MFM Mini - The Burrito Trick: How I Got My First 20 Customers

Here's a mistake that I've noticed a lot of people make when it comes to business. They make big plans. And big plans aren't bad, they're just like a sneaky form of procrastination, right? Because a big plan means you're putting off action until, number one, you finish writing up the plan, and number two, the big plan usually takes place, it plays out over weeks or months from now. And it's usually leading up to a big launch that's a few months from now. And so I'll tell you a story about how we almost fell into this trap but got out of it. Okay, so there's a few years ago, we were making an app for high schoolers. And, and so the engineers had built like a simple prototype. Honestly, it was pretty crappy, wasn't even in the App Store yet. We were playing with it and we kind of liked it, but we're a bunch of 30-year-old, you know, hairy dudes. And so we said, we don't know if high schoolers are gonna like this the way we like this. So, so I told our two growth guys, I went to Tyler and Jason, I said, alright, so those guys, the engineers, they're building this thing, how are we gonna get users? And Tyler and Jason, they're smart guys, they, you know, so they grabbed a marker, they said, alright, we're up for the challenge, how are we gonna get users? And they went and started brainstorming a growth plan. And so they thought, you know, they went to a whiteboard and they're writing down, we could 'Oh, these Instagram influencers, we could get them to shout us out, we could do an influencer program, we could create a referral system or referral program, ambassador program inside these high schools.' And anytime you hear the word program or committee, just run the other way. It's usually, that's for things that are mature, and so if you're working on an early idea, you don't really wanna be baking up full programs just yet. And so, these were all good ideas, they weren't bad, but they were things that would take us weeks or even months to set up, right? Even Facebook ads we couldn't do 'cause the app wasn't even live in the store. It takes a week to get approved, you know, for a new app in the store. And so we thought, okay, well, what are we gonna do? Do we just sit around and wait or what? So we were at lunch and these guys were telling us the ideas and then we all kind of had this realization. We have a framework, or we had a framework at my startup which was called, the 1 month, 1 week, 1 hour, 1 day, 1 hour framework, right? And so anytime we'd have a plan that was like, this, this will take us a month to build this, this will take us 2 months to build this, somebody's— somebody in the room, it's their job to say, dude, that's an awesome idea, love that idea, I think it's gonna be great. You know, what's the 1 week version of that? What's, what's the 1 day version of that? What's something we could do today that we could ship that makes progress towards That and future. And it's basically saying, how do I grab the rope and tug the future forward? How do I pull the future into the present? And how do I simplify this great idea so that we can test it out and see what happens? Because we've learned that most of our great ideas aren't so great when they, when they actually touch customers, when they actually get, get into contact with customers. And so, so we agreed, we were there, we said, okay, yeah, these programs are good ideas, but let's, uh, what's the one-day version? And we said, well, I could just call my nieces and nephews and I could just ask them if they'll try it out with their friends. So we called them and they were in school so they couldn't pick up their phones. We said, all right, well, what are we gonna do? It's lunchtime now. We're gonna wait till tonight, call them, tell them about it, get them to tell their friends. That's at least a 1-day thing. And so somebody asked the question, they go, all right, what's the 1-hour version? We said, the 1-hour, the 1-hour, the 1-hour, what could we do? And that's when we had the idea. We said, well, you know what? The mall that's right next to us— our office was in SoMa in San Francisco. There's a big mall, Westfield Mall. We said, you know, that mall, there's always teens just walking around. Like, maybe we could just go there and maybe we could just like get them to test our app out. It's like, well, isn't that kind of creepy? It's like, yeah, but like just do it in a non-creepy way. Okay. And so Tyler and Jason, you know, they're like, all right, we got this, don't worry. And they went away to a room for like 5 minutes and they came back out with a poster that said Free burrito if you try our app. And they said they're gonna go stand in front of Chipotle, which is like between— there was a Chipotle and like a Jamba Juice or whatever, where a bunch of foot traffic went. And they're like, we're gonna hold the sign up. And so they go and they hold the sign up, and they— in 1 hour, they had a whole bunch of people basically playing with the app at the table. Because hey, if you use this app, you give us feedback, you'll get a free— we'll buy you a burrito, right? We'll buy you a $7 burrito. And so in 1 hour, we went from 0 customers to 20 customers. And 20 is still not like, oh my God, congratulations, you've cracked growth. But 20 is a huge leap when you're at 0. And we didn't need a program that was going to give us 2,000, 20,000, or 200,000 users when we didn't even have 20. And so those 20 pointed out a whole bunch of little things that they were like, oh yeah, like I was confused about this, or like "Yeah, but like, this seems like a lot of work, so I wouldn't, honestly, I wouldn't really do this. I would just want to do this simple thing instead." And so we got a bunch of feedback about what to build, plus we got a bunch of email addresses of kids who basically were like, "Yeah, cool, like if you guys make a new version of this based on the feedback, like, I'll try it out, I'll tell my friends about it." And this always stuck with me, and actually this became a thing that we did every single day that week. In fact, we would go to a high school, we would stand outside the high school again, 30-something-year-old hairy dude standing outside the high school. It's not great, but we had our sign, our burrito sign, and kids were coming out from— it was like after school or whatever, they were leaving, and we would get hundreds of kids to sign up for this. They thought, "Oh, I'm gonna get a free thing? Yeah, I'll sign up." And as soon as a few people were at the table signing up, everybody else just wanted to get it too. And so we thought, "Oh, maybe we'll get in trouble," right? We had all kinds of things we might talk— all kinds of reasons we might Talk ourselves out of this. And sure enough, a teacher comes out, an adult comes out, and they're like, excuse me, what are you doing? And we're like, oh ma'am, sorry, uh, you know, not to alarm you, yeah, we're just— we're a startup, uh, nearby, and we're building an app that we think that high school students will love. It helps them with XYZ, and we were just looking for some feedback, and so we were here to basically recruit some beta testers. And we were waiting for her to say like, you know, get out of here before I call the cops. And instead what she said was, that's so cool. My kids love startups here, but we have no like startup classes or programs. Hey, would you guys be interested in coming in and talking to our class tomorrow? You know, I teach whatever, computer science or something, whatever it was in the school. And she's like, I teach in the school and, you know, I could just let you guys guest teach for a day talking about what it's like to work at a startup and how do you build an app. And so all of a sudden we went from creepy dudes giving out burritos, getting maybe 10 or 20 students at a time, to being invited into the school where every hour we would teach first period through sixth period or whatever, and we would have 25 kids per class. And all of a sudden in one day we would get 125 students as a captive audience. We're talking to them, we're teaching the class for them. It was fun. And we were getting a bunch of users who all knew each other, which was even better, right? Because there's like a When you use an app that your friends use, you have a better experience. And so that was our story of having, you know, finding a way to pull the future forward, to have a high bias for action and not fall into the trap of making quote unquote big plans, right? We do it because we have the right intentions. We just want it to be successful. And it seems like a big, well-written out, well-thought-out, you know, multi-stage plan is a better plan. I don't think so. I think a simple plan violently executed today is better than the, the complicated multi-stage, multi-layered, nuanced plan that we're gonna do over the next 6 months. When it comes to early-stage ideas, just remember, ideas are— ideas and inspiration behind them are perishable. They expire. And so you want to strike while the idea is hot and not wait around falling into the trap of of making big plans.