MFM Mini - The Burrito Trick: How I Got My First 20 Customers

here's a mistake that i've noticed a lot of people make when it comes to business they make big plans and big plans aren't bad they're they're just like a sneaky form of procrastination right because a big plan means you're putting off action until number one you're finished writing up the plan and number two the big plan usually takes place it plays out over weeks or months from now and it's usually leading up to a big launch that's a few months from now and so i'll tell you a story about how we almost fell under this trap but got out of it okay so there's a few years ago we were making an app for high schoolers and and so the engineers had built like a simple prototype honestly was pretty crappy it wasn't even in the app store yet we were playing within we kinda liked it but we were a bunch of thirty year old you know hairy dudes and so we said we don't know if high schoolers are gonna like this the way we like this so so i told our two growth guys i went to tyler and jason i said alright so those guys the engineers they're building this thing how are we gonna get users and tyler and jason they're smart guys they you know so they grabbed a marker they said alright we're up for the challenge how are we gonna get users and they went start brainstorming a a growth plan and so they thought you know they went to whiteboard and they're writing down we could facebook ads we could oh these instagram influencers would get them to shout us out we can do influencer program we could create a referral system or referral program ambassador program inside these high and anytime you hear the word program or committee you know just run the other way it's it's usually that's for things that i'm mature and so if you're working on an early idea you don't really wanna be baking up full programs just yet and so these were all good ideas they weren't bad but they were things that would take us weeks or even months to set up right even facebook ads we couldn't do because the app wasn't even live in the store it takes a week to get approved to you know for for a new app in the store and so so we thought okay well what are gonna do do we sit around and wait or or what so we're we're at lunch and these guys are telling us the ideas and then we all kinda had this realization we have a framework we had a framework at i a startup which was called the one month one week one hour a one day one hour framework right and so anytime we have a plan that was like this this will take us a month to build this this will take us two months to build this somebody's somebody in the room it's their job to say dude that's an awesome idea love that idea i think it's gonna be great you know what's the one week version of that what's what's the one day version that what's something we could do today that we could ship that makes progress towards that end future and it's basically saying how do grab the rope and tug the future forward how do i pull the future into the present and how do i simplify this great idea so that we can test it out and see what happens because we've learned that most of our great ideas aren't so great when they when they actually touch customers when they actually get get into contact with customers and so so we agree we were there we said okay yeah these programs are good ideas but let's what's the one day version if we said why could just call my my nieces and nephews and i could just ask them if they'll try it out with their friends so we called them and they're in school so they couldn't pick up their phones we said alright well what are we gonna do it's lunch lunchtime now we're gonna wait till tonight call them tell them about it get them to tell their friends that's at least a one day thing and so somebody asked the question they go alright what's the one hour version we said the one hour the one hour the one hour what what can we do and that's when we we had the idea we said well you know what the mall that's right next to us our office was in selma san francisco there's a big mall west field mall we said you know in that mall there's always teens just walking around like maybe we just go there and maybe we could just like get them to test our app out it's like well isn't that kind creepy it's like yeah but like just do it in a non creepy way okay and so tyler jason the other they're like alright we got this don't worry and they went away to the room for like five minutes and they came back out with a poster that said free burrito if you try our app and they said they're gonna go stand in front of chipotle which is like between there was a chipotle like a job juice or whatever a bunch of foot traffic went and they're like we're gonna hold the sign it said set they go and they hold the sign up and they in one hour they had a whole bunch of people basically playing with the app at the table because hey you if you use this app and you give us feedback you'll get a free buy a burrito right we'll buy you a seven dollar burrito and so in one hour we went from zero customers to twenty customers and twenty still not like oh my god congratulations you've cracked growth but twenty is a huge leap when you're at zero and we didn't need a program that was gonna give us two thousand twenty thousand or two hundred thousand users but we didn't even have twenty and so those twenty pointed out a whole bunch of little things that they were like oh yeah like i was confused about this or like yeah but like this seems like a lot of work so i wouldn't honestly i wouldn't really do this i would just wanna do this simple thing instead and so we got a bunch of feedback about what to build plus we got a bunch of email addresses of kids we basically were like yeah cool like if you guys make the new version of this based on the feedback like i'll try it out i'll tell my friends about it and this always stuck with me and actually this became a a thing that we did every single day that week in fact we would go to a high school we would stand outside the high school again you know thirty something year old harry dude standing outside the high school it's not great but we had our sign our burrito sign and in kids we're coming out from the it was like after school or whatever they're leaving and we would get hundreds of kids to sign up for this they thought oh i'm gonna get a free yeah i'll sign up and as soon as a few people were at the table signing up everybody else just wanted to get it to and you know so we thought oh maybe this maybe get in trouble right we had all kinds of things we might talk all kinds of reasons we might talk ourselves out of this and sure enough a teacher comes out and adult comes out and they're like excuse me what are you doing and we're like oh ma'am sorry you know not to alarm you yeah we're just we're a startup up nearby and we're building an app that we think that high school students will love it helps them with x y z and we were just looking for some feedback and so we were here to basically recruit some beta testers and we were waiting for her to say like you know get out of here before they call the cops and instead what she said was that's so cool my kids love startups here but we have no like startup up classes or programs hey would you guys be interested in coming in and talking to our class tomorrow you know i teach whatever computer science or something whatever it was in the school and this is she's like i teach in the school and you know i could just let you guys guess teach for a day talking about what it's like to work at a startup and how how do you build an app and so all of a sudden we went from creepy dudes given out burritos getting maybe ten or twenty students at a time to being invited into the school where every hour we would teach first period through six period or whatever and it would have twenty five kids per per class and all of a sudden in one day we would get a hundred and twenty five students as a captive audience we're talking them we're teaching the class for them it was fun and we were getting a bunch of users all who all knew each other which was even better right because there's like we when you use an app that your friends use you have a better experience and so that was our story of having you know finding a way to pull the future forward to have a high bias for action and not fall into the trap of making quote unquote big plans right we do it because we're with right intentions we just wanted to be successful and it seems like a big well written out well thought out you know multi stage plan is a better plan i don't think so i think a simple plan violently executed today is better than the the complicated multi stage multi layered nuanced plan that we're gonna do over the next six months when it comes to an early stage ideas just remember ideas are ideas and inspiration behind them are are perishable they expire and so you wanna strike while the idea is hot and not wait around falling into the trap of making big plans alright if you like these sunday stories by the way my name is sean and i'm one of the c hosts of my first million i do these quickly kind of on friday or saturday nights whatever topic comes to mind i just talk about also do this for my newsletter if you're not signed up for it you should there's i think about thirty thousand people on the newsletter i'm trying to get it to a hundred k this year and if you like stories like this that are like kind of simple business stories that help you be a better entrepreneur help you get better ideas you should sign up for it's just go to sean por dot com it's just my name sean p dot com i'll put the link in the description so you can spell it out s h a a n p u r i dot com and join the newsletter to get more stories like this on a weekly basis alright i'm out of here hey my first million listeners this is steph from trends now if you've been a die hard my first million ben for a while you probably know what trends is but if you're new trends is part of the hustle family just like my first million and just like my first million what we do at trends is we love building businesses and what our team does is we find ideas we figure out non obvious opportunities we use tons of different tools to surface ideas from around the web like google trends or jungle scout app annie bankruptcy filings funding announcements and then we tell you exactly how to capitalize so trends is a weekly email it is a community of over fifteen thousand subscribers that you can work together on building businesses with and you're gonna see tons of people like sam and sean in that community and a bunch of other features but here's why i'm on the pod today we have a sick giveaway coming up and i'm not talking about water bottle and stickers we're talking about a three d printer and i know you're probably thinking stuff a three d printer weren't those like the overhead things from a decade ago well yes and no after the hype dye down 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