Episode #7 - What You Really Need to Start a Business
Building off episode seven, Dale explains exactly how to turn your idea into paying customers — using the promise, trust, and guarantee framework. They also introduce a fun new segment called Merger or Murder, where they debate whether a business idea is worth bringing into your own company.
Hello and welcome to the Sequoia Project podcast. Episode 7. Today I want to jump into a little bit more, I want to get a little bit more specific. So if you've listened from episode one to now, and you're thinking, man, there's some good stuff in here. I want to start a business, I want to get into the actual foundation of starting a business. That's what we're going to talk about today. So first order of business is going to be what you need to start a business.
Dale: The first thing is obviously now you have the idea. So the steps are going to be now you need to build an offer. This might sound counterintuitive because you might be like, no, I need to have the perfect product. I need to have the perfect thing. No, actually you don't. Right now what you need to understand is what that offer is going to give to your audience. And you need to be able to put something in front of them to get them to tell you if they want it or not.
Dale: The prerequisite for a business: needs to solve a problem. There's not a company, business, product or anything out there right now that doesn't do that. If everyone in the world knew how to do everything, service businesses wouldn't exist. The problem and solution is really the biggest variable — if you have an idea and it doesn't solve a problem, it's not a business. It needs to be simple, it's logical, and it generates a result.
Coby: The very basics there — an idea. You need an idea of what you want to do. When I came to you, I didn't have an idea. I knew I wanted to start a business. I didn't know what I wanted to do. But I think it's — don't need an idea straight away in the sense to start, but you do need an idea of where you want to go. I suppose that end outcome. Because I feel like from there, once you have that idea of where you want to go, you can completely reverse engineer how to get there.
Dale: So if you want a tangible thing that you can go, all right, where do I start — what skills or equipment do I have? Then the second thing was we said, who are our networks? Who can we speak to. Third one was what problem did it solve? Everyone wants their lawn care done twice a month, that's a recurring problem. Instead of doing an invoice, you could do a subscription model, you get them on debit, and then you just have the rollover from there. The four criteria: is it simple? Does it solve a problem? What skills and equipment do I have? And how could I do it differently?
Coby: Yeah, I ended up getting a couple of people that came in and they ended up talking. They ended up talking to their friends and family afterwards. They've gotten their photos and all that sort of stuff taken. And then we slowly built up that price from zero dollars to fifty dollars to a hundred dollars to two hundred and fifty dollars. And then we went out and shot weddings. When I started, I offered it to the community for free. The only thing I wanted in return was an honest review. Once they had that review there, people can now go to our pages and see that there's the trust. And that again, like Dale said, started from building trust from you and I working completely for free. And that was the trust building.