Money Likes Speed...

“Money likes speed Ayo, it doesn’t care about intelligence.”

My good friend, Olivia Gamber, said this to me years back when we were having a conversation about quitting my job.

I’d been writing for a bit and I wanted to start launching products to make enough money to leave my main gig.

But I was hesitant.

I consider myself an intelligent guy. Most intelligent people have one problem that keeps them from making money, especially when it comes to launching their own ventures.

They think way too damn much.

The higher your brain’s processing power, the better it is at recognizing downsides.

You can tell what might go wrong before it does go wrong so you avoid taking the plunge. If you stay stuck in thinking and planning mode for too long, you’ll never get anything done.

Better to launch quick and dirty, which is exactly what she showed me how to do.

On our Zoom call, she described the basics of helping me set up a coaching package.

I needed:

• An offer - The thing (s) I was going to sell and deliver to clients
• An email - I wrote a simple email detailing the offer and sent it out to my email list
• A way to collect information and set up calls - I used Typeform to have readers answer a short ‘application’ (pro tip: this helps gauge seriousness because someone who won’t fill out a two-minute survey won’t pay for coaching.

She gave me the basic rundown of how to do a sales call.

I created the offer, sent the email, scheduled calls, and pitched my offer.

My sales call and pitch skills were awful. I didn’t try hard to overcome objections. Mainly because I didn’t have confidence and conviction in my services (yet).

Even though I wasn’t very good, I still landed 4 clients at $250 per month, which was a lot for me at the time (but severely underpriced in retrospect).

I likely would’ve spent months trying to come up with the perfect product — planning, hesitating, waiting.

Planning is useful, but it often makes you feel like you’re doing something when you’re really not. Back of the napkin business plans + execution = $$

Over time you get better at creating, pitching, and delivering your product or service.

You blaze through all of the emotional turmoil that comes with selling your services, but you just rip the band-aid off instead of enduring the slow monotonous process of ‘getting your ducks in a row’ a.k.a hiding.

Money likes speed.

It’s better to get a basic version of your product or service together and improve it over time.

It’s better to get feedback from the market quickly as to whether or not your idea is any good.

These days, I don’t even make a product unless enough people pay me in advance to make it — this is called validating your idea.

I’m running a 12-week program and I sold all the spots before I created a lick of content. I’m building out the program week by week in real-time.

Speed.

It took me nearly five years to go from writing my first article to becoming a full-time writer and entrepreneur.

Knowing what I know now, I could’ve got it done in a year (or less).

Noah Kagan once wrote an article about how he started a brand new business over the span of a weekend that went on to do 7 figures.

The process is simple:

• Research the idea: see if there are people out there who are looking for what you have to offer
• MVP: Get a minimum viable product out and try to sell it. Do it in a way that doesn’t cost you excess money or time (he hired developers overseas to build a basic version of his app)
• Feedback: If it’s a total dud, start a new product. Usually, it’ll be a decent idea but the product or marketing needs to be improved.

That’s pretty much it.

Yes, there are more nuances, but you don’t need them right away.

You need speed.

Speed equals money and speedy money makes your dreams of going full-time a reality. If you look at it mathematically, it’s not that difficult to pull off.

Say you want to make money online, you could easily do it like this:

• Learn a skill people are willing to pay for - writing, marketing, design, no-code web development. If you ruthlessly practiced one of these skills for 90 days without taking a break you’d be good enough to sell it as a service.
• Sell the skill - Either exchange the service for testimonials and referrals or charge a price you plan to raise over time. Cold pitch 100 people, get 10 people on a call, close 3.
• Deliver the service - Over time you’ll get better at the skill itself, pitching it, and the delivery.

When you look at the math, you’re a lot closer to having a full-time business than you might think.

Say you make $60,000 a year and want to quit your job.

Learn to think in price x product or service instead of dollars per hour.

5 grand a month could be:

• 5 clients at $1,000
• 2 clients at $2,500
• 1 client at $5,000

or

• 100 sales of a $50 product
• 50 sales of a $100 product
• 25 sales of a $200 product

Get some eyeballs on your biz and these numbers are more than achievable. If you do business-to-business (b2b) services, figures like $1-5k per month are a drop in the bucket to certain companies but can be life-changing for you.

Stop overthinking the process.

Find out what people want, make it, try to sell it to them, deliver the product or service, improve it, repeat the process until you have enough money to quit your job.

Money likes speed.