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

**Shaan** (0:00)
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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 just like a sneaky form of procrastination, right? Because a big plan means you're putting off action until number one, you finish 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 into this trap, but got out of it. Okay, so there's a few years ago, we were making an app for high schoolers.
And so the engineers had built like a simple prototype. Honestly, it was pretty crappy. It wasn't even in the app store yet.
We were playing with it and we kind of liked it, but we were a bunch of 30 year old, you know, hairy dudes. And so we said, we don't know if high schoolers are going to like this the way we like this. So I told our two growth guys, I went to Tyler and Jason and I said, all right, so those guys, the engineers, they're building this thing. How are we going to get users?
And Tyler and Jason, they're smart guys. They, you know, so they grabbed a marker. They said, all right, we're up for the challenge. How are we going to get users? And they went and started brainstorming a growth plan. And so they thought, you know, they went to a whiteboard and they're writing down, we could Facebook ads, we could, oh, these Instagram influencers, we could get them to shout us out. We could do an influencer program. We could create a referral system or referral program, ambassador program inside these high schools. And anytime you hear the word program or committee, you know, just run the other way. It's usually, that's for things that are 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 for a new app in the store. And so we thought, okay, well, what are we gonna do? Do we sit around and wait or what? So we were at lunch and these guys were telling us the ideas. And then we all kind of had this realization.
We have a framework or we had a framework at my startup, which was called the one month, one week, one hour, one day, one hour framework, right? And so anytime we'd have a plan that was like, this will take us a month to build this. This will take us two months to build this. 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 the one day version of 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 I 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 actually touch customers, when they actually get into contact with customers. And so we agreed, we were there, we said, okay, yeah, these programs are good ideas, but what's the one day version? And we said, well, I could just call 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 were in school so they couldn't pick up their phones. We said, all right, well, what are we gonna do? It's 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.