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Want to lock myself up for 4 days for my own 'bootcamp' with a friend, brainstorming, researching and validating business ideas.

Idea threads

Speculatooor

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My friend and I have both a little experience with entrepreneurship, but want to take it to the next step.

We are going to do a 'monk mode' entrepreneurship style, to brainstorm, research, validate and take the first steps for a business.

Do you guys have any feedback to make the days as much valuable as possible?
 
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Rabby

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Sounds like a blast. Outlining a very loose daily schedule might help... boxing time for things like brainstorming or presenting results of "alone work" to each other, if you split off to do separate tasks.
 

Knugs

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My friend and I have both a little experience with entrepreneurship, but want to take it to the next step.

We are going to do a 'monk mode' entrepreneurship style, to brainstorm, research, validate and take the first steps for a business.

Do you guys have any feedback to make the days as much valuable as possible?

(You might know some of these things)

Do you already have a few ideas listed? The best ideas I have come up with were under the shower and in the car with nobody else around. If you two lock yourselves up you will force and pressure the idea generation phase and you will have a hard time generating good ideas. I wouldnt recommend showering together but taking random and aimless car journeys together might facilitate this and help you come up with something good.

Otherwise I think this is a really great idea. The most important part of your monk-retreat is to learn about your business partner, live and breath with him so that you know who you are getting yourselves into. I made a fatal mistake to go into business with one of my longest and best friends and our relationship suffered immensely when we had to live 3 months together up to the point that we started hating on each other and destroying the start-up. Choosing somebody just because of convenience and similar interests can be a catastrophic mistake.

One of the first things you should do is to identify both your strength and weaknesses and figure out who might take on what role in a future business. This way you will also identify if you need a third founder or what employees/freelancers you will need to hire. Doing this first is essential, because it allows you to better plan for each idea and identify the risks and issues ahead. Whilst doing it, if you feel passionate about a specific role it would make sense to also talk about it. Lets say you really see yourself doing sales and you are quite comfortable with the idea of learning it then you should make that clear that this is an area you want to become the "expert" in. You both have different experiences that you need to pool together. (PS: Some people might see this step as some kind of useless school bs project but I will guarantee you it will make things easier down the line).

Another important point is to both of you to really understand each others aims and circumstances. You need to talk it out how you are realistically going to work on the business and how much personal investment and sacrifises you both are going to make. Clearing this up beforehand will make things easier for you two. e.g parttime job/family/kids/no weekends etc.etc. One of you might enjoy doing work until 3 am whilst the other is an early bird. Respecting each others preference is important in your relationship.

Make a rough plan for the 4 days and agree on it so that you can make the most of it. Dont eat like shit and do some exercise. Whilst you both are probably really hyped about doing the 4-day monk mode you need to keep eating clean, exercise, see the outside and have a little space away from each other. In other words exploit the hype for the work sessions but keep looking after yourselves. You dont want to feel defeated and done by the end of 4 days.

Validation
I love "validation" and I think its majorily underutilised by entrepreneurs. Using it right will prevent you from getting into the wrong hole and avoid a waste of time and effort beyond imagination. One thing I learned from my startup is that every time somebody makes some kind of "statement" in the research stage and beyond, it is an "assumption" until validated with real data. On amazons launchpad I just picked a GPS tracker for dogs as an example: What is the need/ what problem does it attempt to solve/ does it actually solve it / do people want to buy it / why do people want to buy it. You can answer each question by giving me your thoughts and opinions but what matters in the real world is what your cohort of potential customers say. The guys that made this product should question and interview 100 dog owners and come up with some data that validates their assumptions. If they did this they might have found out that people dont want to pay 8 bucks/month for the GPS (GPS to my understanding is a monthly expense). This for example also kills the products ability to be a birthday and christmas gift.

In my own startup we made a fatal mistake about contract length of temporary workers. We assumed temporary workers are "temporary" (shortlived) and that the average 1 million USD spent each year by each client is always "new contracts for us to grab each year" aka obtainable marked 1 million USD per client (x comission). Our issue was that we had no official data but that we also didnt confirm this with clients. Turns out that a lot of temporary workers are actually longterm temporary workers which also make up a lot of the 1 million spent each year. We assumed that there must be a high volume and turnover. This absolutely killed our SAAS business which was made to handle high volume and high turnover. We found out AFTER we blew alot of investors money into development. Worst of all it cost us all a lot of time.

Proper validation is key.
 
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Speculatooor

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Make a rough plan for the 4 days and agree on it so that you can make the most of it. Dont eat like shit and do some exercise. Whilst you both are probably really hyped about doing the 4-day monk mode you need to keep eating clean, exercise, see the outside and have a little space away from each other. In other words exploit the hype for the work sessions but keep looking after yourselves. You dont want to feel defeated and done by the end of 4 days.

Thanks for your value and sharing experience. The quoted part is something I will definitely will incorporate.
 

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