actually have specific Milestones that you're going to hit with the money that you're doing and then you want to show them how you're using that now the team slide let's talk about that usually the team slide looks something like this this this this here are the three people um and people have awesome names like CEO coo and C fo o and the truth is that early on everyone knows that who cares about the names what's more important is
• 98:30 - 99:00 do these people actually cover the important things that have to be done in the business to be able to bring this to the next level so you don't need to have everyone uh for it to become a 10 to hundred million do business but you do need to have someone who's in charge of sales and marketing for example another person who's going to be in charge of building out the product potentially and so you really want to cover everything that you you would need to be able to execute on the plan that you've just described to them throughout the pitch deck now the other thing that people often do is that under here they have
• 99:00 - 99:30 1,000 advisors here are the 10 amazing advisors and it's like no no one cares about these very Loosely tied to you advisers this doesn't bring more credibility because they know that in the end of the day it's going to be the three of you who are tied to this thing and then for each person you probably want to say the role that they're going to be fulfilling but you also want to put one or two or three impressive fact right so fancy University impressive fact great one two hackathons impressive fact uh these can be very different fact
• 99:30 - 100:00 it can be like you know worked for Proctor and Gamble for 10 years and here you can even have a section which is like trusted by and then you have a couple of logos XYZ you know and it's like the logos of the big companies that you've already worked for most important thing here in this slide for the team slide because these are the people who are actually going to execute on this dream this is what they're buying into the most we need to prove to them that we have the skills internally to execute on the plan and we're also the right team to bet on now the next slide we're going to talk about is actually the
• 100:00 - 100:30 traction slide traction is basically Revenue it can be a number of other things but usually we're talking about Revenue here and um here I usually recommend the for traction if we don't have Revenue we want to find other impressive facts right so if you're very early stage it might be uh about your team and how much experience those individuals have it might be letters of intent of future customers who have signed something saying hey we're willing to buy this thing once it's ready some things that people underestimate which doesn't have to do with revenue is customer satisfaction so
• 100:30 - 101:00 it's like if you get a review like that is pretty solid right a review of someone saying this is the most amazing tool ever another thing that's impressive are reorders right so it's like if 30% of people who ordered a first time order again that's really good news right it means oh man we're in the reorder business we're not in the like marketing business right so these kind of things are indicators that there is stickiness around your product that people like your product and that ultimately to the investor tells them hey there's potential here and this is
• 101:00 - 101:30 something that could actually what make money so make sure to if you don't have traction to bet on some of the other big things that you have going for you in your startup and if you do have traction don't just talk about the revenue talk about other impressive metrics like reorder rate do you have any customer testimonials do you have any stories that you can share with them that are super impressive have you w any rewards do you have any I mean anything pretty much that can highlight why they would invest in you now let's talk a little bit about those two versions that we
• 101:30 - 102:00 talked about the sendable deck and the deck that you're going to be pitching with in person right so there's basically the presentation uh presentation deck this one is going to be large numbers and images think of it that way as simple as you can do you're going to be able to quite easily convey your idea because you're actually in the room and with the sendable deck you're going to want to have a slightly different format right you want to have each slide that basically tells a story so the title might be the one line that you want them to retain right you're
• 102:00 - 102:30 telling the major story and they're just if they just read the headlines of your slide they can understand the whole thing underneath there is supporting evidence so if I say the current fishing lure industry is in a crisis and then it's like small small problem with a fact and it's about time that we disrupt it you know for example and then it's like the solution sled and it's like uh an all-in-one platform to this that the other and then it's like it solves this this and this the three problems that we had here on the solution slide and so here you're going to actually want to
• 102:30 - 103:00 bring people through a reading experience where they can actually go through that storytelling that you would be telling in person whereas a presentation slide you literally might just have like one actual number here and one image because you're going to be telling the story on top of the slide and that brings us to another format I do like the idea of creating just a short video so basically you can use a tool like Loom LOM or another video screen recording tool and basically just record yourself speaking over your slides and you can
• 103:00 - 103:30 send that to people who are interested in it now remember that the pitch deck is usually just to get first conversations going you don't have to communicate everything and if you're trying to communicate everything here it's a real big mistake so think of it more like an actual teaser to your startup and this opportunity and then use that to actually gather some interest in knowing more from the investor so they reach out to you to get get a second meeting and to be able to potentially chat about the opportunity now the biggest thing to keep in mind with your pitch decks in general same
• 103:30 - 104:00 thing with a business plan is that it's only going to be as good as you've actually built the business right so I would highly recommend that you first build a business get a little bit of traction around it because then it's going to be much easier to create an impressive pitch deck to go out there and get funding investors no longer invest in your ideas so you have to come with a couple months of traction or Revenue to be able to prove Pro that you have a case to get money to build and grow your startup and that's very important because actually every moment spent planning preparing the pitch decks
• 104:00 - 104:30 reaching out to investors is a moment that you're not spending building out and growing your startup now when we're building a deck remember that you want to create a first version and you want to make that as easy as possible to adapt so adapt it yourself and then once you've created the proper content you can then start thinking of designs cuz you're going to have to adapt that deck a lot of times before it's perfect so make sure not to create perfect designs early that you're going to have to change later on okay in this section we're going to talk about how to get investors now I've raised money for two
• 104:30 - 105:00 startups that I've run out of four and I've also helped more than 600 Founders raise over $56 million in funding so in this section I'm going to be talking about some of the fundamentals of fundraising and then I'm going to tell you the step-by-step process you can use to fundraise for your startup now a couple things you should know before we jump in first of all there are three paths that Founders can take the first one is to bootstrap not take any money and Own 100% of company completely viable and a very popular model today the second one would be to get into an investing accelerator program like Tech Stars or Y combinator here we're raising
• 105:00 - 105:30 about $150,000 for about 7% of the company and you're basically helped to raise additional funding throughout the program and then finally you can go to investors directly and raise money but there are lots of different types of investors and there's also different strategies that you can use to get them now the first thing you want to ask yourself is when is the right time to actually fundrais you see over the past 15 years there's been a big shift before you could literally just show up with a great idea and a small team and they
• 105:30 - 106:00 would just invest money in your startup today we're really talking about about 90% of all deals going towards Revenue generating startups there's actually a study that was done that showed between 2010 it was only 9% of deals going towards Revenue generating startups and by 2019 that number was already 67% and today again about 85% of all deals go to revenue generating startups and in fact a famous quote from Mark sester who is a big investor in Los Angeles is that they
• 106:00 - 106:30 invest in lines not dots the first time they meet you is just one point in time and you're showing a specific amount of traction or revenue and they actually want to meet you a couple every month or two and see that the direction is going up and to the right in addition to that raising money is not in of itself a huge success 67% of startups that raise money from Venture Capital firms these large investors in C Val basically actually end up stagnating or dying so it's not because you raise money from an investor that you have a successful business okay
• 106:30 - 107:00 now an important part is to understand the different profiles of investors because these act differently and it's important for you to understand there are four main sections the first one is going to be called a FFF so these are friends and family um the last f is actually for fools so people who don't have experience now again these people are usually going to be the first people that you get a check from and um fools are pretty much people who get excited about tech but don't really know the tech investing game all right the second category is going to be the accelerator
• 107:00 - 107:30 program so this is a program that's going to ask for about 7% of your company for an investment of roughly 100 to $150,000 and they're really going to help you raise that next round by teaching you how to actually pitch raise money uh and provide you with those connections so those are like y combinator Tech Stars 500 startups um and so these can be very beneficial if you're looking to fund raise especially if you have no experience or contact now the third group are Angel Investors
• 107:30 - 108:00 these are individuals investing their own money anywhere between and $100,000 those are usually called super Angels um but basically they're investing their own money into startups and they'll make a number of Investments every single year and then finally we have Venture Capital investors these investors are very professionalized they're called institutional investors and what they do is that they raise money from even richer people um and then they basically invest in startups at scale right now the reason why it's
• 108:00 - 108:30 important to understand these is because each one of them acts kind of differently and pretty much is willing to invest at a different phase as well and if you're trying to raise a firstr investment I would only really focus on friends and family accelerator programs and also Angels right because Venture Capital firms often say that they invest in ideas or early stage startups but they really don't so I wouldn't waste my time on that every investor is trying to do one thing they're trying to make money right so everything that you're talking to them about should be kind of angled around how this is going to make
• 108:30 - 109:00 money so you know you have happy customers that's great because it points towards people wanting to buy your product meaning that there's potential to make money right building your team look we have all the right people because they believe that those people will be able to execute and make money so everything kind of leads back to money and they're looking to really make a return on investment for the investment they're putting in your company um you know that's basically a value multiplier that they're looking for now all investors are looking at a bunch of deals and they basically are trying to do one key thing to mitigate
• 109:00 - 109:30 risk so they are trying to find any excuse not to invest in your startup and if they have absolutely no excuse by the end of the whole process they'll probably invest in your startup but the funny thing is that if you approach them and you're basically asking for money they're more likely to give you advice and if you come asking for advice and developing the relationship then they might be offering you money and it's kind of fun money because you're always in the best position to fund raise when you actually don't need the money it's just a great Catalyst for you to
• 109:30 - 110:00 actually build and grow your business quickly so the question of when is a good time to raise money is pretty much when you have Revenue you are growing and you can use it as a catalyst not really for the very early stages now every fundraising strategy is a funnel let me show you cool so here's the funnel that I just drew not an artist but hey that's what you got for today um so here at the top what we're going to have are pretty much anyone who has heard of your startup right these are all the individuals let's say that you're pitching at pitch events let's say that you're sending a uh a pitch
• 110:00 - 110:30 deck to different investors anyone who's ever heard of your startup then at the top of your funnel here you might have a first row who are actually potential investors right so these are potential investors um in your startup um so some people who you've contacted some people who you've been put in contact with um then there's uh a couple of these people who you've been able to have a meeting with let's just call it meet then there's only a couple of those people who actually gave you a second
• 110:30 - 111:00 meeting and then here there's uh people who are going and asking for a term sheet this is where you talk about all the terms of investment and then U at the very bottom of this you're basically going to have one or two investors who are investing in your startup at the very end cutting the check right cuz even here we're talking about like contracts uh and here you can lose a lot of people along the way as well so basically one important thing to understand is that it is a numbers game so don't get frustrated you're going to definitely get NOS in fact Airbnb got
• 111:00 - 111:30 hundreds of NOS at the very beginning of them raising money for their startup so make sure that you have a wide enough funnel and that you're playing the funnel game right because if you have a thousand people who hear what you do who have heard about your startup then you might get about um you know let's say 100 let's say 10% 100 investors who you've reached out to uh only about let's say 20 of them who you've been able to meet with only five of those asked for next meeting only three of
• 111:30 - 112:00 those went on to ask for a term sheet and one fell out during the contract phase and so now you have two investors right each one invest let's say $100,000 and you have a 200k uh round right here boom so that's the way that you should be thinking about it and the reason for that is that you're going to be able to manage your own expectations these people get thousand of deals every single month and so don't worry it's not personal it's just them doing their business the way that they want to do their business now knowing that we're
• 112:00 - 112:30 running a funnel one thing that's super important is that at the top here the way that we talk about our startup is very simple because the simpler it is for someone to understand our uh startup idea and what we're trying to accomplish the easier it's going to be to meet more people who are actually qualified buyers who kind of come down this funnel here now the reason we want to do that is because a lot of the people here at the top basically they are not your ideal uh investors right so we need to maximize
• 112:30 - 113:00 the chances that some of these people can introduce us to investors uh by making them understand what we do right now here people just need to understand the basics about what your business does and then if they know someone they might be able to connect you this is what we call Lily Pad hopping actually which is where uh one person introduces you to another person to another person and suddenly you hit the right investor because you're usually only one or two connections away from all the investors you want actually reach so the wider the
• 113:00 - 113:30 top of the funnel which is done by having very simple messaging about your startup allows you to have more that come in here and if you multiply this by 10 you have 20 investors at the bottom here right and that's the goal it's a numbers game okay so what are the actual steps that you have to go through to be able to fund raise right well there are pretty much five steps I'm going to break them down right now the first one is planning right preparation the second one is Outreach then it's going to be running all these meetings the fourth is
• 113:30 - 114:00 pretty much creating demand and then the last one is to close so now let's break down each one of those okay so the first step is preparation first you want to prepare your pitch deck you want to prepare your financial forecast um but then what you want to do is you want to start preparing for the fundraising process so you're first going to research specific investors you're going to want to Target investors who have money in their funds for example or they are actually actively investing you want
• 114:00 - 114:30 to research uh that they invest in startups like yours you want to basically create a hit list of investors who have the potential to invest in your startup preparation also means knowing the terminology understanding startup talk so that when you jump in this meeting you don't look like super silly the second thing is to prepare yourself by understanding some of the general terms that are used like metrics inside of startups for example if you don't know what retention means or if you don't know what uh CAC means or if you
• 114:30 - 115:00 don't know what growth means then uh you might want to research that right you want to prepare yourself so that you don't look like an amateur in front of investors right especially if we're talking about institutional investors or people who have experience investing in startups but once you have the material and you are prepared and you also have a list of Target investors we're going to watch to start doing Outreach right and the best way to do Outreach which is step two is through warm introductions so of course you want to participate in Pitch events so you can get yourself out
• 115:00 - 115:30 there to meet people who could potentially create these warm introductions but there are also other types of introductions that are really valuable right so another good introduction is for example an investor who's investing in your startup they've already confirmed they can introduce you to other investors which is great what if you don't have that well the second best introduction is actually from an entrepreneur who has gotten investment from that inv investor so if you develop good relationships with other Founders who have raised from these companies that you're looking to get money from then that introduction is going to be
• 115:30 - 116:00 very good right because you know that they invested in that founder that means there is a bond of trust between the investor and the uh founder himself and then there are other levels like professors that you might have had if you've gone to nice universities or the lawyers who are essentially going to get paid to close the deal if it goes through but warm introductions generally are just the best way to go and uh yeah if if you don't have any connections then you have to start somewhere so start going to events start participating in Pitch events start getting yourself out there and you're going to see that they start developing
• 116:00 - 116:30 themselves some investors also Pride themselves by actually you know opening up people's emails who cold DM them so make sure to have creative strategies as well like that where you can go on Twitter and just basically like send a quick message to someone here I would have a very simple message in one line so it's basically like explain what you do and the exciting uh sort of traction that you have to date that will probably attract an investor to at least answer uh but again the best is warm introductions now success you've gotten your first meeting booked number three
• 116:30 - 117:00 is to actually go to the meeting right so here you want to you want to do a couple of things first of all you're probably going to have time to do somewhere between a 3 and a 15minute pitch you're probably going to want to spend only 20% of that time pitching uh with the help of your your presentation deck and of course because you're in the room um but then also leave plenty of time about 80% of the time to answer all the questions
• 117:00 - 117:30 right because ultimately you want to get the chance to answer the questions that they have because that's where you're going to show a lot of your deeper knowledge and build that trust with them now one thing during the meeting that people get wrong is that they expect people to pretty much write you a check then and there they won't right so the only goal of this first meeting is to get another meeting so that's all you need to go you need to get the second meeting that's all that you're looking for in that first meeting and every time you're in a meeting you want to find out what the next step is going to be right so not for the first meeting but as soon
• 117:30 - 118:00 as you jump into the second meeting you want to start commanding the conversation so that you go towards a close now for that close to happen you have to have some other interest right so this is all around creating demand in the fundraising strategy you want to create Demand right and the best demand is when there are multiple people who want what you have to sell and you're kind of putting them in competition with each other so they want to very quickly be the first to invest right so this is where you really want to book as many meetings and go as hard as you can in
• 118:00 - 118:30 the fundraising process as quickly as possible because fundraising honestly will take away from you building your business and you're going to want to get in there and out there so you can continue building your business right every moment that you're not spending or that you're spending fundraising you're not spending building your actual business and that's what matters most to all these investors as well right so create demand get more than one investor interested uh get those investors to introduce you to other investors and bring them on board and take as many
• 118:30 - 119:00 meetings as quickly as possible because that's going to bring us to step five which is the close now the close is basically going to be going from um you know starting off with a uh basic term sheet which just outlines the general terms of the contract once you agree on that we talk about contracts and then basically uh money in bank and one piece of advice here is that until the money hits the bank remember that you don't have an investor even if you have a signed contract so make sure to follow
• 119:00 - 119:30 these different steps and to create some pressure towards the close by having a lot of competition in the process and to be able to do that you need to be well prepared you need to be put in contact with plenty of great people then you have to run those meetings you have to learn about that and if you want more information cuz obviously I can't uh you know present everything here I would highly recommend a book called Venture deals where they really go into some of the minutia or the smaller print of how these this entire process is run and to teach you some of the terms that you're
• 119:30 - 120:00 going to need to know walking in so quick recap make sure that you're actually ready for investors because if not you're going to spend a lot of time fundraising if you don't have Revenue number two focus on getting in and out of there as quickly as possible so you can continue building your business three come prepared because you're going to need it for build relationships early expecting the fruits of those relationships to pay off later meaning that you can you can build early relationships asking for advice with these investors and then when you're actually ready to fund raise they might be a great person to turn to to ask for
• 120:00 - 120:30 money and number five create that sense of urgency because if investors aren't feeling urgency or fear of missing out fomo then they will happily sit in the back seat and just wait month after month for you to either go to success or fail and that's pretty much it for the fundraising section okay now let's talk about how Equity Works Equity are the shares inside of a company and they can be a very very powerful tool to get people all on board to your ultimate Mission which is to have a thriving
• 120:30 - 121:00 company right and to stay long-term in that company to grow it and make it something amazing and early on in a startup you want to be very mindful about how you distribute those shares why well because investors who are going to come in and buy shares from you later on want to make sure that hey you actually value what you have here now when we talk about Equity we really are talking about two different things the first one is ownership right uh the second thing is decision-making so there are different types of shares there are
• 121:00 - 121:30 sort of common stock which is just normal shares and then there are preferred shares often times institutional investors want preferred shares those come along with like more voting rights decision-making power this kind of stuff but anyway the main people that you're going to be giving Equity to in the company are employees it's going to be advisers it's going to be investors and it can be other people along the way as well but there I would really be careful with who I'm giving shares to now the first thing people ask me all the time is how many shares should I give to my co-founder for
• 121:30 - 122:00 example and the answer is usually pretty straightforward and always follows similar principles right the earlier you start and the earlier you are involved in a startup the more shares you will get right uh for example if you join Airbnb right now they're going to give you tiny stock options right whereas if you joined at the very beginning and you were one of the uh co-founders with Brian chesy well you would probably have a large portion of the company right so if you have a co-founder for example and you started this thing together then pretty much makes sense to have a 50/50
• 122:00 - 122:30 split and it also makes both people feel valued you'll see in the explanation I'm about to give you now that there are a couple mechanisms that happen when you distribute equity which will influence your Equity Stakes as well now if a co-founder joins later it can be anywhere from 5 to 50% that number that you would give to them and there are also some mechanisms that we're going to use and disc discuss in a second that allow you to protect the company from both yourself and your co-founder and you know each other for future employees this is a really good way to get them on
• 122:30 - 123:00 board with the long-term Vision right you pay them a smaller amount of sort of upfront sort of salary and you give them some shares in the company because they actually believe that this will grow into becoming a really big Affair and you can actually make a lot of money by Simply Having shares in a startup and have the value explode so for employees who join a little bit later we're talking about any where from 1% to 5% depending on the role and the seniority level and also the stage at which you are in terms of the process of uh
• 123:00 - 123:30 building the startup now for investors it's something a little bit different investors usually take anywhere from 10 to maybe 30% of the company in each big funding event or funding round um and I'll explain how that influences the shares of the existing members um as we sort of go along okay let's hit the board so I can show you how this works okay so for me to explain to you the Dynamics of uh Equity throughout a early stage startup I want to just give you kind of an example say that for example you and your buddy you start a company
• 123:30 - 124:00 uh the company you just split it 50/50 so for the moment it doesn't really have a value you have 50% of this company and let's say that um the number of shares that have been issued uh this is really just um something that's a bit more technical is basically let's say there's 10 million shares right so basically if you have 50% then you own uh five million shares in the company right now when you go out and raise money what happens like is it you selling your 50%
• 124:00 - 124:30 no what happens is that you basically issue more shares so let's say that here I'm going to actually issue more shares I'm going to issue an additional um let's say 5 million shares uh in the company that ultimately are going to be additional shares that both me and the other founder have agreed upon we're going to sell to an investor for a specific amount of money um and uh the amount of money is basically determined on valuation so let's say that we raised uh $10 million
• 124:30 - 125:00 for that amount so this person's putting in $10 million here what happens after this funding round is that we have a larger company right we have both of those now the company is worth you know the uh $10 million that this person invested plus let's say that it was worth $10 before so now the value of the company is uh you know $10 million and $10 $10 million $10 but basically What's Happening Here is that you will suddenly have a uh
• 125:00 - 125:30 smaller percentage of the company but the company now instead of being worth $10 it's worth 10 million so you might only have at this point 30% right because now you know you put let's say these 10 million shares plus 5 million shares those are 15 million shares you have 5 million shares still 5 million shares 30% right 30% 33% um but basically the point is that um by raising money you're raising at a higher valuation and you're also putting
• 125:30 - 126:00 a bunch of money in the company so now the value of this company is much larger so even though you get diluted which is you know you went from 50% to 30% here well you own 30% of now a $10 million business instead of owning 50% of a $10 business so that's pretty much what happens in the fundraising process uh you basically are uh raising money and uh you're raising at a higher valuation
• 126:00 - 126:30 and then you are diluting the percentage of shares that you have in the company but you have a smaller piece of a much larger company now there are other dynamics that can also take place uh usually you want to open up a pool of shares for investors meaning that you're going to issue more shares so let's say hey we need more shares cuz we need to hire a bunch of people now we have $10 million in the company we need to get these people excited on board for the long run great let's open up 1 million shares on top of that um and now you
• 126:30 - 127:00 know we could basically have a slightly bigger pie um and there's a small percentage of this that is for employees that we're going to distribute as we hire more people um and yes we get diluted a little bit more so we might have 28% or something like that at this point but the whole goal is that over time we are building a larger and larger company and and we own a slightly smaller percentage of a much bigger company now there are a couple Concepts that you need to understand with regard to these shares which I think are really
• 127:00 - 127:30 important you want to protect yourself and more importantly the company from everyone else who has shares in the company specifically your co-founder so there is a clause that is called vesting now vesting what it means is that um you have 50% in the company but for example if you leave within the first four years you have to give up a number of your shares right so let's say that we divide that equally over the four years right meaning that if you leave within one year you have to give 75% of your shares
• 127:30 - 128:00 back if you leave after 2 years you have to give back 50 3 years 75% uh sorry 25% back and uh etc etc this basically means that you earn the shares over time and the reason for that is that you want people to be committed for a longer period of time inside your startup so this is really investors will require it for you to have vesting schedules but it's also a great way for you to set it up so that if you for any reason want to leave the company at some point you can simply just be like you know what I need to step away for XYZ Reasons I'm willing
• 128:00 - 128:30 to give up my shares it's very clear with your co-founder and they can then use those shares to go and hire someone else to replace you or uh things like that so it's really a healthy uh mechanism to keep people in uh longer term but also to have a very clear agreement with your uh co-founder of like hey if either of us up leaves you know we have to like provide a little bit of our shares back and so that's basically it there's another mechanism that's called a cliff so a cliff can be for testing new people basically uh
• 128:30 - 129:00 let's say that for the first year you actually uh if you leave within the first year you actually have to give all your shares away so it's basically uh what it sounds like right it's like a period early on where yes you're earning those shares but you're only paid those shares if you stay x amount of time if not you get nothing and this vesting is basically just saying like yeah like we're going to split that into uh and it's basically proa which means day by day um and um yeah so if you were to work all the way to here and then you left right here you would lose
• 129:00 - 129:30 everything because we're saying right here that we have a cliff for this uh for the first year uh it could be a 3-month cliff as well um if you were to leave after like let's say you leave like here well then you still have 25% that you could keep of the shares in the company so this is a simplified version I hope that it was clear though and these are the kind of things that you just kind of need to know um and it really makes a good relationship with your partner to to have clear rules in case anyone leaves and uh honestly I've been investing schedules where the other
• 129:30 - 130:00 person left and they were we were fine right because then they're like okay I'm going to have to give up some of my shares perfect and uh everything's very clear and so you know you don't have to break up friendships because you and your co-founder who are buddies separate now one important thing to know is that you will need to include your team in understanding some of these basic mechanisms so they don't feel like they're ripped off if one day they're like what I thought I had 20% of the company and now I have 15 uh you just want to explain these mechanisms so those were some of the core principles you need to understand when it comes to
• 130:00 - 130:30 how Equity Works in an early stage startup and now my friends we're going to jump into how to sell a business okay so now let's talk about how to sell a business I've built out several businesses and I've sold one and I can tell you that the process is relatively similar to the process of raising money the only difference is that you're basically selling not just a portion of the company but the entire company and one of the funny things about this process is that often times an acquisition offer comes in without you actually actively going out to look for someone to buy your company and that's
• 130:30 - 131:00 really cool because you can actually at that point have a lot more leverage along the conversation negotiation and you can choose to just not sell as well so the best time to sell your business is actually when you don't necessarily need to sell your business now if you currently already have investors in your startups they are going to play actually a really big role in getting you to the acquisition why well because that's their liquidity EV which means that's the way they get their money back out that they invested in you at the very beginning and throughout the process of you building this company and yes this is going to be a game-changing
• 131:00 - 131:30 opportunity for you as an entrepreneur it's going to be to sell your company but remember that you haven't sold the company until the money hits the bank it's the same thing with fundraising now one of the things you'll want to do if you're looking to sell your business will be to get your numbers up right because if not you're not going to get very good terms for selling your business so you want to make sure that you have Revenue growth you want to make sure that you have good profitability you want to make sure that you have all of the things and the numbers that show that this is a thriving company because what we're going to get better terms for that now the next thing you want to do
• 131:30 - 132:00 is kind of set expectation kind of get a third party potentially to come in and provide a valuation of your company so you can kind of figure out U how you could be able to sell right like what price point could you sell at at the moment so that you kind of know what to expect you know what a good deal is you know what a bad deal is and uh usually this is going to be done through through a free cash flow method of valuation so just ask a financial specialist who's going to be able to create a valuation of your company now this process can sometimes be pretty complicated so what
• 132:00 - 132:30 you want to do is build a team of advisers who are going to be able to guide you through it and of course if you have investors those will be the first people to turn towards because they'll have done this process many times before and it's going to make it increasingly streamlined they'll just know who to call in and they'll know even potentially who to sell your company to so that can really make the process a little bit smoother the other thing that's going to make this process smoother is to have all of your financials in order so that you can easily present those uh during due diligence now due diligence is pretty much where uh they do a background check
• 132:30 - 133:00 on all of the different things they check all of the details uh to make sure that the deal is good to go and that's only really done once you agree on the basic terms of the deal then they go in and go and dig uh for all of the smaller details to make sure that everything's in line so that you can actually uh sell the business now if you're actually actively looking for someone to buy your business you want to do a lot of research beforehand right to out what kind of companies buy companies like yours what is kind of the uh price point that they're buying what's the reason why they're buying it right a lot of
• 133:00 - 133:30 this information can actually be found on crunch base which is quite interesting because deals sometimes just fall through you want to make sure that you have a backup plan so make sure that you're actually not neglecting the revenue and the operations of your business throughout the negotiation process another thing you might find is that employees might get unmotivated to work hard if they know that a sale is going to happen happen so you might want to be very strategic about the way that you communicate it uh you might want to keep only a very small number of people uh involved in the process of selling
• 133:30 - 134:00 your company until it's actually done and then everyone can reap the rewards right especially people who are key to the operations of the company cuz we don't want them to lose motivation but also uh we don't want them to not know about the deal at all so at first you might want to keep a small number of people knowing about the actual transaction that's taking place because hey it could fall through and if it does you don't want them to be excited and then it falls through um so there's kind of a balance that has to take place there in terms of the communication to your larger team now a couple tips here
• 134:00 - 134:30 a make sure that you have multiple parties interested in buying your company uh and uh two would be to basically angle the sale of your company strategically to what they want right so the company who's buying your company are really looking for something in your company right your company is really going to uh give them something they don't currently have make sure that when you actually talk about your company you're positioning it as a solution to what they're trying to do so for example if you're a AI consulting company and you're selling to a larger consulting
• 134:30 - 135:00 company they want that knowhow they want those clients they want the employees so make sure that you angle things in the direction of being the solution to their problem so that you have higher likelihood of having interest from them the third piece of advice is just hire an m&a lawyer if you need to mergers an acquisition basically someone who's used to selling companies um you know day in day out and then yes if you have investors rely on them too and that was how to sell your company as well now we've covered pretty much every step but I do want to share some of the key mistakes that I think that a lot of
• 135:00 - 135:30 Founders make and how you can actually avoid them because I think that just avoiding those can save you a lot of time and money along the way so let's jump into them okay so in this bonus section I want to talk about some of the largest mistakes that I've seen so many people go down and how you can avoid them in your startup you see when I ran a startup accelerator program I literally saw thousands of startups and so many of the mistakes were the same so if you can simply avoid those mistakes you can learn from other people's and you don't have to commit those and you don't have to waste time and money so
• 135:30 - 136:00 let's talk about the key ones that I found the first one is don't hire expensive programmers and designers to test the market and to get first demand to get an understanding and even usually to build your first product there are tools out there that allow you to do that yourself and to have more control why because the number one reason startups fail is because they don't find product markeet fit and that Journey sometimes can take a while so the more that you invest in learning the skills to actually experiment with different uh sort of Target markets and business
• 136:00 - 136:30 models and products the more likely you are to be able to nail it and at some point then be able to grow the business right so having control early on is really important and as soon as the bank hits zero is pretty much when you have to close so for that not to happen make sure that you aren't spending a bunch of money left and right the second thing is procrastination so basically that can take form of shiny object syndrome where you're constantly distracted like interested in all these cool new things coming out but you're not actually
• 136:30 - 137:00 taking actions um another way that that could show itself is basically through perfectionism so you're like working on something and you want it to be so perfect and it takes ages for you to launch that first product like and then you end up going to Market realizing oh we have to change it anyway and so all that Perfection was for really for nothing so time early on in a startup is one of the most important resources that you have and the quicker you're able to quickly figure out what the market actually wants and kind of pivot towards
• 137:00 - 137:30 that the quicker that you're going to be able to find product Market fit generate revenue and then be able to grow from there another thing is analysis paralysis so basically just overthinking things thinking that you can think your way through problems no you got to take action action over Perfection as we talked about earlier and through those actions you're going to understand what's required and then you're going to be able to adapt that now the third piece of advice is that if you are going to fund raise trust me it takes a huge amount of time and effort constantly changing pitch deck's Financial
• 137:30 - 138:00 forecasts and you definitely don't want to do that too early right because every moment is the moment you're taking out from actually building your business plus no investor cares until you actually have Revenue so make sure that you only go after raising money if ever when you have revenue and revenue over at least at least 3 to 6 months with a proven model and you're really just looking for that money to grow now the next piece of advice is to not get distracted by the competition you can
• 138:00 - 138:30 build businesses million dooll businesses with lots of direct competitors so don't think that because there's a company that's doing something similar to what you do that there isn't an opportunity for you to do it yourself and have a million dooll business don't always think that you have to build a billion dooll business to be happy often times this is what we hear in the news and it is a load of BS if you ask me we want to really build businesses so that we have freedom so that we create this Financial Freedom and uh also so that we
• 138:30 - 139:00 can do things that we actually care about and build things that are meaningful so don't always get caught up into the main Narrative of like hey I got to raise a bunch of money and then I got to build a billion dooll company or nothing trust me there are so many happy Founders out there that are running companies that just generate a couple hundred, for them personally every single year and through that you can do it for years and years and be very happy and my last piece of advice which is probably the most important is do not procrastinate on your business
• 139:00 - 139:30 model you don't have a business until you have first paying customers so make sure to very quickly test business models out it's okay if you don't make money from the first business model and if that doesn't work out because you always have the opportunity to change but if you're procrastinating on making money you will never figure out how to turn this idea into a revenue generating business and that's ultimately why we're all here thanks so much for watching everyone if you got some value from this you know please just check it out
• 139:30 - 140:00 subscribe turn on the Bell so you can be the first to find more videos from me and the we are no code channel uh with that thanks so much and make sure to learn the skills and the strategies to make you succeed in the long run let's go my friends