Another Excuse Newsletter

Welcome back to the Another Excuse Newsletter. It isn’t just another excuse, but a reason to start that thing you’ve been putting off.

What to expect this week:
👓Perspective - Eat the frog
🔨 Tool - Hemingway
🍿Consume - Trash
📖Concept - Painted Door Method

Latest Podcast Episode

In the latest episode of Another Excuse, I’m joined by the founder of Best10, James White.

Best10 is an app that makes fat loss easy. They pair you up with your very own coach who will plan all your meals and workouts for you. They’ll also be available to support you 12 hours a day, every day. We cover a lot of ground in this episode.

In the episode, we discuss:

• How he pivoted from law to opening a gym
• His scrappy stories from starting
• Creating the most basic MVP to start
• Needing less money than you think
• What makes a good entrepreneur
• Future Plans for Best10
And so much more...

You can check out the episode here.

Perspective

Eat the frog

We often chat about productivity and to-do lists.

We all want to get shit done, but most of the time the list gets longer and longer and we feel horrible about it.

Mark Twain had a different approach:

It’s pretty simple and makes a lot of sense.

If you feel overwhelmed by your long to-do lists, rather start the day figuring out what the biggest task is or what the biggest problem that needs solving is and just do that.

Most of the time we avoid the big, scary, important tasks because it’s usually the most difficult.

So we fill our time with easy small tasks while the big one looms over us.

If you complete the big frog first, it might take a lot of time, but you will feel like you’ve accomplished something.

Helping with that ever-important momentum.

So start the week with the big task, tick it off and then move to the next.

Tool

Hemingway

I’m not sure why I haven’t spoken about this tool yet.

This is the tool I recommend to anyone who has just started writing regularly.

We bring a lot of high school English rules into our writing and to be honest, most of them aren’t necessary.

Most of the time it just comes across like you’re just trying to sound smart, which doesn’t resonate with anyone.

If you want your writing to be easy to read and impactful, you’ve got to write like you speak and keep it simple.

But how simple?

Well someone like Alex Hormozi says a grade 3 reading level is the goal, and I suppose it depends on your goals, but I think it’s a good place to start.

Why a grade 3 reading level?

Well, his statement is based on statistics and a grade 3 reading level is the reading level of the majority of the US.

So if you’re trying to communicate a point or sell a product, the more complicated you get, the more possible clients or audiences you exclude.

So Hemingway is a tool where you simply write or paste your writing into it and it will tell you what reading level your writing is.

It will tell you which sentences are too long and which words are unnecessary or complicated.

So check it out.

I’d recommend it to anyone. No matter what the purpose of your writing is.

Consume (Read / Watch / Listen)

Trash

Some of my favourite content is watching people build in public.

Spencer Scott is doing just that.

He was fed up with the quality and cost of his local waste collectors. They were leaving the neighborhood’s bins all over the place and didn’t really care.

He wanted it to be done better and so he decided that he would make it better.

He publicly announced he was embarking on this journey and has been updating everyone following along as he goes.

You can see from the tweet above that he give updates on every single detail.

Content like this is great.

It helps show that starting isn’t that hard and that the best business to start is one that solves a problem of your own.

Check out his tweets if you’re vaguely interested.

The business is growing fast and it's very informative.

Concept

Painted Door Method

The Painted Door Method is used when starting a new business.

Most people think they need to have everything set up. Ready to sell their products.

But that’s not the case.

The founders who use this method believe that validating the idea and making sure that people will actually pay for the product is the most important.

So how do you see if people want it without having stock and complete website?

You create a painted door.

It’s done in a few ways, but you basically run a few ads and draw people in. You then track activity on the page.

You can either get them to give an email and say the product is coming soon, or you can do let people go through the whole purchase process and make the payment fail.

Then you know for sure that people are interested in the product.

For the failed payment method you obviously collect emails in the process too.

If the response was positive you then get the product ready for purchase and email everyone who was interested.

Many first time founders don’t think of this approach and end up going through a lot of R&D and creating the product without validating the idea.

Keep this in your repertoire for next time.

And if you haven’t figured out why it’s called the painted door, it’s because it looks and feels like a door, but isn’t one.

Thanks for Reading

Now start something!

P.S. Feedback is welcome and needed! If you’d prefer to send me an email and not respond, you can do so here: [email protected]

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