Your Mind Needs Constraints

0:00I'm a tech founder. How would you go about finding ideas in the current economy if you do not have a product yet? >> So, really good question. Start with the customer. Don't start with the product. Figure out what someone wants and then go try and solve that. And there's a number of different ways to solve it. And um there's a great book by not by Elen but about Elen's process called The Algorithm. Um I'm getting my whole team or I think most of my team already has read it. It's a 4-hour audio book. You can consume it in two hours. to think about it. It's like a two-hour podcast, but the the premise is very simple that there's five steps. I'm not going to break them down, but what we what you want to do is think, how do I solve this problem in the absolute most efficient manner possible and then do that entire process manually and then once you've done it manually over time, you will be able to simplify and automate different steps of it so you can increase your margin and increase the effectiveness of the solution you have for a specific customer. And so like, and this is why I think the question of like what business should I start? go one level deeper which is what things should I sell which one level deeper is what customer problem do I want to solve once you once you figure out the problem you want to solve then figuring out what product or way that you want to solve it is much easier and I'll give you one more kind of like filter for this the reason that so many of you have trouble figuring out what business to start is because you're trying to pick from infinity you need your mind needs constraints and so said differently if you've heard of the jam experiment so they had two different supermarkets they 24 types of jam out and they had people they had free samples and then they asked people to buy a jam and then they had a different table at a different supermarket that same supermarket that only had I think three jars or six jars of jam and the three or six jar of jam uh table the much lower amount sold far more jars of jam. So why is that? So, it's the paradox of choice, which is the more choices we have, the more difficult it is to make a choice and the more likely we think that it is that we're going to regret the choice we made. And we're also going to second guessess the choice, right? We're going to think, wait, maybe I should have done something else, right? And so, the reason that I think uh Steve Jobs started the first iPods as black and white is because he understood this basic psychology. And I think they made mistakes by having all these different colors, which I think over time they trimmed back down. And so we we approached the problem of creating a business the same way, which is if you had two businesses to pick from, you'd be easy it'd be easy for you to pick one or the other. And so with that, you'd be like, I'll walk you through the experiment. Look at two businesses.

2:20Doesn't matter what they are. Look around the room, look around your your as you're driving, here's two businesses. Which of those two businesses would you rather do? Once you answer the question, because you'll be able to pick that pretty easily. The next question is why. And so once you have the why, then that starts to give you your own preferences of what you're really looking for. Do you want in person? Do you want remote? Do you want a digital business? Do you want a service business? Do you want uh you know physical products? Uh do you want to work 5 days a week? Do you want to work seven days a week? Do you want to work two days a week? Do you want to work only in the mornings? Uh do you want to have a big team? Do you want a small team? Do you want like there are a lot of questions that you'd be able to answer um that if you answer that then very quickly you just narrow down the universe. And so all of a sudden at the very end you might have two or three options to pick from rather than infinite. and then you'll actually be able to make a choice and you'll feel confident about the choice because you understood the filters that you put in line in order to make the decision. So hopefully that helps. Unconstrained thinking very hard to do. If you like this video and you're a business owner who wants to break through your current revenue ceiling, I distilled every lesson from scaling 10 businesses past 10 million and three businesses past 100 million into a completely free scaling road map that I've used to go from 0 to 1, 0 to 10, and 0 to 100 plus. And so you can click here and you can check it out. Again, absolutely free. And since you're a business owner, appreciate you and uh enjoy.