Sometime last year I was listening to a podcast that featured Dan Norris. I had never heard of him before. The focus of the podcast was Dan’s successful company, WP Curve, but he also mentioned his book, The 7 Day Startup. Being an entrepreneur and fascinated with the whole lean process, I bought the book immediately and finished it in one day. It was pure genius.
As Dan writes in the book, “The goal of this book is to get you from wantrepreneur (someone who wants to be an entrepreneur) to entrepreneur. From someone who has an idea to someone who has a startup.”
What’s especially amazing is that Dan shows you how to start your business in just 7 days. He even assigns a task for each day with the task for Day 7 being: Launch!
After showing you exactly how you can launch your business in 7 days, he goes on to give 14 business rules to live by. I’ve applied these rules to my own business life—they work. In fact, they work fabulously and have saved me a lot of pain from trial and error and error and error.
I reached out to Dan and asked if he had time for a short interview…
Short Interview with Dan Norris
1. Why did you write this book? Was the number one reason for lead generation, to help establish your authority or for a new income stream?
I wrote The 7 Day Startup originally because my co-founder said I should write a book. It literally started from a few loose blog posts. Eventually, it gathered so much steam that it turned into a real book and a big community of people around the world who are passionate about this idea of launching and learning quickly. Like most of the stuff I do, it started very small and quickly grew. I wrote the first draft in about a week. My original idea was to write a book called The 7 Day Startupand write it and launch it in 7 days. I eventually figured out that it was more of a creative project than a business, and it didn’t really make sense to rush it. We spent time editing, formatting, and marketing, and we launched it properly.
2. How successful has the book been both in terms of sales and income and lead generation?
It has been ordered around 25,000 times. About 13,000 of those were free in the first week, and it’s been steadily selling 20 to 40 copies a day since then. I think I make about $2.50 per copy, so I guess I’ve made around $30,000 since it launched. I haven’t really checked. I also make money from translations when someone wants to market it in a specific country. I’ve sold a few for a few grand each. The coolest thing is the community. There are 2,000+ people in my Facebook group and hundreds who have built businesses after reading the book. Some have gotten to multiple six-figure businesses in a matter of months. Nothing cooler than that!
3. Any cool stories to share that happened as a result of the book?
Lots of examples like the one above. Some of the stories I featured in the book, like the Baremetrics and Tidy.me startups, have gone up to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars at multi-million dollar valuations, which is super cool. Lots of people have read it and started businesses as a result, and that is even better.
Dan’s new book, Content Machine, “aims to inspire thousands of people to build their business without advertising.”