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5 Steps to Start Your First Business

2023-05-10 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali, Daniel Priestley · recording, 17:01 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Business and entrepreneurship · mode: Explanation and tutorial · tags: His own products discussed, His own numbers, Lesson from a book, AI, Sponsor segment present

In a Money Club episode built on Daniel Priestley's five-step plan, Ali presents the CASTLE method for a first business: generate ideas, build a free minimum viable product for lead generation, shape the product to the market through customer conversations, then launch and scale; everything, he says, is downstream of lead generation.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Starting a business as a step-by-step process: the CASTLE method and a free template

  • ★★★ Ali says starting a business is a step-by-step process, and following the steps of his CASTLE method makes it far more manageable. — 00:00:00
  • ★★ Ali tells beginners who have not yet started a business that following the first two steps of the CASTLE method will give them a working minimum viable product, hopefully in under two hours. (hedged) — 00:00:39

00:01:08 — Step one, conceptualise: ideation, AI and the Hedgehog Concept, the wand studio example

  • ★★ Daniel Priestley's first step is ideation: come up with at least ten business ideas, then work out which one, or which two or three, would be best. — 00:01:08
  • ★★ Ali calls Daniel Priestley's Oversubscribed his most highlighted book of all time and says its knowledge has directly translated into over $2 million of sales for his business. — 00:01:54
  • ★★ Ali suggests using artificial intelligence to help come up with business ideas and refine the value proposition. — 00:02:24
  • ★★ Ali cites the Hedgehog Concept from Jim Collins's Good to Great: a business can flourish at the intersection of what the market wants, what you could be best in the world at and what you personally enjoy. — 00:02:53
  • ★★★ For a first business, Ali says, by far the most important part of the Hedgehog Concept is the problem you solve for your customers: focus on being of service rather than being selfish. — 00:02:53

00:03:51 — Step two, assemble a minimum viable product: lead generation, free scorecards and webinars

  • ★★★ Step two of the CASTLE method, as Daniel Priestley teaches it, is to start with a very simple minimum viable product whose objective is lead generation. — 00:04:20

  • ★★★ Ali calls it a golden law of business that everything is downstream of lead generation. — 00:04:20

    “And this is a golden law of business. Everything is downstream of lead generation.”

  • ★★ Ali defines a lead as any indicator of interest: a minimum viable product gets such indicators from the market by giving away something of value for free. — 00:04:50

  • ★★★ Ali recommends giving the first product away for free rather than charging for it: if people will not sign up for it free, they will never pay for anything. — 00:04:50
  • ★★ Of the free minimum viable products a new business can make, Ali recommends two: a scorecard or a free webinar. — 00:05:19

00:05:48 — Building a "which wand is right for you" scorecard in ScoreApp

  • ★★ Ali has recently started using scorecards, glorified online quizzes, as minimum viable products in his business: people love filling in online quizzes, and the questions help validate the business idea. — 00:05:48
  • ★★ For scorecards Ali's team has used ScoreApp for the last six months, an app designed for them and owned by Daniel Priestley, author of Scorecard Marketing. — 00:06:17
  • ★ Ali's business uses scorecards to generate leads for its products, among them a productivity quiz and scorecards for podcasters, brand income, side hustles, YouTube growth and the wheel of life. — 00:06:17
  • ★★ ScoreApp does not sponsor the video, but Ali invested in it about two weeks earlier because he loves it and his team uses it so much. — 00:06:46
  • ★ Asking for contact details at the start of a lead-generation scorecard, Ali notes, means you get the contact details of everyone who takes it. — 00:08:15

00:09:10 — Sponsor read: Trading 212

  • ★★ Ali generally invests most of his money in broad stock market index funds like the S&P 500, where the vast majority of his net worth sits, keeping some money aside to play with individual stock picking. — 00:09:59 · S&P 500

00:10:57 — Step three, shape towards product-market fit: the Part-Time YouTuber Academy survey

  • ★★ Daniel Priestley defines product-market fit, the third step, as adjusting the product to meet the market: you imagined it red, but everyone wants it blue. — 00:10:57
  • ★★ In Ali's wand example of step three, talking to customers may show that they would rather buy an online wandcraft course first, with the custom wand upsold later, something he would not have known without validating the idea with customers. — 00:11:43
  • ★★ Before the Part-Time YouTuber Academy, Ali planned a course teaching creators with over 100,000 subscribers to scale their systems, delegate, hire a team and build a business around their channel. — 00:12:13 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★ When Ali's pre-launch survey for the Part-Time YouTuber Academy went out on his email list and Twitter, 99% of respondents had not started a YouTube channel and about 0.01% had over 100,000 subscribers. — 00:12:13 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★★ Ali's audience turned out to be mostly YouTube beginners, so the Part-Time YouTuber Academy was moulded to be far more beginner-friendly, reached product-market fit and became a multimillion-dollar product. — 00:12:42 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy

00:13:29 — Step four, launch: go to market, emotion, logic and urgency, Apple

  • ★★ In step four, launch, Ali says a business that has validated its idea puts marketing behind the product: paid ads, influencers showing it on their YouTube channels, even knocking on doors. — 00:13:40
  • ★★★ Daniel Priestley says every sale is triggered by a combination of emotion, logic and urgency: every business is naturally good at only one of them, while great businesses use all three in the right doses. — 00:13:40
  • ★★ Ali calls Apple good at all three: logic through marketing that says the iPhone camera is better than last time, emotion through its keynotes and ads, and urgency through pre-orders for an iPhone that will sell out. — 00:14:22 · Apple, iPhone

00:14:51 — Step five, expand and scale: a CEO coach and books on marketing

  • ★★ Daniel Priestley's fifth step, expand and scale, normally means new products, new markets and new territories. — 00:14:51
  • ★★ Daniel Priestley: Very few businesses reach the scaling stage, Daniel Priestley says, because few even get to launch: people get hamstrung along the way by not giving things away for free. — 00:14:51
  • ★★ Ali, just dipping his toes into scaling, says a CEO or business coach is really helpful for it; his business spends thousands of dollars a month on his CEO coach Eric Partaker, who has scaled many businesses. — 00:15:20
  • ★★★ To learn marketing and how to get customers to buy, Ali recommends two books: Alex Hormozi's $100M Offers and Russell Brunson's DotCom Secrets. — 00:15:20
  • ★★ For a launch-based business Ali also recommends Daniel Priestley's Oversubscribed, again calling it his most highlighted business book of all time. — 00:15:49
  • ★★ Ali calls such marketing books too much for beginners: first conceptualise, assemble a minimum viable product and get product-market fit, and only then worry about copywriting, sales and marketing. — 00:15:49

00:16:18 — Recap: everything is downstream of lead generation; the Deep Dive interview with Daniel Priestley

  • ★★★ Ali's main takeaway: validate a business idea by getting people in for free through a scorecard, a webinar or a landing page, then have real conversations with those customers to reach product-market fit. — 00:16:18
  • ★ Ali's long-form Deep Dive podcast interview with Daniel Priestley covers these steps in much more detail. — 00:16:18 · Deep Dive

Threads in this video

Mentioned

Central: CASTLE method · Daniel Priestley · lead generation · minimum viable product · Oversubscribed · Part-Time YouTuber Academy · product-market fit · ScoreApp

Also: People: Alex Hormozi · Eric Partaker · Jim Collins · Russell Brunson

Projects: Deep Dive

Works: $100M Offers · DotCom Secrets · Good to Great · Scorecard Marketing

Organizations: Apple

Concepts: artificial intelligence · Hedgehog Concept

Products: iPhone

Also centred on Daniel Priestley: I Asked 15 Experts For Life Advice. Here's What I Learned. · A Multi-Millionaire's Advice on Starting a Business #shorts · I Asked 5 Millionaires for Their Best Financial Advice · 7 Life Lessons School Didn’t Teach You

Also centred on lead generation: I Asked 15 Experts For Life Advice. Here's What I Learned. · I Asked 5 Millionaires for Their Best Financial Advice

Also centred on minimum viable product: I Asked 15 Experts For Life Advice. Here's What I Learned.

Also centred on Oversubscribed: The Biggest Lessons from 110 Books

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