Will It Fly? by Pat Flynn

A lack of proper validation kills more businesses than anything else. Will It Fly provides you with action-based examples, small-scale litmus tests, and real-world case studies that ensure you properly vet your idea before you spend your hard-earned time and money. Pat’s book is the business flight manual you never had to transform your part of a plan into a business that takes off and soars.

Notes from, “Flynn, Pat. Will It Fly?: How to Test Your Next Business Idea So You Don’t Waste Your Time and Money. SPI Publications. Kindle Edition.”

Part 1: Mission Design

The purpose of Mission Design is to help you understand what your goals are in all areas of your life and help you determine whether or not your target idea supports them. How your target idea will perform in the market means nothing if you can’t validate how it can support you first. (pp. 46-47).

The Airport Test

Let’s say you’ve climbed into a DeLorean time machine and zapped yourself five years into the future. You find yourself at the airport. As you sit in the terminal, waiting for your next flight, you feel someone tap your shoulder. You turn around and your face immediately breaks into a huge smile as you recognize an old friend from school. Your friend exclaims, “I thought that was you! It’s been too long since we’ve connected!” (p. 50).

Now here comes the key question: What’s happening in your life five years from now that makes you respond like this? (p. 51).

We can use this same exercise to discover whether or not your target idea aligns with your own ideal future. Think of it as interviewing your future self to make sure that you’re making the right decision now, whether or not you move forward with this idea. (p. 52).

Step 1: Set up your sheet

Just grab a sheet of paper, and fold it in half in both directions so that after you unfold it you have it divided into four quadrants. (p. 55).

Step 2: Define the four most important category of your life that you feel is most important to you.

Each of these four spaces on your sheet of paper is going to represent a category of your life that you feel is most important to you… After you come up with these four categories, write them down on your sheet of paper, each at the top of one of the four quadrants.(p. 57).

Example:

• Family
• Professional
• Finances
• Health

Step 3: Determine why life is awesome five years from now

Within each of these categories of your life, you’re going to write down as many examples of things that would be happening in that area of your life five years from now to make you say that life is amazing… In this thought experiment, what you write down is what your reality will be five years from now. (p. 58).

After you’ve completed the Four Quadrants of You, examine everything you’ve written down. This piece of paper defines who you want to become and it will be the foundation for several decisions that you make from here on out. (p. 64).

The History Test

In The History Test, you’re going to trace all of the jobs, positions, and volunteer work that you’ve ever done. By creating a chronological roadmap of your past work experience, you’ll be able to discover some very interesting patterns about who you are and what works best for you. (pp. 68-69).

Step 1: The what

We are going to look at different experiences from our past to complete this test, but for now let’s start with the first job you ever had. (p.70).

• What: Employee at Picnic People San Diego (p.71).

Step 2: The when

Beneath your first entry, write down when you did that, like this:

• When: 1998-2000 (p. 71).

Step 3: The good

List three answers to the following question.

What did you enjoy about it?

• I got to work with some of my friends.
• My schedule was extremely flexible
• I was able to choose the days I wanted to work. (p. 71).

Step 4: Your Favorite Memory

Next, write down your single favorite memory related to this. (p. 72).

Step 5: The bad

Next, let’s think about what you didn’t like about what you were doing. As before, list three answers to the following question:

What did you NOT enjoy about it?

• I didn’t like having to stand in one place the entire time.
• We had to wear these ugly uniforms—a bright yellow shirt with super short green shorts.
• I didn’t like cleaning up after the hosted events were over. (pp. 72-73).

Step 6: Grade

And finally, based on the following scale, please rate this particular experience based on how much you enjoyed it:

• Grade: C (p. 73).

Repeat this same process with at least two other life experiences. (p. 74). Lay out each of your experiences in chronological order so you can see them all at the same time. (p. 78).

If you’re like most people, this exercise will begin to help you think about the kind of work that’s actually involved with the direction you’re thinking of going, but beyond that, it helps you understand how you can set yourself up for success. (p. 79).

The Shark Bait Test

In this final thought experiment, you suddenly find yourself walking down a brightly lit hallway. Your footsteps echo through the corridor as you move across the polished wood floor. In the distance, at the end of your pathway, are two large wooden doors. As you approach, you notice the walls on either side of you are lined with brightly lit, blue-tinted aquariums, and out of the corner of your eye a small shark swims by and catches your attention, as if to say “hello” (although it could just as well mean “goodbye”). As you step closer to the doors they suddenly part for your entrance into a much larger room, well-decorated but a bit dim, except for what is highlighted with spotlights at the center of the room—a panel of five well-dressed people who have been patiently waiting for your arrival. From left to right, you recognize Mark Cuban, Daymond John, Barbara Corcoran, Kevin O’Leary, Lori Greiner, and Robert Herjavec. You are on the hit TV show Shark Tank. (pp. 82-83).

So as you stand motionless but alert, like a minnow in front of The Sharks, you notice the gentleman in the center of the room, billionaire entrepreneur and investor Kevin O’Leary press his fingers together, look you directly in the eyes and say, “You know, I could probably hire someone right now to do whatever it is you’re thinking of doing. So why should I be interested in working with you? What makes you so special?” (p. 84).

This resistance that you might be feeling, this doubt in your head, is actually a sign that you need to keep moving forward; that this is exactly what you’re supposed to do. As Steven Pressfield, author of The War of Art describes: “Fear is good. Like self-doubt, fear is an indicator. Fear tells us what we have to do. Remember our rule of thumb: The more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it.” (p. 89).

To come back to this scenario, what Kevin is really asking you is this: What can you bring to the table that no one else can? What is your unfair advantage? (pp. 89-90).

This is different from a Unique Selling Proposition, or USP, as we often hear about when starting a business. A USP is about the business itself and how it’s different than the rest. Your unfair advantage, however, is about you. It’s what you have that no one else has. It’s your superpower, and it should absolutely be incorporated into any business with which you become involved. (p. 90).

The best way to know what makes you unique is to hear it from someone else, which is why I recommend finishing off Part 1 with one final exercise, even if you already have an idea of what your unfair advantages are. Exercise: You’re going to email 10 friends and colleagues and ask them to identify your superpowers. (p. 92).

Part 2: Development Lab

Here in the Development Lab we will take your target idea through a series of exercises to help you fully understand exactly what it is. First, we’ll be organizing all of the noise in your brain that surrounds your idea so that we can visually see everything you’re working with. Then, like sculpting a brick of clay, we’ll be molding it into something real. (p. 109).

Germination

The word idea is actually rooted in the Greek word idein, which means, “to see,” so we’re going to take all of those thoughts in your brain, every single light bulb moment you’ve had, and translate that into something visual. Once you can see, you can do. To help you through this, we’re going to create a mind map. (p. 110).

A mind map is simply a visual representation of our thoughts, and it’s an extremely clever and useful way to organize those thoughts and discover important patterns and relationships. (p. 110).

Mind Mapping Phase 1: The Brain Dump

What you’ll need:

• Your mind mapping method (Post-It notes or software) ready.
• A space where you’ll be uninterrupted for 10 minutes.
• A countdown timer (like the one on your mobile phone) set for 10 minutes.
• Any other thing that helps you think best (e.g. coffee, music, your favorite chair)
• And finally, an open mind that won’t think about order, structure, or editing.

What to do (read these instructions first):

When you’re ready, start your countdown timer and then begin to rapidly write down or type as many thoughts or ideas related to your target idea as you can. Anything and everything is fair game. Do not edit, delete, remove, or move anything around yet. (pp. 116-117).

Mind Mapping Phase 2: The Clean Up

The overall mission is to organize everything you’ve written by forming visual clusters of your thoughts that seem to align with one another. To help you remember what those groups are as you go, you can use a different colored Post-It note or colored marker to designate that particular section. Or if you’re using mind mapping software you can begin to name these groups by creating a new branch of your tree and dragging and dropping related thoughts in it. (p. 118).

By the end of this exercise, your seed idea will have germinated and grown into its own lush tree, one with several extending branches and each branch its own set of leaflets. Your target idea has structure; it’s becoming real. (p. 119).

Mind Mapping Phase 3: Pruning Your Tree

Start by removing the low hanging fruit—the obvious notes that don’t really belong… What you have left in front of you is what you need in order to move forward. Should we prune some more? Absolutely. We just don’t need to do right now. (p. 120).

One Sentence

If you were to show someone your mind map right now, assuming they already know what a mind map is, it’s going to be very difficult for them to understand exactly what you’re trying to create. (p. 125).

This exercise consists of writing three iterations of your target idea:

1. One page
2. One paragraph
3. One sentence

With each step you will be further refining your idea, distilling it down to the essential elements. (p. 126).

Conversation and Observation

Over the next two days, your challenge is to talk to 10 people about your target idea. I encourage you to speak to more, but 10 is a great starting point to cover a wide array of potential reactions. Start with people you’re comfortable with, who you know would care to listen and provide great feedback. Then try to speak to at least two people who you’ve never met before. (p. 137).

Tips for How to Share Your Idea:

• Don’t give any opinions leading up to the conversion.
• Don’t sell yourself (or your idea) short.
• Help then Ask.

Tips for How to Listen:

• Consciously listen to the person’s response.
• Don’t take notes or record the conversation.
• Let the person speak.
• Dig deeper by asking quick follow-up questions.
• Don’t just listen to the words.

Part 3: Flight Planning

Here in Part 3, you’re going to explore and assess what the environment in which you are about to fly looks like. (p. 147).

Your 1,000 True Fans

The main idea is that in this world of seven billion people, there are a lot of sub-worlds to which you can become or create a trusted resource, product, or service that those people need or want. You don’t need those sub-worlds to be huge in order to make a difference in the lives of others, and your own. (p. 153).

The Market Map

You’re going to define the box, level, or crowd—the places, people and products that already serve your target audience. This is what I like to call a market map. With this market map, you’ll get a bird’s-eye perspective of the environment to which you are about to enter. (p. 156).

Create Your Market Map

To create your market map, we’re going to find the 3-P’s within your market:

• Places
• People
• Products

Each of these items should be organized into their own separate spreadsheet, each with three columns: name, web address, notes. (p. 157).

The results of this exercise will become a list of places where you could potentially advertise or submit articles to gain exposure and build authority and trust in the market. There are a number of tools available that can help us quickly find the top websites that serve our market, but no other tool is quicker and smarter than Google. So let’s start there. (p. 159).

• Places:
  • blog: keyword
  • forum: keyword
  • social media groups
• People:
  • Top media profiles in Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, Twitter
  • Itunes
  • Buzzsumo
• Products
  • Amazon.com

The Customer P.L.A.N.

Your Customer P.L.A.N. is broken down into four sections, in this specific order: (p. 189).

• Problems
• Language
• Anecdotes
• Needs

To help you organize the research you’re about to do, we’re going to add one additional sub-sheet to your master spreadsheet. Title the sheet P.L.A.N., and then add headings to four separate columns: Problems, Language, Anecdotes, and Needs. Then, keep reading. (pp. 191-192).

P: Problem

A business idea is really just a potential solution to a target customer’s pain or problem. The better you can solve that person’s problem, the more successful your business will become. (p. 192).

• 1-to-1 Real Time Conversations
• Surveys

L: Language

Your task in this section is to learn the language of your target customer. You’ve done a little bit of this while you were digging into the pains and problems of your target customer, but we’re going to dive even deeper here to reveal a lot more information to help us better understand what’s on their mind. To narrow down our search, we’ll be looking into the three most useful kinds of words and phrases you could collect at this point: (p. 201).

• Questions
  • Forum Search
  • FAQs
• Complaints
  • Forum Search
  • Amazon Reviews
• Keywords
  • Google Related Searches

A: Anecdotes

An anecdote is a short, interesting story, and they’re some of the most powerful tools you can use in your business… Here in the final parts of this research phase, we’re going to find stories about your target customer—real stories. (p. 213).

• Forum Search
• Audio Podcast Interviews

N: Needs

A need is what you believe your customers require to solve a problem, and the product or business becomes the mechanism to fulfill that requirement. (p. 220).

Sometimes you won’t be able to come up with a need, and that’s okay. You don’t have to fill out the entire matrix, but as you go along, try to think clearly about what your target customer requires in order to fight that particular problem. (p. 223).

Elixirs

To finish off your customer P.L.A.N., you’re going to come up with the “elixirs” that address the specific problems and needs of your target customer. (p. 224).

To start, add one more column to your P.L.A.N. spreadsheet and title it Elixir, and then one-by-one, problem-by-problem and need-by-need, come up with what you feel would be the best remedy for that problem… Great entrepreneurs test and validate one solution for one problem at a time, and now it’s just a matter of picking the row in your P.L.A.N.E. that works best for you. (p. 225).

So to finish off this chapter, do the following: (p. 227)

1. Eliminate all but one row and one solution on your matrix.
2. Sit on the idea for a day.
3. Conduct a second mind mapping exercise with your new target solution as the focal point.
4. One page, one paragraph, one sentence.

Part 4: Flight Simulator

In this chapter you’re going to enter your own flight simulator, testing your idea and validating it on a small scale so that you can make sure it works. Along the way, you’ll be able to make adjustments and fine-tune your approach so that you can be ready and confident before you start counting down to the real launch. (p. 233).

Principles Of Validation

The purpose of testing anything is to answer the simple, yet crucial question: does the idea work? Whether it works or it does not, successful validation also comes with understanding why things happened the way they did. This knowledge will bring you closer to your ultimate goal. (pp. 236-237).

1. You receive invaluable feedback from the actions people take.
2. You get early experience selling something.
3. You can get money in your pocket upfront.
4. It will motivate you to follow through and get things done!

Step 1: Get In Front Of An Audience

If you don’t have an audience yet, don’t worry. That audience you need doesn’t have to be one that you own or build yourself. You just need to get access to an audience, and there are several different ways to do that. (p. 241).

• Target Advertising
• Guest Posting
• Forums
• Groups
• The “Poster Child” Formula
• Offline Audiences (Speaking gig in conferences)
• Crowdfunding Platform

Step 2: Hyper-Target

This means getting people in that larger target market to self-identify as someone who wants or needs your particular solution. (p. 254).

In order to get a target segment of the audience to “raise their hand” and express interest, you must first ask them a question or propose a relevant scenario that elicits a “yes” or “that’s me” response from them. (p. 256).

A comment or response is typically the easiest way for people to say “yes,” such as in a forum, a blog post or social media post. A click on a link is another way to gauge interest, such as ones within an email, blog post, or even an advertisement. Other forms of a “hand raise” include downloading something, subscribing to an email list, sending you a personal email, or even picking up the phone and calling you. (p. 256).

Step 3: Interact And Share Your Solution

There are several methods you can choose to directly interact with your prospects… The following one-on-one methods are ranked from most effective (top) to the least effective (bottom), but also most time consuming in the same order. (pp. 258-259).

• In person
• A video call, like a Google Hangout or Skype conversation
• A phone call
• A private message (i.e. on a forum or social media channel)
• A direct one-on-one email

There are also methods you can use to interact with a large number of your prospects at the same time. (p. 259).

• A live stream or webinar with chat functionality
• A live stream or webinar without chat functionality
• An email broadcast
• A web page with an explainer video
• A web page with text and images only

No matter which method you choose to interact with your prospect, there are three things you must do first before you present your solution, each of which will help your prospect get to know, like, and trust you. (p. 259).

1. Take a minute to learn about them first (while also confirming they are in the right place).
2. Qualify yourself.
3. Be honest about what you’re up to.
4. The pitch.

Step 4: Ask For The Transaction

Asking for a payment before you build your product might feel uncomfortable to you, but again if you’re honest about this with your prospect, you’ll have nothing to worry about. (p. 264).

No matter what method you choose to ask for a pre-order, if you don’t get a response within 24 hours send one more follow-up email that checks to make sure the person received it. (p. 266).

How high should you price your product?

If you’re struggling with where to even start, I’d suggest looking at your competitor’s prices to get an idea… Depending on how you feel your product will stack up to the competition, you can price it relative to what’s already out there and how you’ll compare. (p. 267).

What mechanism do you use to collect pre-orders?

There are a number of web solutions available to us to set up a quick page to collect pre-orders. The one I would recommend is Gumroad (Gumroad.com). (p. 267).

How do you keep in contact with your customers after they pay or pre-order?

A weekly or bi-weekly broadcast email with progress updates and inquiries for feedback can do the trick. Regular communication will ensure they know what’s going on, while also holding you accountable for finishing your product. The worst thing you can do is collect people’s money or get their vote of confidence, and then leave them in the dark. (pp. 268-269).

Countdown

The worst thing you could do is stop. You’ve got momentum on your side so definitely take advantage of that, which means knowing what to do next and then taking action to make it happen. But you already know that, and likely already know what’s next. (p. 308).

• Break it down and appreciate the small wins along the way.
• Get support.
• Treat your customers like gold.
• Remember why.
• Enjoy the ride.