Will It Fly? By Pat Flynn [Book Summary]

Based on Pat Flynn Book, Will It Fly? How to Test Your Next Business Idea So you Don’t Waste Your Time and Money

Part 1: Mission Design

A. The Airport Test

What is it? The Airport Test is a thought experiment wherein you envisioned what your life looks like 5 years from now. To help you create your vision, imagine you are in the airport and met your old friend. He asks you, “How’s your life?” and the answer you want to give is “My life’s amazing.” The key question is: What’s happening in your life five years from now that makes you respond like this?

Why is it important? Conducting the airport test will help ensure that your goals are aligned with your values and future self.

How does it work?

Step 1:Get a piece of blank paper and fold into four.

Step 2: Define the four most important categories in your life: Health, Finance, Business, Relationship etc. Write it down on each quadrant.

Step 3: Determine why life is awesome five years from now. As you write your goals for each category, make sure you use a present tense verb instead of future tense.

B. The History Test

What is it? It is another thought exercise wherein you list down all your past experiences, whether a job or hobby.

Why is it important? The goal here is to know your strengths and weaknesses, likes and dislikes, and the skills that you may have forgotten.

How does it work?

Step 1: The What. List down the past jobs, contest, or club you have joined in the past.

Step 2: The When. Next, is to write the date it happened.

Step 3: The Good. List down at least three reasons why you enjoy those experience.

Step 4: Your Favorite Memory. Write down your most memorable story.

Step 5: The Bad. List down at least three reasons why you hate those experience.

Step 6. Grade.

• A — Everything about it was perfect!
• B — For the most part, it was very enjoyable.
• C — It was okay.
• D — Didn’t really like it much.
• F — A terrible experience.

Step 7. Repeat the process for the other experience.

After listing down your history, it’s time to evaluate. You may notice some patterns and similarities on different experiences. Use your discoveries if the business you are planning is aligned with your goals and personality.

C. The Shark Bait Test

What is it? Based on the famous TV Show Shark Tank wherein the startup entrepreneur have to pitch in their business in front of well-known investors.

Why is it important? By doing this exercise, you will discover your ‘unfair advantage’. What skill or asset that you have that no one else has, or very few others might have in a specific niche? What makes you special?

How does it work? This is similar to History Test. But this time you are asking other for help. Talk to at least 10 people and ask them what they think your ‘superpowers and kryptonite’ are.

D. Folding Your Wings

“A plane symbolizes flight, movement, and innovation. It also symbolizes freedom. In the air, without the constraint of road and terrain, you can choose to move in any direction you’d like.” — Pat Flynn

After finishing all the exercise, time for some fun. Fold the paper and turned into a plane.

Along with your entrepreneurial journey, you may be frustrated and bound to give up. This will serve as a reminder on the why’s of business.

Part 2: Development Lab

Goal: To take your business ideas into more visual to help you understand exactly what it is

A. Germination

What is it? An exercise use to brain dump anything that comes out of your mind related to your business idea

Why is it important? Seeing your idea on hand will help you with the thinking process rather than keeping it your brain

How does it work? Though there’s a lot of ways to this, Pat Flynn recommended the used of Mind Mapping, either offline or online.

A mind map is simply a visual representation of our thoughts, and it’s an extremely clever and useful way to organize those thoughts and discover important patterns and relationships.

Items can be grouped together, hierarchies can emerge, and it’s not unusual to finish this exercise with a total understanding of all that noise in your head.

Method 1: Post It Notes (Offline with pen and post it paper)

Method 2: Mind Mapping Software (Mindmeister)

The rule of the game is to “Don’t Think” while mind mapping. Whatever comes on your mind, write it down.

Mind Mapping Phase 1: Brain Dump

What you’ll need:

• Your mind mapping method (Post-It notes or software) ready.
• A space where you’ll be uninterrupted for 10 minutes.
• A countdown timer (like the one on your mobile phone) set for 10 minutes
• Any other thing that helps you think best (e.g. coffee, music, your favorite chair)
• And finally, an open mind that won’t think about order, structure, or editing.

Mind Mapping Phase 2: The Clean Up

After 10 minutes, organize your ideas with the common category or similar topics.

Mind Mapping Phase 3: Pruning Your Tree

Take a few minutes to discard those notes that don’t really matter.

B. One Sentence

What is it? In this exercise, you will need to combine and organize your idea into one sentence

Why is it important? When you get to the core, you find what really matters.

How does it work?

Step 1: Write One Page

Write a one page summary of your idea, usually about 400 to 500 words.

Step 2: Write One Paragraph

From one page summary, rewrite your idea in one paragraph, usually around 3 to 5 sentences.

Step 3: Write One Sentence.

Finally, summarize your paragraph into one sentence. The idea here is to have a one sentence idea that people will understand and provide comment.

C. Conversation and Observation

What is it? After you created your one sentence business idea, it’s time to share and request feedback from your target audience

Why is it important? This is to dig deeper on the value of your idea until it becomes refined and mature.

How does it work? All you have to do is go out of your room and request feedback about your business idea.

Pat Flynn’s Tips on How To Share Your Idea

• Don’t give any opinions leading up to the conversion.
• Don’t sell yourself (or your idea) short.
• Help. Then ask.

Pat Flynn’S Tips on How to Listen:

• Consciously listen to the person’s response.
• Don’t take notes or record the conversation.
• Dig deeper by asking quick follow-up questions.
• Don’t just listen to the words.
• Let the person speak.

Part 3: Flight Planning

Goal: To learn everything you need to know about your target audience and where to find them

Market Map

What is it? Research to define the places, people and products that already serve your market

Why is it important? This is to give you a ‘bird’s eye view’ of the environment you want to enter

How does it work?

To create market map, you are going to find the 3P’s within your market

Pat Flynn’s Tip: Using a spreadsheet, create 3 sub sheets and rename each sheet as Places, People and Products

A. Places

These are websites where your target audience resides or hang out. These are:

• Blog
• Forums
• Social Media Groups (Facebook and Linkedin)

Pat Flynn’s Tip: To search places in Google, type in the search bar

blog: keyword

forum: keyword

Copy in the spreadsheet the URL of websites related to your keyword.

B. People

These are the authorities who are already dominating your target audience. This is to determine what’s working and what’s not.

In the People sheet, construct the list of influencers including their name, website, and any special notes about them. You can found them on:

• Social Media Platforms (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram LinkedIn , Periscope)
• Podcast (iTunes)
• Using search tool like Buzzsumo

C. Products

Find the top products, services, and books being offered to your target audience. You can find them, of course, at Amazon.com.

Pat Flynn’s Tip: Using the product reviews, you can learn more about what your target audience is looking for and what makes them buy a product or service.

The Customer P. L. A. N.

What is it? Use this exercise to define your customer avatar or customer profile.

Why is it important? This is to learn more about your target audience, what solutions they are looking for, the language they used to describe their problem, the needs to satisfy and stories they can relate.

How does it work?

On a separate spreadsheet, create 4 sub sheets and name them as follows.

• Problems.
• Language
• Anecdotes
• Needs

A. Problems

Look for problems that you can provide solutions either through

• One on One Real Time Conversation
• Surveys (What’s your #1 biggest challenge related to [topic]?)
• Paid Traffic (Facebook advertising)

Pat Flynn’s Tip: Discover stories behind stories. Always dig deeper by asking follow up questions like, “how come?” or, “why do you feel that way,”

B. Language

When you can learn the language of your audience, you can more easily make a connection with them, and ultimately they begin to trust you more.

To narrow down our search, we’ll be looking into the three most useful kinds of words and phrases you could collect at this point:

• Questions
• Complaints
• Keywords

You can find them thru Forums, FAQs, Amazon Reviews, Google Related Searches.

Pat Flynn’s Tip: Use the following keywords in the search engine that begins with

• “why is it”
• “when can I”
• “what are the”
• “what is the”
• “how come I”
• “need help”
• “please help”
• “I need”
• “help with”

C. Anecdotes

An anecdote is a short, interesting story, and they’re some of the most powerful tools you can use in your business.

You can find them on:

• Forums sites
• Audio Podcast Interview

D. Needs

A need is what you believe your customers require to solve a problem, and the product or business becomes the mechanism to fulfill that requirement.

In Needs Sheets, create two columns. One for Problem and One for Needs to solve the problem.

Elixer

These will each become a potential solution you can test and run through the customer validation method.

Create a new column for beside your P. L. A. N. and name Elixer or the solution for every problem.

Final Exercise

Step 1: Eliminate all but one row and one solution on your matrix.

Step 2: Sit on that idea for a day.

Step 3: Conduct a second mind mapping exercise with your new target solution as the focal point.

Step 4: One page, one paragraph, one sentence.

Part 4: Flight Simulator

Objective: To test and validate an idea on a small scale so that you can make sure it works

The Validation Method

What is it? The purpose of testing anything is to answer the simple, yet crucial question: does the idea work?

Why is it important?

1. You will receive valuable feedback from the action people take.
2. You get early experience selling something.
3. You can get money in your pocket upfront.
4. It will motivate you to follow through and get things done.

How does it work?

Step 1: Get in front of an audience.

a. Targeted Advertising

Validation of business idea thru paid advertisement like Google Ads and Facebook Ads

b. Private Targeted Advertising

Serving the ads on specific websites where you know your target audience already exists. This time you will use the list of People and Places you collected in the previous exercise.

c. Guest Posting

A guest post is an article that you write that you publish on another website.

d. Forums

Pick two or three of the forums in your database and spend at least a week posting valuable information and responding to questions before asking for anything in return.

e. Groups

Similar to the forum, you will also provide useful information for the members before asking anything in return.

f. The “Poster Child” Formula

Be the poster child or the proof of the teaching of an influencer.

g. The Derek Halpern Strategy

When you provide value to others, more often than not, especially if they get results from what you share, they are going to want to find ways to pay you back for it.

h. Offline Audiences

Given a chance to speak with your target audience, talk you them and tell them what they can say about your business idea.

i. Crowdfunding Platforms

An all-in-one validation method that allows you to share an upcoming project in a marketplace where there are existing users who, if they are interested, will pledge money to support you and your campaign in exchange for the future build of the project.

Benefits:

• You get the exposure from the existing audience that those platforms have
• They are trusted marketplaces where people are comfortable using the platform to pledge and pre-order items.
• The platforms enable you to communicate with people about your project, even after the pledge period ends so you can keep them informed about the project build and other news.
• You can begin to build a following.
• It’s possible to generate a sizable amount of income, even beyond what your pledge goal might be.

Step 2: Hyper-target (a.k.a. Hand Raise)

This is to narrow down your potential clients or customer. It is unlikely that 100% of your target market will like your ideas. People who are responsive to your blog post, email or surveys fall under this exercise.

Step 3: Interact and share your solution.

Now, that you pinpointed potential buyers, it is time to interview them. Ask them what their problem is and share your solution. This is the best way to know the viability of your idea on hand.

Pat Flynn’s Tip: In conducting Interview

1. Take a minute to learn about them first (while also confirming they are in the right place
2. Qualify yourself. Tell them who you are and the reason why you doing the interview.
3. Be honest about what you’re up to.

Step 4: Ask for the transaction.

Ask for pre-order before creating the product. This is to ensure that there are buyers before you launch your beta-product.

Originally published at www.briandelacruz.net on April 8, 2019.