Business Lessons from Shaan Puri

These I have salvaged from Shaan Puri’s various tweets and articles and consolidated here. These advice range from marketing to hiring to project management etc.

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Big Mario Marketing

Your customer = little mario - one bad move away from failure

Your product = an item mario can use

The result = big mario, shooting fireballs and kicking everyone’s ass.

What most people do: talk endlessly about yourself / your product.

What you should do instead: tell customers how awesome they will be after using your product

I don’t care what you’re doing. If you’re selling breakfast bars, don’t tell me about the granola. Tell me how this bar can save me 20 minutes of time in the mornings by giving me a grab and go breakfast AND I’ll lose weight in the process.

Nobody cares about your product. Literally nobody.

But everybody cares about their own quality of life improving. So that’s what you do. Describe how their life will improve, if they use this special little product of yours.

THEN back it up with evidence, social proof, and explanations of why it works.

For example… for the all access pass

Little Mario == someone who wants to build a successful business, but is unsure of how to do it.

Big Mario == someone who is confident that they can build a successful business, because they have seen first hand how to do it! They are armed with a toolkit of tactics and a blueprint to follow.

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Employment Contract for hiring ambitious interns

Beneficial for both the interns and the employer. Cutting through the corporate bullshit about experience and educational requirements.

If you can do what i need, welcome aboard.

Being who I needed when I was younger

• I’ll pay you, but this won’t make you rich.
• It will be hard, and you will learn a lot
• Sometimes I’ll forget that you’re young and never done this before
• I’ll ask you what you think. Not as a pop quiz. Just to know
• If I say “can you do that?” Just say yes & figure out how to do it later
• I’ll invest in you as much as you’re investing in yourself
• I’ll push you into the pool, but I won’t let you drown
• I will be brutally honest with you. I may be the first to do so
• You will get 3 years of experience in 1 year
• I won’t give you any work that I haven’t done myself
• You will end up in meetings you don’t belong in, so that one day you belong in them.
• I’ll judge you on your results, not your age
• I don’t drink coffee, so you’ll never have to make me one

Sounds good?

Let’s do it.

PS - if I forget to do one of these things, remind me

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Work like a Lion

Today - we’re trained to work like a cow.

Cows stand in a field all day. Slowly, chewing weak, low nutrient grass. Everyday, the same thing, at the same slow pace. This is how we are trained to work. 9-to-5, Monday-thru-Friday, 50 weeks in a row.

Instead - we should work like a LION.

Lions sit. wait. observe. looking for their prey.

When they see it. They SPRINT. Hunt. Catch.

EAT. enjoy. celebrate.

Rest. Relax. Wait for the next juicy prey.

This is how winners work. high intensity, focused on high value projects. With frequent breaks to rest and recover.

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Kicking off a project

make a Kickoff Doc, before you start any project it will have 4 parts

• Define “winning”

  • clear measurable goals, NO abstract writing
    • I want to grow my business to be really big, sign many clients - BIG NO
    • Get $20k gross in first year - YES
  • 2 goals
    • One, good goal - like $20k gross in first year, $50k in second year
    • Other, Holy Mother of Christ goal - $100k in second year, $250k in third year

• Write Anti-goals

  • Means for “winning”, you won’t let these goals happen
  • Example - if your dream was to be a musician. “winning” means to have successful concerts. But while you’re touring the world, you gain weight, get addicted to drugs and your kids don’t recognize you. “Anti Goal” would be - Gaining weight, drug addiction, you get the point

• Back of the Envelope calculation, how might I get there?

  • If I want to make a million dollars. I can make a $1 app and sell it to 1M users. Or I can create a $100k product and find 10 customers.

  • The back of the envelope is meant to walk through some scenarios, and identify which number seems “hard to hit”. That becomes my focus. How do I get that number?

  • Then brainstorm

  Kickoff project template

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Promote lifestyle, not the product

If you’re operating in a new/niche market, promote the lifestyle, not your product.

Put differently - if you’re a company that makes saddles. Rather than talking about how your saddle is better than other saddles to a niche market.

…what if you promoted the lifestyle of horseback riding to the masses instead?

That’s why the CEO of Slack explained: “We don’t sell saddles here”. Rather than selling their chat app, they sold the dream of working without so much damn email.

We put this into action while promoting our course.

The course is niche (learning how to buy businesses), so instead of selling the course - we started promoting badass entrepreneurs who have done this and built $100M+ empires doing it.

We ignored our saddle (the course) and instead promoted badass cowboys who ride horses (eg. Chamath, Andrew Wilkinson, etc..)

Ask yourself. Should we be selling our saddle? Or should we be selling the dream of horseback riding… and when they need a saddle, they’ll buy from us.

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How to get out of a setback

You get “stuck”. You have a “setback”. Face an “obstacle”, Hit a “wall”, etc.

You want to move forward, but it’s not easy. And it’s draining.

Plateaus are inevitable and part of the growth process. Why stress over the inevitable? That’s like stressing out everytime the sun goes down each day.

The Plateau Breakthrough Recipe

1. First, relax. Plateaus are always a part of growth curves. This is normal.
2. Start with getting in the right “state” of mind. I make better decisions, and am more creative when feeling loose, confident, happy. Not frustrated, tired, or stressed.
   1. Change your mental state through Music, movements like Pushups, windsprints, jumping jacks and reframing this negative state to a positive learning situation

Now start asking your brain the questions

1. What does the data actually say is happening?
2. What is the stupidly obvious thing I haven’t tried yet?
3. What would a friend or mentor of mine do in this scenario?
4. What is a 20% tweak I could make that would make a 100% difference?
5. Who’s already successfully doing this? What the heck are they doing differently?
6. Who are 3 smart people i can talk to on the phone to help me problem solve this?

Now all you need is patience.

Impatience with action, Patience with results.

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