Noah Kagan’s book “Million Dollar Weekend” isn’t about getting rich quick.
The multimillionaire founder and CEO of discount software firm AppSumo would be the first to tell you that he didn’t become wealthy overnight.
But by acting quickly and decisively when he realized he had a good idea on his hands, he put himself in the position to succeed. It took Kagan, now 41, just a few days in 2010 to found AppSumo, a company which brought in about $80 million in revenue last year.
Kagan’s idea: copying MacHeist, a site that offers discounted software bundles for Apple users, and making a similar service available for PC. Kagan emailed the founder of Imgur, an image-sharing service popular on Reddit, and offered to promote a discounted version of the software in exchange for a percentage of what he sold.
Then he reached out to Reddit’s founding engineer to ask if he could advertise the deal on the site for free.
“Why not?” Kagan recalls hearing. “Our users love Imgur. They’ll be thrilled to get a discount.”
He paid a developer in Pakistan $48 to build a website with a PayPal button and spent $12 on a domain name. One weekend, $60 down, and he was up and running. The rest, as they say, is history.
If you’re an aspiring entrepreneur, you may be able to ensure that history repeats itself Kagan says: “Literally, you can copy my model.”
Here are three steps he recommends for anyone looking to start a successful business in 48 hours.
1. Get started now
Your natural instinct when looking to start a business may be to learn as much as you possibly can. You might spend days taking courses, reading books and watching YouTube videos to build up your expertise. But ultimately, you’re wasting time, Kagan says.
“You’ve got to start today. You can’t keep watching videos,” he says.
What does that mean? It means that you’ll likely have some ideas that don’t quite get off the ground and others that outright fail from the jump. Consider these experiments rather than failures, Kagan says –…
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