Getting started is this simple...

[KaterCharlie1]

After seeing the upteenth thread where a new member says "I decided to go fastlane, but I have 10 dollars and am eating a raccoon I hit with my '94 Mercury Tracer right now to stave off starvation," or "I read TMF but tell me the exact steps and don't leave anything out," I decided that apparently MJ's really simple explanation wasn't simple enough.

I don't know how else rationalize that guys like @SinisterLex and @IceCreamKid are putting points on the board in mundane fields and people are totally shocked that it's possible to make money that way, like "how could someone who owns a cleaning company for a living possibly get that rich?"

It's pretty easy, as they illustrated, CENTS+badass execution, but it's also easy in parallel fields that don't involve ripping them off. If you missed the basic principle behind their threads (which seemingly a lot of people did, because instead of using it as a launching point for the millions of possible parallel businesses, everyone just started copy/carpet gigs), I'm going to spell it out for you.

There are lots of ways to go fastlane, you can apply CENTS to figure them out. But if you're dead out of ideas, if you've got nothing, there is one way that never fails. In the last two years I have used it over, and over, and over again. Since it seems a lot of people couldn't distill the secret of "churning their own ice cream" from the other threads, here it is:

Boom.




Think it doesn't work? Think again. I'm going to make this live for you guys, at the risk of inadvertently starting dozens of non-EPA and non OSHA compliant ghetto auto body operations, which hopefully won't happen because now you guys have at least the six other possibilities whose little cliparts I pasted up above.

A little over a month ago I decided I was going to learn to paint cars. I had to buy equipment to do it. The equipment cost me $1200. I spend $700 on paint (would have been $350 but I messed up so many times on the first panel that that one consumed the entire materials supply and took three weeks) so $1900 overall. The last panel I shot took me 6 hours including dry time, without dry time, my total effort was 1 hour. Very, very steep learning curve with very, very shallow effort curve once I cracked it.

So I get the car done. I know this girl from back near my parent's house who is friends with one of my younger siblings. She's hard up and has an old station wagon that has a mismatched door because she couldn't afford to fix it or buy a better car. I make her a deal-you buy the base coat only for the door ($45.00 1/2qt ppg) and I'll use my leftover base and clear and my own sandpaper and tools and respray the door to make it an exact match, but no blending because that's a lot more effort and cost. $45 for a probably $250+ job normally.

So he does, and I do, and it looks great. Boom. Done.

So not 4 days later, I get a call from a guy this kid knows from work. He has a car that he wants repainted. He want's it done in a custom metallic (mixed by the shop, no real work on my end except evenly blending the metallics) but the shop wants $9,500 to do it. He says he'll remove all the trim and everything and sand the panels if I can do it for less (that's like at least 75% of the work, but I had the specialty tools and knowledge, whereas unbolting things and sanding requires few/no special tools or knowledge). I'm not typically down for manual labor because I prefer to get paid for sitting or sleeping, but I'm always looking for ways to make tools and other things I buy pay for themselves quickly, so, long story short, I eventually ended up getting paid $4000 for three 8-hour days of work. And I've only been doing this for a month.

I needed no degree, no education, no contacts, nothing except a computer or phone, internet access, access to electricity, and the gumption to save up $1700-2000 to risk on supplies, to increase my income from hypothetically as low as minimum wage to $160/hr. How long would your mummified corpse have been in the ground waiting for Burger King to raise your pay from $10.00/hr to $160/hr? The general managers don't make a third that much. But follow my map, have some savvy in picking a real need people have, and you, O teenage roadkill eater, can be making $7.25/hr January 1st and potentially more than $15,000/mo by January 31st. Replace my spray kit with a battery of carpet cleaners and a van, or some wicked copy skills a laptop and a modem, and you see it's the same formula, with some good advertising thrown in, to get these results.

Luck? You wish you had that excuse. You know how long it was between the time I blew my first content up on social media to the time I landed my first xx,xxx advertising contract?

less than 3 weeks.

See you with your resume are wandering around beating on doors (whether for VC for an untested unproduced and unsold idea, or for a slow-lane job), implicitly broadcasting to employers (and anyone who will follow you online) "I have no direction and no drive, teach me how I can produce some value for people so I can afford to live and eat, hold my hand, make me stable." So, predictably, you get rejection after rejection, and you keep eating that tasty raccoon.

But if you follow the map above, you switch from being like the McDonald's employee, to being like a mini version of the McDonald's restaurant itself. Word gets out. You talk, and people talk, and suddenly, it's like you're there on the corner with your neon sign glowing in the dark. People can smell the value being created inside, and people who see you know instantly "If I want something to satisfy my hunger, that's where I can go to get it." The whole game changes. I haven't looked for work in AGES pursuant to my consulting stuff. I learn new skills. I get the tools to manifest the value of those skills. Work comes looking for me. And when it does, it's the employer, it's the job, that's clutching the resume, looking hopefully at me across the desk, wanting me to do for them what they heard I did for X and Y other local business.

This is a hustle. It's not a time independent fastlane (not in its nascent stage anyway, hire others to do the work, get spending your capital on advertising rather than on bottle service at the club, build out, and you're on your way). Whether you have lawn care equipment or a team of painters or a floor sander or video equipment for rent, get the expensive tools (entry) that are built to meet needs (need, duh), that only your fastidious research could have assembled in just such a way to maximize their value (entry), get trained to use it to meet needs more effectively (Need, entry), and sit there and watch your magnitude variable absolutely explode as you with your $5000 worth of video camera go from being worth $12.00/hr at Kohls to $250/hr at Susie Q Public's wedding. Work two days, take 5 off to work on your fastlane, earn more money than you did working 5.

Now get out there, kick a$$, get started, get the cash you need to launch, and have fun...

but I swear if anybody PMs me asking what paint equipment I bought or how to find clients for car painting, Imma be waiting under your bed when you turn off the lights tonight.

Love this story, thx for sharing! It really helps for just getting started with something/ with just making the really first step, because it shows how easy it actually is! Great story to remember, when you are hesitant to make first steps.

 

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[LateStarter]

Love this story, thx for sharing! It really helps for just getting started with something/ with just making the really first step, because it shows how easy it actually is! Great story to remember, when you are hesitant to make first steps.

The other part that's important to realize is that you don't need to have a major benefit compared to the competition when you start. It can be something really small.

It's ok to start a business and 'just compete' in the market. People my just like you better (or like the other guy less). Your differentiator can be discovered in time when you understand the business more and see bigger opportunities in the market. Your difference can be simple things like better marketing, better customer service, better pricing, more transparency, or just more relatable. And 'better' is always up for interpretation; it's based on what your customers view as better, not what you 'think' is better.

Coke and Pepsi have competed for decades. Their products are basically the same. They compete on marketing their brand differently to appeal to different demographics because they simply can't appeal to everyone. There is room for both in the market.

I build houses based on speculation. Basically I buy land, have a house design in mind based on the area, advertise there will be a house built, then start building. People can buy the house at any time in this process. Most home builders either give you a limited selection of finishes (aka builder basic), or offer a completely custom built house ($$$). I offer a hybrid approach. Our base building has higher end features to begin with and I offer fixed, transparent margins on upgrades outside of our basic offering. So long as timelines allow, a buyer can make any changes they want and they'll feel comfortable knowing they aren't getting gouged in the process.

Is this entirely unique? No. But where I'm building, for the kind of house I'm building, it appeals to higher-end buyers that don't want the hassle of making decisions for a fully custom built house. It works.

When trying to find ideas and start a business, a lot of people think "that's already being done" and it stops them from pursuing it further. They don't understand that just because it's already being done, doesn't mean there isn't still room for competition.

Any company or brand out there can be disrupted. This can be done through either:

• disruptive innovation, or
• incremental improvements that they don't respond to, or respond to quickly enough.

I can't emphasize this enough; JUST START!

 

[Albert KOUADJA]

After seeing the upteenth thread where a new member says "I decided to go fastlane, but I have 10 dollars and am eating a raccoon I hit with my '94 Mercury Tracer right now to stave off starvation," or "I read TMF but tell me the exact steps and don't leave anything out," I decided that apparently MJ's really simple explanation wasn't simple enough.

I don't know how else rationalize that guys like @SinisterLex and @IceCreamKid are putting points on the board in mundane fields and people are totally shocked that it's possible to make money that way, like "how could someone who owns a cleaning company for a living possibly get that rich?"

It's pretty easy, as they illustrated, CENTS+badass execution, but it's also easy in parallel fields that don't involve ripping them off. If you missed the basic principle behind their threads (which seemingly a lot of people did, because instead of using it as a launching point for the millions of possible parallel businesses, everyone just started copy/carpet gigs), I'm going to spell it out for you.

There are lots of ways to go fastlane, you can apply CENTS to figure them out. But if you're dead out of ideas, if you've got nothing, there is one way that never fails. In the last two years I have used it over, and over, and over again. Since it seems a lot of people couldn't distill the secret of "churning their own ice cream" from the other threads, here it is:

Boom.




Think it doesn't work? Think again. I'm going to make this live for you guys, at the risk of inadvertently starting dozens of non-EPA and non OSHA compliant ghetto auto body operations, which hopefully won't happen because now you guys have at least the six other possibilities whose little cliparts I pasted up above.

A little over a month ago I decided I was going to learn to paint cars. I had to buy equipment to do it. The equipment cost me $1200. I spend $700 on paint (would have been $350 but I messed up so many times on the first panel that that one consumed the entire materials supply and took three weeks) so $1900 overall. The last panel I shot took me 6 hours including dry time, without dry time, my total effort was 1 hour. Very, very steep learning curve with very, very shallow effort curve once I cracked it.

So I get the car done. I know this girl from back near my parent's house who is friends with one of my younger siblings. She's hard up and has an old station wagon that has a mismatched door because she couldn't afford to fix it or buy a better car. I make her a deal-you buy the base coat only for the door ($45.00 1/2qt ppg) and I'll use my leftover base and clear and my own sandpaper and tools and respray the door to make it an exact match, but no blending because that's a lot more effort and cost. $45 for a probably $250+ job normally.

So he does, and I do, and it looks great. Boom. Done.

So not 4 days later, I get a call from a guy this kid knows from work. He has a car that he wants repainted. He want's it done in a custom metallic (mixed by the shop, no real work on my end except evenly blending the metallics) but the shop wants $9,500 to do it. He says he'll remove all the trim and everything and sand the panels if I can do it for less (that's like at least 75% of the work, but I had the specialty tools and knowledge, whereas unbolting things and sanding requires few/no special tools or knowledge). I'm not typically down for manual labor because I prefer to get paid for sitting or sleeping, but I'm always looking for ways to make tools and other things I buy pay for themselves quickly, so, long story short, I eventually ended up getting paid $4000 for three 8-hour days of work. And I've only been doing this for a month.

I needed no degree, no education, no contacts, nothing except a computer or phone, internet access, access to electricity, and the gumption to save up $1700-2000 to risk on supplies, to increase my income from hypothetically as low as minimum wage to $160/hr. How long would your mummified corpse have been in the ground waiting for Burger King to raise your pay from $10.00/hr to $160/hr? The general managers don't make a third that much. But follow my map, have some savvy in picking a real need people have, and you, O teenage roadkill eater, can be making $7.25/hr January 1st and potentially more than $15,000/mo by January 31st. Replace my spray kit with a battery of carpet cleaners and a van, or some wicked copy skills a laptop and a modem, and you see it's the same formula, with some good advertising thrown in, to get these results.

Luck? You wish you had that excuse. You know how long it was between the time I blew my first content up on social media to the time I landed my first xx,xxx advertising contract?

less than 3 weeks.

See you with your resume are wandering around beating on doors (whether for VC for an untested unproduced and unsold idea, or for a slow-lane job), implicitly broadcasting to employers (and anyone who will follow you online) "I have no direction and no drive, teach me how I can produce some value for people so I can afford to live and eat, hold my hand, make me stable." So, predictably, you get rejection after rejection, and you keep eating that tasty raccoon.

But if you follow the map above, you switch from being like the McDonald's employee, to being like a mini version of the McDonald's restaurant itself. Word gets out. You talk, and people talk, and suddenly, it's like you're there on the corner with your neon sign glowing in the dark. People can smell the value being created inside, and people who see you know instantly "If I want something to satisfy my hunger, that's where I can go to get it." The whole game changes. I haven't looked for work in AGES pursuant to my consulting stuff. I learn new skills. I get the tools to manifest the value of those skills. Work comes looking for me. And when it does, it's the employer, it's the job, that's clutching the resume, looking hopefully at me across the desk, wanting me to do for them what they heard I did for X and Y other local business.

This is a hustle. It's not a time independent fastlane (not in its nascent stage anyway, hire others to do the work, get spending your capital on advertising rather than on bottle service at the club, build out, and you're on your way). Whether you have lawn care equipment or a team of painters or a floor sander or video equipment for rent, get the expensive tools (entry) that are built to meet needs (need, duh), that only your fastidious research could have assembled in just such a way to maximize their value (entry), get trained to use it to meet needs more effectively (Need, entry), and sit there and watch your magnitude variable absolutely explode as you with your $5000 worth of video camera go from being worth $12.00/hr at Kohls to $250/hr at Susie Q Public's wedding. Work two days, take 5 off to work on your fastlane, earn more money than you did working 5.

Now get out there, kick a$$, get started, get the cash you need to launch, and have fun...

but I swear if anybody PMs me asking what paint equipment I bought or how to find clients for car painting, Imma be waiting under your bed when you turn off the lights tonight.

very excellent content.
Thanks very much.

 

[KaterCharlie1]

The other part that's important to realize is that you don't need to have a major benefit compared to the competition when you start. It can be something really small.

It's ok to start a business and 'just compete' in the market. People my just like you better (or like the other guy less). Your differentiator can be discovered in time when you understand the business more and see bigger opportunities in the market. Your difference can be simple things like better marketing, better customer service, better pricing, more transparency, or just more relatable. And 'better' is always up for interpretation; it's based on what your customers view as better, not what you 'think' is better.

Coke and Pepsi have competed for decades. Their products are basically the same. They compete on marketing their brand differently to appeal to different demographics because they simply can't appeal to everyone. There is room for both in the market.

I build houses based on speculation. Basically I buy land, have a house design in mind based on the area, advertise there will be a house built, then start building. People can buy the house at any time in this process. Most home builders either give you a limited selection of finishes (aka builder basic), or offer a completely custom built house ($$$). I offer a hybrid approach. Our base building has higher end features to begin with and I offer fixed, transparent margins on upgrades outside of our basic offering. So long as timelines allow, a buyer can make any changes they want and they'll feel comfortable knowing they aren't getting gouged in the process.

Is this entirely unique? No. But where I'm building, for the kind of house I'm building, it appeals to higher-end buyers that don't want the hassle of making decisions for a fully custom built house. It works.

When trying to find ideas and start a business, a lot of people think "that's already being done" and it stops them from pursuing it further. They don't understand that just because it's already being done, doesn't mean there isn't still room for competition.

Any company or brand out there can be disrupted. This can be done through either:

• disruptive innovation, or
• incremental improvements that they don't respond to, or respond to quickly enough.

I can't emphasize this enough; JUST START!

Also a great add on to the story at the beginnig. I also read this a few days ago in TMF . I have registered in this forum just a few days ago and the story about car painting and your story about house renovation, I will already keep in mind to remember. Love this forum!

 

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[Nyavix]

After seeing the upteenth thread where a new member says "I decided to go fastlane, but I have 10 dollars and am eating a raccoon I hit with my '94 Mercury Tracer right now to stave off starvation," or "I read TMF but tell me the exact steps and don't leave anything out," I decided that apparently MJ's really simple explanation wasn't simple enough.

I don't know how else rationalize that guys like @SinisterLex and @IceCreamKid are putting points on the board in mundane fields and people are totally shocked that it's possible to make money that way, like "how could someone who owns a cleaning company for a living possibly get that rich?"

It's pretty easy, as they illustrated, CENTS+badass execution, but it's also easy in parallel fields that don't involve ripping them off. If you missed the basic principle behind their threads (which seemingly a lot of people did, because instead of using it as a launching point for the millions of possible parallel businesses, everyone just started copy/carpet gigs), I'm going to spell it out for you.

There are lots of ways to go fastlane, you can apply CENTS to figure them out. But if you're dead out of ideas, if you've got nothing, there is one way that never fails. In the last two years I have used it over, and over, and over again. Since it seems a lot of people couldn't distill the secret of "churning their own ice cream" from the other threads, here it is:

Boom.




Think it doesn't work? Think again. I'm going to make this live for you guys, at the risk of inadvertently starting dozens of non-EPA and non OSHA compliant ghetto auto body operations, which hopefully won't happen because now you guys have at least the six other possibilities whose little cliparts I pasted up above.

A little over a month ago I decided I was going to learn to paint cars. I had to buy equipment to do it. The equipment cost me $1200. I spend $700 on paint (would have been $350 but I messed up so many times on the first panel that that one consumed the entire materials supply and took three weeks) so $1900 overall. The last panel I shot took me 6 hours including dry time, without dry time, my total effort was 1 hour. Very, very steep learning curve with very, very shallow effort curve once I cracked it.

So I get the car done. I know this girl from back near my parent's house who is friends with one of my younger siblings. She's hard up and has an old station wagon that has a mismatched door because she couldn't afford to fix it or buy a better car. I make her a deal-you buy the base coat only for the door ($45.00 1/2qt ppg) and I'll use my leftover base and clear and my own sandpaper and tools and respray the door to make it an exact match, but no blending because that's a lot more effort and cost. $45 for a probably $250+ job normally.

So he does, and I do, and it looks great. Boom. Done.

So not 4 days later, I get a call from a guy this kid knows from work. He has a car that he wants repainted. He want's it done in a custom metallic (mixed by the shop, no real work on my end except evenly blending the metallics) but the shop wants $9,500 to do it. He says he'll remove all the trim and everything and sand the panels if I can do it for less (that's like at least 75% of the work, but I had the specialty tools and knowledge, whereas unbolting things and sanding requires few/no special tools or knowledge). I'm not typically down for manual labor because I prefer to get paid for sitting or sleeping, but I'm always looking for ways to make tools and other things I buy pay for themselves quickly, so, long story short, I eventually ended up getting paid $4000 for three 8-hour days of work. And I've only been doing this for a month.

I needed no degree, no education, no contacts, nothing except a computer or phone, internet access, access to electricity, and the gumption to save up $1700-2000 to risk on supplies, to increase my income from hypothetically as low as minimum wage to $160/hr. How long would your mummified corpse have been in the ground waiting for Burger King to raise your pay from $10.00/hr to $160/hr? The general managers don't make a third that much. But follow my map, have some savvy in picking a real need people have, and you, O teenage roadkill eater, can be making $7.25/hr January 1st and potentially more than $15,000/mo by January 31st. Replace my spray kit with a battery of carpet cleaners and a van, or some wicked copy skills a laptop and a modem, and you see it's the same formula, with some good advertising thrown in, to get these results.

Luck? You wish you had that excuse. You know how long it was between the time I blew my first content up on social media to the time I landed my first xx,xxx advertising contract?

less than 3 weeks.

See you with your resume are wandering around beating on doors (whether for VC for an untested unproduced and unsold idea, or for a slow-lane job), implicitly broadcasting to employers (and anyone who will follow you online) "I have no direction and no drive, teach me how I can produce some value for people so I can afford to live and eat, hold my hand, make me stable." So, predictably, you get rejection after rejection, and you keep eating that tasty raccoon.

But if you follow the map above, you switch from being like the McDonald's employee, to being like a mini version of the McDonald's restaurant itself. Word gets out. You talk, and people talk, and suddenly, it's like you're there on the corner with your neon sign glowing in the dark. People can smell the value being created inside, and people who see you know instantly "If I want something to satisfy my hunger, that's where I can go to get it." The whole game changes. I haven't looked for work in AGES pursuant to my consulting stuff. I learn new skills. I get the tools to manifest the value of those skills. Work comes looking for me. And when it does, it's the employer, it's the job, that's clutching the resume, looking hopefully at me across the desk, wanting me to do for them what they heard I did for X and Y other local business.

This is a hustle. It's not a time independent fastlane (not in its nascent stage anyway, hire others to do the work, get spending your capital on advertising rather than on bottle service at the club, build out, and you're on your way). Whether you have lawn care equipment or a team of painters or a floor sander or video equipment for rent, get the expensive tools (entry) that are built to meet needs (need, duh), that only your fastidious research could have assembled in just such a way to maximize their value (entry), get trained to use it to meet needs more effectively (Need, entry), and sit there and watch your magnitude variable absolutely explode as you with your $5000 worth of video camera go from being worth $12.00/hr at Kohls to $250/hr at Susie Q Public's wedding. Work two days, take 5 off to work on your fastlane, earn more money than you did working 5.

Now get out there, kick a$$, get started, get the cash you need to launch, and have fun...

but I swear if anybody PMs me asking what paint equipment I bought or how to find clients for car painting, Imma be waiting under your bed when you turn off the lights tonight.

Amazing!

I read another thread that put the idea that I could possibly turn my little once-in-a-while visualizer hustle, which I only do once a month, into a proper business. I still felt like I should re-evaluate because the skill that I use for that all spawned from my interest in game development which started 8 years ago now. I also have been making music for the past 4 years so it's sort of a 3-way decision. But reading this thread as well as the others I've read over the past few hours is making me believe I should go for the service that I've already confirmed value in. I'm going to turn my little 3D Visualizer hustle into a business!

Thank you!

 

[Isaac Odongo]

This is one of the best threads on this forum. At least of the ones I have read.

Bring on more guys.

 

[andrea532]

Dopo aver visto il thread upteenth in cui un nuovo membro dice "Ho deciso di andare veloce, ma ho 10 dollari e sto mangiando un procione, ho colpito con il mio Mercury Tracer del '94 in questo momento per evitare la fame" o "Ho letto TMF ma dillo dimmi i passaggi esatti e non tralasciare nulla", ho deciso che apparentemente la spiegazione davvero semplice di MJ non era abbastanza semplice.

Non so in quale altro modo razionalizzare il fatto che ragazzi come @SinisterLex e @IceCreamKid stiano mettendo punti sul tabellone in campi banali e le persone sono totalmente scioccate dal fatto che sia possibile fare soldi in quel modo, come "come può qualcuno che possiede un'impresa di pulizie per vivere diventare così ricco?"

It's pretty easy, as they illustrated, CENTS+badass execution, but it's also easy in parallel fields that don't involve ripping them off. If you missed the basic principle behind their threads (which seemingly a lot of people did, because instead of using it as a launching point for the millions of possible parallel businesses, everyone just started copy/carpet gigs), I'm going to spell it out for you.

There are lots of ways to go fastlane, you can apply CENTS to figure them out. But if you're dead out of ideas, if you've got nothing, there is one way that never fails. In the last two years I have used it over, and over, and over again. Since it seems a lot of people couldn't distill the secret of "churning their own ice cream" from the other threads, here it is:

Boom.




Think it doesn't work? Think again. I'm going to make this live for you guys, at the risk of inadvertently starting dozens of non-EPA and non OSHA compliant ghetto auto body operations, which hopefully won't happen because now you guys have at least the six other possibilities whose little cliparts I pasted up above.

A little over a month ago I decided I was going to learn to paint cars. I had to buy equipment to do it. The equipment cost me $1200. I spend $700 on paint (would have been $350 but I messed up so many times on the first panel that that one consumed the entire materials supply and took three weeks) so $1900 overall. The last panel I shot took me 6 hours including dry time, without dry time, my total effort was 1 hour. Very, very steep learning curve with very, very shallow effort curve once I cracked it.

So I get the car done. I know this girl from back near my parent's house who is friends with one of my younger siblings. She's hard up and has an old station wagon that has a mismatched door because she couldn't afford to fix it or buy a better car. I make her a deal-you buy the base coat only for the door ($45.00 1/2qt ppg) and I'll use my leftover base and clear and my own sandpaper and tools and respray the door to make it an exact match, but no blending because that's a lot more effort and cost. $45 for a probably $250+ job normally.

So he does, and I do, and it looks great. Boom. Done.

So not 4 days later, I get a call from a guy this kid knows from work. He has a car that he wants repainted. He want's it done in a custom metallic (mixed by the shop, no real work on my end except evenly blending the metallics) but the shop wants $9,500 to do it. He says he'll remove all the trim and everything and sand the panels if I can do it for less (that's like at least 75% of the work, but I had the specialty tools and knowledge, whereas unbolting things and sanding requires few/no special tools or knowledge). I'm not typically down for manual labor because I prefer to get paid for sitting or sleeping, but I'm always looking for ways to make tools and other things I buy pay for themselves quickly, so, long story short, I eventually ended up getting paid $4000 for three 8-hour days of work. And I've only been doing this for a month.

I needed no degree, no education, no contacts, nothing except a computer or phone, internet access, access to electricity, and the gumption to save up $1700-2000 to risk on supplies, to increase my income from hypothetically as low as minimum wage to $160/hr. How long would your mummified corpse have been in the ground waiting for Burger King to raise your pay from $10.00/hr to $160/hr? The general managers don't make a third that much. But follow my map, have some savvy in picking a real need people have, and you, O teenage roadkill eater, can be making $7.25/hr January 1st and potentially more than $15,000/mo by January 31st. Replace my spray kit with a battery of carpet cleaners and a van, or some wicked copy skills a laptop and a modem, and you see it's the same formula, with some good advertising thrown in, to get these results.

Luck? You wish you had that excuse. You know how long it was between the time I blew my first content up on social media to the time I landed my first xx,xxx advertising contract?

less than 3 weeks.

See you with your resume are wandering around beating on doors (whether for VC for an untested unproduced and unsold idea, or for a slow-lane job), implicitly broadcasting to employers (and anyone who will follow you online) "I have no direction and no drive, teach me how I can produce some value for people so I can afford to live and eat, hold my hand, make me stable." So, predictably, you get rejection after rejection, and you keep eating that tasty raccoon.

But if you follow the map above, you switch from being like the McDonald's employee, to being like a mini version of the McDonald's restaurant itself. Word gets out. You talk, and people talk, and suddenly, it's like you're there on the corner with your neon sign glowing in the dark. People can smell the value being created inside, and people who see you know instantly "If I want something to satisfy my hunger, that's where I can go to get it." The whole game changes. I haven't looked for work in AGES pursuant to my consulting stuff. I learn new skills. I get the tools to manifest the value of those skills. Work comes looking for me. And when it does, it's the employer, it's the job, that's clutching the resume, looking hopefully at me across the desk, wanting me to do for them what they heard I did for X and Y other local business.

Questo è un trambusto. Non è una corsia preferenziale indipendente dal tempo (non nella sua fase nascente comunque, assumi altri per fare il lavoro, spendi il tuo capitale in pubblicità piuttosto che nel servizio di bottiglia al club, costruisci e sei sulla buona strada). Sia che tu abbia attrezzature per la cura del prato o un team di imbianchini o una levigatrice per pavimenti o attrezzature video a noleggio, ottieni gli strumenti costosi (ingresso) che sono costruiti per soddisfare le esigenze (necessità, duh), che solo la tua meticolosa ricerca avrebbe potuto assemblare in appena in un modo tale da massimizzare il loro valore (ingresso), addestrati a usarlo per soddisfare le esigenze in modo più efficace (Bisogno, ingresso), e siediti lì e guarda la tua variabile di grandezza esplodere assolutamente mentre tu con la tua videocamera del valore di $ 5000 passi dal valore $ 12,00/ora da Kohls a $ 250/ora al matrimonio di Susie Q Public. Lavora due giorni, prenditi 5 giorni di pausa per lavorare sulla tua corsia preferenziale,

Ora esci, calcia un $$, inizia, prendi i soldi che ti servono per il lancio e divertiti...

ma giuro che se qualcuno mi chiede quale attrezzatura per la verniciatura ho comprato o come trovare clienti per la verniciatura dell'auto, aspetterò sotto il tuo letto quando spegni le luci stasera.

After seeing the upteenth thread where a new member says "I decided to go fastlane, but I have 10 dollars and am eating a raccoon I hit with my '94 Mercury Tracer right now to stave off starvation," or "I read TMF but tell me the exact steps and don't leave anything out," I decided that apparently MJ's really simple explanation wasn't simple enough.

I don't know how else rationalize that guys like @SinisterLex and @IceCreamKid are putting points on the board in mundane fields and people are totally shocked that it's possible to make money that way, like "how could someone who owns a cleaning company for a living possibly get that rich?"

It's pretty easy, as they illustrated, CENTS+badass execution, but it's also easy in parallel fields that don't involve ripping them off. If you missed the basic principle behind their threads (which seemingly a lot of people did, because instead of using it as a launching point for the millions of possible parallel businesses, everyone just started copy/carpet gigs), I'm going to spell it out for you.

There are lots of ways to go fastlane, you can apply CENTS to figure them out. But if you're dead out of ideas, if you've got nothing, there is one way that never fails. In the last two years I have used it over, and over, and over again. Since it seems a lot of people couldn't distill the secret of "churning their own ice cream" from the other threads, here it is:

Boom.




Think it doesn't work? Think again. I'm going to make this live for you guys, at the risk of inadvertently starting dozens of non-EPA and non OSHA compliant ghetto auto body operations, which hopefully won't happen because now you guys have at least the six other possibilities whose little cliparts I pasted up above.

A little over a month ago I decided I was going to learn to paint cars. I had to buy equipment to do it. The equipment cost me $1200. I spend $700 on paint (would have been $350 but I messed up so many times on the first panel that that one consumed the entire materials supply and took three weeks) so $1900 overall. The last panel I shot took me 6 hours including dry time, without dry time, my total effort was 1 hour. Very, very steep learning curve with very, very shallow effort curve once I cracked it.

So I get the car done. I know this girl from back near my parent's house who is friends with one of my younger siblings. She's hard up and has an old station wagon that has a mismatched door because she couldn't afford to fix it or buy a better car. I make her a deal-you buy the base coat only for the door ($45.00 1/2qt ppg) and I'll use my leftover base and clear and my own sandpaper and tools and respray the door to make it an exact match, but no blending because that's a lot more effort and cost. $45 for a probably $250+ job normally.

So he does, and I do, and it looks great. Boom. Done.

So not 4 days later, I get a call from a guy this kid knows from work. He has a car that he wants repainted. He want's it done in a custom metallic (mixed by the shop, no real work on my end except evenly blending the metallics) but the shop wants $9,500 to do it. He says he'll remove all the trim and everything and sand the panels if I can do it for less (that's like at least 75% of the work, but I had the specialty tools and knowledge, whereas unbolting things and sanding requires few/no special tools or knowledge). I'm not typically down for manual labor because I prefer to get paid for sitting or sleeping, but I'm always looking for ways to make tools and other things I buy pay for themselves quickly, so, long story short, I eventually ended up getting paid $4000 for three 8-hour days of work. And I've only been doing this for a month.

I needed no degree, no education, no contacts, nothing except a computer or phone, internet access, access to electricity, and the gumption to save up $1700-2000 to risk on supplies, to increase my income from hypothetically as low as minimum wage to $160/hr. How long would your mummified corpse have been in the ground waiting for Burger King to raise your pay from $10.00/hr to $160/hr? The general managers don't make a third that much. But follow my map, have some savvy in picking a real need people have, and you, O teenage roadkill eater, can be making $7.25/hr January 1st and potentially more than $15,000/mo by January 31st. Replace my spray kit with a battery of carpet cleaners and a van, or some wicked copy skills a laptop and a modem, and you see it's the same formula, with some good advertising thrown in, to get these results.

Luck? You wish you had that excuse. You know how long it was between the time I blew my first content up on social media to the time I landed my first xx,xxx advertising contract?

less than 3 weeks.

See you with your resume are wandering around beating on doors (whether for VC for an untested unproduced and unsold idea, or for a slow-lane job), implicitly broadcasting to employers (and anyone who will follow you online) "I have no direction and no drive, teach me how I can produce some value for people so I can afford to live and eat, hold my hand, make me stable." So, predictably, you get rejection after rejection, and you keep eating that tasty raccoon.

But if you follow the map above, you switch from being like the McDonald's employee, to being like a mini version of the McDonald's restaurant itself. Word gets out. You talk, and people talk, and suddenly, it's like you're there on the corner with your neon sign glowing in the dark. People can smell the value being created inside, and people who see you know instantly "If I want something to satisfy my hunger, that's where I can go to get it." The whole game changes. I haven't looked for work in AGES pursuant to my consulting stuff. I learn new skills. I get the tools to manifest the value of those skills. Work comes looking for me. And when it does, it's the employer, it's the job, that's clutching the resume, looking hopefully at me across the desk, wanting me to do for them what they heard I did for X and Y other local business.

This is a hustle. It's not a time independent fastlane (not in its nascent stage anyway, hire others to do the work, get spending your capital on advertising rather than on bottle service at the club, build out, and you're on your way). Whether you have lawn care equipment or a team of painters or a floor sander or video equipment for rent, get the expensive tools (entry) that are built to meet needs (need, duh), that only your fastidious research could have assembled in just such a way to maximize their value (entry), get trained to use it to meet needs more effectively (Need, entry), and sit there and watch your magnitude variable absolutely explode as you with your $5000 worth of video camera go from being worth $12.00/hr at Kohls to $250/hr at Susie Q Public's wedding. Work two days, take 5 off to work on your fastlane, earn more money than you did working 5.

Ora esci, calcia un $$, inizia, prendi i soldi che ti servono per il lancio e divertiti...

ma giuro che se qualcuno mi chiede quale attrezzatura per la verniciatura ho comprato o come trovare clienti per la verniciatura dell'auto, aspetterò sotto il tuo letto quando spegni

hi, I find myself in a situation where I could skip the other two steps because I have the possibility of creating an e-commerce with an external supplier in a very large sector with a specific need that has not yet been resolved. what do you think, is it better to continue with my project or follow this step by step guide?

 

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[Surgewave]

After seeing the upteenth thread where a new member says "I decided to go fastlane, but I have 10 dollars and am eating a raccoon I hit with my '94 Mercury Tracer right now to stave off starvation," or "I read TMF but tell me the exact steps and don't leave anything out," I decided that apparently MJ's really simple explanation wasn't simple enough.

I don't know how else rationalize that guys like @SinisterLex and @IceCreamKid are putting points on the board in mundane fields and people are totally shocked that it's possible to make money that way, like "how could someone who owns a cleaning company for a living possibly get that rich?"

It's pretty easy, as they illustrated, CENTS+badass execution, but it's also easy in parallel fields that don't involve ripping them off. If you missed the basic principle behind their threads (which seemingly a lot of people did, because instead of using it as a launching point for the millions of possible parallel businesses, everyone just started copy/carpet gigs), I'm going to spell it out for you.

There are lots of ways to go fastlane, you can apply CENTS to figure them out. But if you're dead out of ideas, if you've got nothing, there is one way that never fails. In the last two years I have used it over, and over, and over again. Since it seems a lot of people couldn't distill the secret of "churning their own ice cream" from the other threads, here it is:

Boom.




Think it doesn't work? Think again. I'm going to make this live for you guys, at the risk of inadvertently starting dozens of non-EPA and non OSHA compliant ghetto auto body operations, which hopefully won't happen because now you guys have at least the six other possibilities whose little cliparts I pasted up above.

A little over a month ago I decided I was going to learn to paint cars. I had to buy equipment to do it. The equipment cost me $1200. I spend $700 on paint (would have been $350 but I messed up so many times on the first panel that that one consumed the entire materials supply and took three weeks) so $1900 overall. The last panel I shot took me 6 hours including dry time, without dry time, my total effort was 1 hour. Very, very steep learning curve with very, very shallow effort curve once I cracked it.

So I get the car done. I know this girl from back near my parent's house who is friends with one of my younger siblings. She's hard up and has an old station wagon that has a mismatched door because she couldn't afford to fix it or buy a better car. I make her a deal-you buy the base coat only for the door ($45.00 1/2qt ppg) and I'll use my leftover base and clear and my own sandpaper and tools and respray the door to make it an exact match, but no blending because that's a lot more effort and cost. $45 for a probably $250+ job normally.

So he does, and I do, and it looks great. Boom. Done.

So not 4 days later, I get a call from a guy this kid knows from work. He has a car that he wants repainted. He want's it done in a custom metallic (mixed by the shop, no real work on my end except evenly blending the metallics) but the shop wants $9,500 to do it. He says he'll remove all the trim and everything and sand the panels if I can do it for less (that's like at least 75% of the work, but I had the specialty tools and knowledge, whereas unbolting things and sanding requires few/no special tools or knowledge). I'm not typically down for manual labor because I prefer to get paid for sitting or sleeping, but I'm always looking for ways to make tools and other things I buy pay for themselves quickly, so, long story short, I eventually ended up getting paid $4000 for three 8-hour days of work. And I've only been doing this for a month.

I needed no degree, no education, no contacts, nothing except a computer or phone, internet access, access to electricity, and the gumption to save up $1700-2000 to risk on supplies, to increase my income from hypothetically as low as minimum wage to $160/hr. How long would your mummified corpse have been in the ground waiting for Burger King to raise your pay from $10.00/hr to $160/hr? The general managers don't make a third that much. But follow my map, have some savvy in picking a real need people have, and you, O teenage roadkill eater, can be making $7.25/hr January 1st and potentially more than $15,000/mo by January 31st. Replace my spray kit with a battery of carpet cleaners and a van, or some wicked copy skills a laptop and a modem, and you see it's the same formula, with some good advertising thrown in, to get these results.

Luck? You wish you had that excuse. You know how long it was between the time I blew my first content up on social media to the time I landed my first xx,xxx advertising contract?

less than 3 weeks.

See you with your resume are wandering around beating on doors (whether for VC for an untested unproduced and unsold idea, or for a slow-lane job), implicitly broadcasting to employers (and anyone who will follow you online) "I have no direction and no drive, teach me how I can produce some value for people so I can afford to live and eat, hold my hand, make me stable." So, predictably, you get rejection after rejection, and you keep eating that tasty raccoon.

But if you follow the map above, you switch from being like the McDonald's employee, to being like a mini version of the McDonald's restaurant itself. Word gets out. You talk, and people talk, and suddenly, it's like you're there on the corner with your neon sign glowing in the dark. People can smell the value being created inside, and people who see you know instantly "If I want something to satisfy my hunger, that's where I can go to get it." The whole game changes. I haven't looked for work in AGES pursuant to my consulting stuff. I learn new skills. I get the tools to manifest the value of those skills. Work comes looking for me. And when it does, it's the employer, it's the job, that's clutching the resume, looking hopefully at me across the desk, wanting me to do for them what they heard I did for X and Y other local business.

This is a hustle. It's not a time independent fastlane (not in its nascent stage anyway, hire others to do the work, get spending your capital on advertising rather than on bottle service at the club, build out, and you're on your way). Whether you have lawn care equipment or a team of painters or a floor sander or video equipment for rent, get the expensive tools (entry) that are built to meet needs (need, duh), that only your fastidious research could have assembled in just such a way to maximize their value (entry), get trained to use it to meet needs more effectively (Need, entry), and sit there and watch your magnitude variable absolutely explode as you with your $5000 worth of video camera go from being worth $12.00/hr at Kohls to $250/hr at Susie Q Public's wedding. Work two days, take 5 off to work on your fastlane, earn more money than you did working 5.

Now get out there, kick a$$, get started, get the cash you need to launch, and have fun...

but I swear if anybody PMs me asking what paint equipment I bought or how to find clients for car painting, Imma be waiting under your bed when you turn off the lights tonight.

It's an amazing post. It encourage me to take risk to go on a fastlane. Thanks for this post.

 

[DCG]

+1 on this.

Use your network. They already know, like, and trust you.

People typically need to know, like, and trust you before they do business with you.

I love AdWords paid search. I consider it the purest form of cold traffic (because of the search intent). However, it's the purest form of cold traffic, meaning the visitors to your website don't know you*. Whenever I have to hustle and get more clients super quick, I use my own network of people I've already done business with, NOT visitors to my website who don't know me.


* Unless it's a branded search.


EDIT: If you're a consultant then this post might help.

I've been getting clients wrong this whole time. I could just ask my neighbor for a website, thanks.

 

[Tomco]

Thanks for the post @RHL, it really captures how I was viewing things.

I feel like, at least in my case, we have this mentality that someone is going to approach us with a problem, describe how it should be solved and then tells us to do it. It's kind of like being back at school, faced with a math problem (Find x to solve y).

Even when we have the procedures and steps and theory right in front of us (as you said, TMF is a good example) we still over complicate things, and then complain (myself especially) that there aren't any needs to be met.

A key point I took from your post is that, start small, whatever it might be, effecting those closest to you. Then a kind of ripple effect takes place. And do not shy away from investments that will further your education or talents.

Thanks again @RHL for putting things into perspective!
(And thank you to @Andy Black for leading me here)

 

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[Brass Pockets]

After seeing the upteenth thread where a new member says "I decided to go fastlane, but I have 10 dollars and am eating a raccoon I hit with my '94 Mercury Tracer right now to stave off starvation," or "I read TMF but tell me the exact steps and don't leave anything out," I decided that apparently MJ's really simple explanation wasn't simple enough.

I don't know how else rationalize that guys like @SinisterLex and @IceCreamKid are putting points on the board in mundane fields and people are totally shocked that it's possible to make money that way, like "how could someone who owns a cleaning company for a living possibly get that rich?"

It's pretty easy, as they illustrated, CENTS+badass execution, but it's also easy in parallel fields that don't involve ripping them off. If you missed the basic principle behind their threads (which seemingly a lot of people did, because instead of using it as a launching point for the millions of possible parallel businesses, everyone just started copy/carpet gigs), I'm going to spell it out for you.

There are lots of ways to go fastlane, you can apply CENTS to figure them out. But if you're dead out of ideas, if you've got nothing, there is one way that never fails. In the last two years I have used it over, and over, and over again. Since it seems a lot of people couldn't distill the secret of "churning their own ice cream" from the other threads, here it is:

Boom.




Think it doesn't work? Think again. I'm going to make this live for you guys, at the risk of inadvertently starting dozens of non-EPA and non OSHA compliant ghetto auto body operations, which hopefully won't happen because now you guys have at least the six other possibilities whose little cliparts I pasted up above.

A little over a month ago I decided I was going to learn to paint cars. I had to buy equipment to do it. The equipment cost me $1200. I spend $700 on paint (would have been $350 but I messed up so many times on the first panel that that one consumed the entire materials supply and took three weeks) so $1900 overall. The last panel I shot took me 6 hours including dry time, without dry time, my total effort was 1 hour. Very, very steep learning curve with very, very shallow effort curve once I cracked it.

So I get the car done. I know this girl from back near my parent's house who is friends with one of my younger siblings. She's hard up and has an old station wagon that has a mismatched door because she couldn't afford to fix it or buy a better car. I make her a deal-you buy the base coat only for the door ($45.00 1/2qt ppg) and I'll use my leftover base and clear and my own sandpaper and tools and respray the door to make it an exact match, but no blending because that's a lot more effort and cost. $45 for a probably $250+ job normally.

So he does, and I do, and it looks great. Boom. Done.

So not 4 days later, I get a call from a guy this kid knows from work. He has a car that he wants repainted. He want's it done in a custom metallic (mixed by the shop, no real work on my end except evenly blending the metallics) but the shop wants $9,500 to do it. He says he'll remove all the trim and everything and sand the panels if I can do it for less (that's like at least 75% of the work, but I had the specialty tools and knowledge, whereas unbolting things and sanding requires few/no special tools or knowledge). I'm not typically down for manual labor because I prefer to get paid for sitting or sleeping, but I'm always looking for ways to make tools and other things I buy pay for themselves quickly, so, long story short, I eventually ended up getting paid $4000 for three 8-hour days of work. And I've only been doing this for a month.

I needed no degree, no education, no contacts, nothing except a computer or phone, internet access, access to electricity, and the gumption to save up $1700-2000 to risk on supplies, to increase my income from hypothetically as low as minimum wage to $160/hr. How long would your mummified corpse have been in the ground waiting for Burger King to raise your pay from $10.00/hr to $160/hr? The general managers don't make a third that much. But follow my map, have some savvy in picking a real need people have, and you, O teenage roadkill eater, can be making $7.25/hr January 1st and potentially more than $15,000/mo by January 31st. Replace my spray kit with a battery of carpet cleaners and a van, or some wicked copy skills a laptop and a modem, and you see it's the same formula, with some good advertising thrown in, to get these results.

Luck? You wish you had that excuse. You know how long it was between the time I blew my first content up on social media to the time I landed my first xx,xxx advertising contract?

less than 3 weeks.

See you with your resume are wandering around beating on doors (whether for VC for an untested unproduced and unsold idea, or for a slow-lane job), implicitly broadcasting to employers (and anyone who will follow you online) "I have no direction and no drive, teach me how I can produce some value for people so I can afford to live and eat, hold my hand, make me stable." So, predictably, you get rejection after rejection, and you keep eating that tasty raccoon.

But if you follow the map above, you switch from being like the McDonald's employee, to being like a mini version of the McDonald's restaurant itself. Word gets out. You talk, and people talk, and suddenly, it's like you're there on the corner with your neon sign glowing in the dark. People can smell the value being created inside, and people who see you know instantly "If I want something to satisfy my hunger, that's where I can go to get it." The whole game changes. I haven't looked for work in AGES pursuant to my consulting stuff. I learn new skills. I get the tools to manifest the value of those skills. Work comes looking for me. And when it does, it's the employer, it's the job, that's clutching the resume, looking hopefully at me across the desk, wanting me to do for them what they heard I did for X and Y other local business.

This is a hustle. It's not a time independent fastlane (not in its nascent stage anyway, hire others to do the work, get spending your capital on advertising rather than on bottle service at the club, build out, and you're on your way). Whether you have lawn care equipment or a team of painters or a floor sander or video equipment for rent, get the expensive tools (entry) that are built to meet needs (need, duh), that only your fastidious research could have assembled in just such a way to maximize their value (entry), get trained to use it to meet needs more effectively (Need, entry), and sit there and watch your magnitude variable absolutely explode as you with your $5000 worth of video camera go from being worth $12.00/hr at Kohls to $250/hr at Susie Q Public's wedding. Work two days, take 5 off to work on your fastlane, earn more money than you did working 5.

Now get out there, kick a$$, get started, get the cash you need to launch, and have fun...

but I swear if anybody PMs me asking what paint equipment I bought or how to find clients for car painting, Imma be waiting under your bed when you turn off the lights tonight.

Fantastic mindset, thats all that matters i think

Get something going and follow the path it takes you down

 

[Stacia.Henry]

People often ask how they should fund their (first) Fastlane business. THIS is bootstrapping.

Don't have the $1900? Fix iPhone screens. Speed up computers (esp. Mac computers). Build computers for people (have them buy the parts, you do the building, charge a small markup). Paint houses (inside and outside). Finish driveways.

Here's what this does for you. First, it puts you at the forefront of potential needs (Paint Brush Cover was invented because one of Sal's side gigs was painting with his brother and cousin). Second, it puts you in front of the customer and teaches you about real business (how to manage expectations, etc). Third, it gives you an extra stream of income, some extra money in the bank, and a hedge against the Slowlane.

That means if you lose your job, you're not as F*cked as most people would be.

Now I'm not saying go full @IceCreamKid and try to scale it (you COULD potentially). I'm saying that with a network of friends that trust you, you could potentially see things that people might NEED... and do them.

Start with mom and dad. Tell them to tell their friends at work or at bingo (lol). Start with your buddies.

If you have a friend or family member that potentially competes with you, learn from them and operate in a different geographical area (or help THEM scale).

Money is everywhere. Go F*ckin get some.

Thank You, Thank You, Thank You. This helped the light build in my brain to start working I am new to the fast lane forum and still haven't decided my value I want o pursue to you haled me to figure out how a mom of 3 taking care of 3 sick parents can make it work. Thank you this provided so many turning wheels to build fund for when I find my idea to pursue.