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CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Author’s Note

Foreword – The 48-Hour Start-Up Philosophy

1 One Weekend

2 Coming Up with an Idea

3 A Journey of a Thousand Miles …

4 The Product

5 Creating a Kick-Ass Brand

6 Dot.com from Day One

7 Finding Your First Customer

8 What Next?

9 Resources, Links, Tools, Places to Go, Things to Read

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

AUTHOR’S NOTE

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

FOREWORD

THE 48-HOUR START-UP PHILOSOPHY

For anyone with a dream to start up on their own, there are endless airport bookshops filled with ‘build a billion-dollar company’ manuals. But what if your dream isn’t to build the next Apple? What if your dream is more … realistic?

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

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

The idea that starting a business can be your route to freedom and adventure – to doing what you were born to do – can, for some people, be a slightly overwhelming prospect. A lot of people labour over their ideas, scheming and planning for years on end – with a worry that their idea isn’t quite right yet, that maybe they need to do more market research to be completely sure that it won’t be a total flop.

More than anything, this fear of failure stops people from pursuing their dreams. We hold ourselves back from what we deserve in life because we worry that if things don’t work out as they should and we end up with egg on our faces, people will laugh – or worse, that they won’t give us another chance.

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

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

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

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

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

By hotwiring the whole start-up process in this way, you’ll be able to do in days what most start-up entrepreneurs spend months on. Sure, you won’t build a billion-dollar company in a weekend, but you’ll be amazed at what you can achieve with a methodical process and, above all, two days of complete focus.

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

CHAPTER 1

ONE WEEKEND

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

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

Throughout my adventures as a young entrepreneur, I’ve had the pleasure of speaking at literally hundreds of entrepreneur events around the world. No matter how different the culture of the host country might be from my own, I have always felt at home in the company of other entrepreneurs. We are a sort of dysfunctional global family of people who just happen to think the same sort of way – people who don’t want to work for someone else, but who want to make a mark on the world in our own particular way.

We’re a group of people who like coming up with ideas, sometimes inventing products that hitherto didn’t exist in the world. In my experience at least, we’re also a group of people who tend to feel that life is short – that we ought to make the most of every second we have. For all kinds of reasons, we see starting a business as the best way of doing that – an opportunity to make a career for ourselves, maybe work with our friends, do something we love and perhaps in some small way change the world. What more could you want from your work?

But something I have found on my travels in this community is that not all of the people who feel this way actually do act on their emotions. In fact, most of the people who harbour such feelings live their lives in a fashion that contradicts them – they hold down a job, study at university, work towards a rise, pay their mortgages and generally go along with the status quo.

THE CULT OF WANTREPRENEURSHIP

Everywhere I’ve gone on my trips, speaking at different entrepreneurship events, I’ve been aware of the legions of ‘wantrepreneurs’ who frequent such conferences. People who think a lot about starting a business – they attend the seminars, buy all the books, even meet with successful entrepreneurs to ask for advice … but they never actually start.

Perhaps they don’t start out of fear of failure or maybe they just procrastinate, putting things off for another day. I am sure a lot of them are waiting for the ‘perfect idea’, which will never really come. They’re always telling their friends about the idea-of-the-week, never giving enough focus to one idea for it to become anything close to a reality.

Far too often, wantrepreneurs will inhibit this very healthy process by keeping their ideas all bottled up to themselves, never even so much as sharing them with anyone – let alone actually getting them onto the market. I think this is all such a tragedy – no doubt all kinds of ideas don’t make it into the world and, more importantly, so many people don’t get the chance of taking them there.

Maybe some of these justifications for inaction sound familiar … and I don’t want to be the one who says it but maybe, just maybe, the phrase ‘wantrepreneur’ applies to you. But don’t worry, it’s a very curable disease. I can assure you that if you’re willing to take action then it’s not a phrase that will describe you for much longer.

TELL EVERYONE YOUR IDEAS

There’s something that, for me, absolutely sums up the wantrepreneur mentality. Quite often, at the end of one of my talks, people will come up to me and introduce themselves. They’ll say, ‘Hey, I have an idea for a business,’ and I’ll say, ‘Oh, great, what’s your idea?’ … ‘Oh no, I can’t tell you that … what if you steal it?’ they’ll shriek.

Not only is this kinda funny, I think it is totally upside down. In my mind, if you have an idea for a business, especially if it’s a half-baked one, you should tell anyone who’ll listen – you never know which person might help you. They might give you some useful feedback or introduce you to someone who works in your industry or if you’re very lucky, point you in the direction of a willing customer.

Because people keep their cards close to their chests in this slightly misguided way, I never do get to hear all of these ideas. I should probably be careful what I say because, for all I know, some of these people I’ve met are working on truly revolutionary, paradigm-shifting, world-changing innovations. The chances are, however, that they’re not.

And that’s not just me being mean. I’m sure you’re well aware that the likelihood of any idea going anywhere is pretty slim – most new businesses barely make it off the starting blocks and, more often than not, the ones that do are destined to fail.

So, in light of the terrible odds facing these bright-eyed entrepreneurs, the chances of their businesses making it are, at least in my opinion, even more slim. If their ideas haven’t so much as had the oxygen of discussion, they really don’t stand a fighting chance.

PESSIMISM AND OPTIMISM

Ideas are extremely precious little things. You can absolutely assume that the first incarnation of any idea is completely wrong – that it needs more bashing about, further iterations, until it actually makes sense. I sometimes think that the perfect environment for an idea to succeed is one with equal parts of blind optimism and honest pessimism.

Let me explain what I mean by this. First off, there’s definitely a need for a little bit of blind faith in the recipe of what makes an idea succeed. If you analyse any idea enough, you’ll soon put yourself off starting it at all. The thing is that most ideas don’t make a lot of sense in the beginning. It’s only by having the faith of actually getting them going and learning as you go that you’ll wind up hitting upon a model that works.

Because of this, you need to have a bit of faith – throw yourself completely into your idea even if it isn’t all perfectly mapped out at the start. So many wantrepreneurs are waiting to complete a business plan or do more market research – the truth is that your idea will never be perfectly formed before it gets out into the world. Basically, you just need to start.

Coupled with this faith, you need your idea to go through a bit of a beating. If nothing else, you need to talk to a few people to be sure that you’re not completely crazy … or at least that your idea isn’t. You will be tempted to simply ask your family and friends what they think, but the fact is that they aren’t really going to give you impartial advice – they love you too much to tell you honestly if your idea stinks.

So, you need to try running your idea past some people who have been there and done it before or some people who are inside your chosen industry who know what they’re talking about. You need to find some people who aren’t afraid of hurting your feelings, people who don’t have any kind of vested interest in you or your idea.

This process doesn’t need to take a lot of time and, of course, later in the book we will talk about some of the ways that you can find this critique very quickly. If you can muster up enough optimism to throw yourself wholeheartedly into your idea and also find some pessimists to help bash it into shape, your little caterpillar of a concept might well grow into a beautiful butterfly.

Of course, some of your ideas will be beaten to death by pessimism – and perhaps quite rightly. Never be too pig-headed to change your idea or change your mind. If all the advice comes back as a thumbs-down, maybe consider your other options.

No matter how many ideas you have to go through, the most important thing is that you maintain your optimism. I guarantee that if you do that, eventually you’ll make a start and you’ll graduate from wantrepreneur to entrepreneur.

MY START AS AN ENTREPRENEUR

In my case, I always wanted to be an entrepreneur, perhaps from an unusually young age. I’m not exactly sure where it started but I was always making things and selling thing to the neighbours.

My earliest memory of trying to make money was from when I was about eight years old. I baked some cakes and sold them to my teachers at school. I sent the money that I made to Greenpeace, my favourite charity at the time. By ten, my entrepreneurial ambitions had grown and I was fascinated by the simple businesses that I came across as a child on the outskirts of my home town of Edinburgh. I visited a local chicken farm with a childhood friend. ‘What a great business!’ I thought: the farmer just has to feed the chickens, they lay eggs, and he can carefully steal them to sell for a profit, without having to share any of the takings with his feathered employees. Bingo!

We convinced the farmer to give us a box of eggs for free, which I took home to my mum and dad and explained that we’d had this brilliant business idea. We would keep the eggs warm so that they would hatch and then sell the eggs that the resulting brood of chickens would lay!

As I’m sure you can imagine, my parents weren’t particularly keen on this business idea – of turning their suburban back garden into a chicken farm! Fairly used to my hare-brained schemes by this point, however, they let us give it a shot, not really expecting two ten-year-old boys could find a way of hatching eggs.

And so we put the eggs on top of the cable TV box under the telly, where it was kind of warm. And, amazingly, three weeks later, four of the eggs hatched into little chickens. The poor things probably thought that Jerry Springer was their mum!

We raised the chickens in the house, gave them names, and soon they were big enough to go out into a house my dad built for them in the garden. Before long, they were laying eggs, which we sold to the neighbours.

Unfortunately, my chicken farming career was sadly cut short one afternoon when the local fox decided to eat the chickens for dinner! I guess you could say that I learned my first real lesson as an entrepreneur – that, at the absolute least, you should look for a business idea that doesn’t have any natural predators!

As I’m sure you can tell by this point, my beloved parents were very supportive of my no doubt exhausting entrepreneurial energy as a child. My interests baffled them, and everyone around us. Neither of my parents nor anyone we knew had ever started a business before – where this interest came from was something of a mystery.

FROM EGGS TO BACON

It wasn’t long before I met an entrepreneur for the first time. One of my high school friends had a job as a ‘bacon boy’, selling bacon and sausages door to door. He told me about how he was paid 30p commission for each packet of bacon that he sold. I was instantly hooked – where could I sign up?

My friend explained that since I was only 12 this would be a problem – I would have to pretend that I was 13. ‘No problem,’ I exclaimed. And so it was arranged that my friend would introduce me to the boss – The Bacon Man, a Mr Alan Bryson. Despite my naïvety and perhaps the insincerity of some of my answers, I got the job, and within days we were pounding the concrete, knocking on doors all over the neighbourhood.

It didn’t take long for me to build up a list of regular customers. I would walk miles every evening after school, proudly wearing my white uniform and always trying to improve my pitch. In the beginning I was selling maybe 20 packets a week, but gradually I found myself close to breaking the 50-packet-a-week mark.

TEENAGED COMPETITION

The Bacon Man published a weekly newsletter for his fifty or so teenaged, spotty sales reps. He would include motivational quotes – ‘If you fail to plan, you should plan to fail,’ that sort of thing – along with a ‘Top 10’ table of who had grossed the most sales that week.

A few months into the job, I found myself published in the top ten for the first time. My sense of achievement was immense – I had grown my delivery route to include all of the well-to-do neighbourhoods in the west of Edinburgh. It wasn’t an easy job and I worked hard at it. I would walk down vast driveways in the rain, only to be told that the owners were Muslim, Jewish, on holiday, on a diet or just didn’t have any money to hand.

Eventually, at around 60 packets sold in one week, I found myself in second place with another boy. His name was Richard Field; I can remember his name to this day. He had beaten me by only a few packs – next week I was resolved to top the charts.

But I quickly learned that he wasn’t going to give up the top spot easily, and so found myself engaged in a spate of competitive bacon selling.

Our weekly totals rapidly touched 80 packets apiece and continued to climb. One week he would have the top spot; the next it would be mine. Eventually, partly thanks to the modest innovation of doing my round by bicycle instead of on foot, I managed to overtake him for good. This competition resulted in an achievement I still feel a twinge of pride over: I became the first Bacon Boy to sell 100 packets in a week!

Impressed by my accomplishment, the Bacon Man asked me to become his new right-hand man. I was 13 years old and nobody so young had been granted such an honour before. The deal was that he’d pick me up from school in his van and drop me off in an area of town I’d never been to. I’d be given an under-performing Bacon Boy and it would be my task to get them up to speed.

What a wonderful job, I thought. And that wasn’t all: I’d be paid the incredible sum of £20 a day. An unheard-of amount among the kids of our playground.

‘Sounds great!’ I thought. ‘No way!’ my parents shrieked. Whether they didn’t like the idea of me wandering through the wrong parts of town in the dark, or were concerned that all this extracurricular bacon selling would affect my studies, I’m not sure, but my parents’ reservations stood no chance against my enthusiasm, and I was soon selling bacon wherever it needed to be sold. The Bacon Man taught me everything he knew. He was truly an archetypal entrepreneur – a man who saw an opportunity and went for it, regardless of how unconventional a business model it no doubt appeared to his friends when he first started ‘The Bacon Service’.

He taught me the basics of customer service. He would go crazy if he found out that a Bacon Boy hadn’t been doing his ‘call backs’. This was where you would have to walk back to a house of one of your regular customers at the end of your round – if they had been out the first time you called. Of course, this was a total pain in the ass, especially if they were still out the second time around.

But the lesson he taught me was that if you didn’t get hold of your customer, you had let them down. Some, for example, were old ladies who counted on your delivery each week. They would often have the correct change all ready for you. If they had popped out to the post-box and ended up missing their bacon that week, there was a risk they’d buy a multipack at the supermarket instead and you would lose them forever.

KEEP ON KNOCKING

The bacon-selling job was a truly formative experience, and the attitude it pressed into me has had an impact on me to this day.

There is no more physically exhausting and mentally gruelling way to sell a product than by going door to door with it piled high in a plastic bucket. At least if you do telesales you have a seat.

Add to that the fact that there can’t be many more unpleasant climates in which to go door-to-door selling than the one we have here in Scotland. For the most part, it was so cold outside that the bacon we were selling needed no further refrigeration!

Our customers were Scottish housewives – a thrifty bunch who knew the prices of equivalent products in the supermarket only too well. It’s safe to say that a Bacon Boy faces more than his fair share of rejection on his rounds.

We would knock on nine doors before the tenth might say ‘yes’, taking a packet from our shivering hands and replacing it with a few coins. At first, being rejected over and over again was hard to take. But in the end I came to accept that as a Bacon Boy, just as in life, you have to knock on thousands of doors, each time with the same enthusiasm as the last. For the most part, anyone’s career as an entrepreneur is a sea of rejection, peppered with the occasional hard-won sale. A process of trying something, failing, changing tack a little and trying again. This is natural.

My youthful sales experience provided me with a great education. I was totally captivated by the whole world of starting a business – amazed that through nothing more than walking the streets, pressing doorbells and talking to people, I could build a business out of thin air, despite my being a teenager who knew nothing about anything. I could secure hundreds of regular customers and even grow my little enterprise week on week, simply by doing a good job.

Remember, at the start of your 48-hour journey, the importance of starting small. There is no shame in launching a product on a tiny scale – at a farmers’ market, or by picking up the phone, or, heaven forbid, knocking on doors.

In the end, despite my fondness for the Bacon Man and the lessons he was teaching me, I had a burning desire to ‘stick it to the Man’. Why was I spending my life working for someone else when I now knew how to do it on my own?