Book: The 7 Day Startup. You Don’t Learn Until You Launch by Dan Norris

November 5, 2014

Dan Norris is a entrepreneur with an obsession for content marketing. He spent fourteen years launching several businesses and trying to make them profitable. But none of his startups survived. He failed every time.

His current company, WP Curve, is profitable and growing over 10% month after month. It is one of the world’s fastest growing WordPress support company. What changed? What did he do different?

In The 7 Day Startup, Dan synthesizes his experience in a seven-step guide to launching a startup.

The biggest mistake people make is obsessing over their idea and not focusing enough on finding people willing to pay for their product.

Dan learned the hard way that you cannot run a business based on assumptions, or that it makes no sense to spend months and money trying to put the perfect webpage and paying system in place, when you have no customers. Because he didn’t understand his business model, increasing revenues had almost no impact on his company’s profits. He found out that while execution is everything, ideas certainly matter. A well-executed bad idea won’t make a business sustainable.

This book can be read back-to-back in a few hours. The main point the author tries to make is that you should launch your business as soon as you can, because until you launch, you are working on assumptions.

Norris covers topics like how to avoid failed validation techniques, how to qualify an idea for a bootstraped startup, or why you should see the point where you can hire in staff or systems to replace you and still continue to generate a profit when testing your idea. In the last pages, the author tries to give day-to-day advice for running your business. However, beware that because the number of topics covered in a relatively short book, there is no in-depth treatment of any of the techniques recommended.

The value of this book for me is that the advice given comes from the author’s personal experience with failure and success. If you have a tendency to overanalyze things, and postpone launching your projects because you don’t have enough data, reading Dan Norris’ The 7 Day Startup can help you get “out of the building” to find customers for your product or service.