One sentence summary: Will It Fly by Pat Flynn presents a strategy to test, qualify, and turn your business ideas into profitable ventures.
One paragraph summary: Will It Fly by Pat Flynn is a detailed guide to help you determine which business ideas are worth pursuing. Pat’s inspiration for the title comes from his experience teaching his son how to make paper planes. When his first paper plane didn’t fly, his son was disappointed, but he got better results as he continued to learn. Pat uses the same concept to teach readers how to test and qualify their business ideas from the ground up.
“Not all businesses are created equal, and not all ideas should be built by the people that dream them up. It’s when your idea supports your lifestyle that it becomes worth exploring more”
Pat Flynn is a podcaster and author. He also runs several websites, with the most popular being Smart Passive Income, where he teaches people how to create and run profitable online businesses. Pat decided to become an entrepreneur after getting laid off, and in his podcasts, he shares beautiful entrepreneurial lessons on how to formulate profitable ideas from scratch.
The book is divided into 5 parts:
Mission Design
Development Lab
Flight Planning
Flight Simulator
All Systems Go!
The following are important lessons found in each part of the book:
Building a successful business is not always synonymous with building a successful life
Take time and make an effort to develop your business idea properly
It is important to understand your target audience or target market
Validate your business idea based on how much it actually sells
Keep the momentum going!
Pat says it is important to have clarity about our desires in every area of our lives and then strive to build businesses that support the complete life experience we desire. He suggests the following tests:
Monopoly businesses offer unique and differentiated services. Such companies usually have no competition but act as if they do so that the monopolized nature of their business isn’t discovered by entrepreneurs that might flood the newly discovered industry. Peter cites Google as an example of a monopoly.
The Airport Test: This challenges the reader to imagine narrating how amazing their life is five years from now. It requires one to answer the question,”What’s happening in your life five years from now that causes you to describe your life as amazing?” This exercise is designed to give one a clear picture of what to work on in the present to achieve their vision of the future
The History Test: This is taken by writing down all previous jobs and volunteer work done in the past and identifying the good and bad and one’s favorite memories from the experiences. After this, one is expected to grade their experience based on how much they enjoyed it
The Shark Bait Test: This challenges entrepreneurs to ask themselves what makes their business idea so special. This exercise helps one discover what unfair advantage they have over their competitors
Pat attributes his ability to get many things done to his clarity of mission. He cites clarity as a key to true productivity and success.
Pat says it can be dangerous to launch a business idea before it has true substance. He takes readers through three exercises that help entrepreneurs with a process he calls ‘germination of a business idea’. The exercises are as follows:
Creating a mind map: TMind maps are visual representations of our intentions. This can be done by using post notes or mind mapping software. Pat advises readers not to overthink during this creative process
The One Sentence Exercise: Here, the reader is required to write a page-long description of their target, compress it into a paragraph and finally summarize it into a single sentence. This is an exercise designed to help entrepreneurs effectively articulate their target ideas
Speak to 10 people every day about your business: Sharing a business idea ought to be done from a place of honesty about what the business offers and what it doesn’t, as well as being open to receive feedback that will be instrumental in making the business better
In some business circles, there is a notion that a business has to have a broad reach to be successful. Pat challenges this thought with this quote
“You don’t have to go big in the world to experience success. You just have to be big in somebody’s world.”
He challenges entrepreneurs to consider the idea of thinking small enough, which means thinking about a niche audience that will remain true to them and faithfully consume every product they produce. This can be done by first identifying what one’s target audience is already consuming
Once the entrepreneur finds out what his target audience already likes about his competitors, he can adjust his business accordingly by adding fresh ideas to what is already working. This action gives the entrepreneur a cutting edge.
After identifying what products to sell the next step is finding the target audience or target customers online. Examples of such places are blogs, forums, and social media groups. It also helps to build relationships with people who are already influencers in the entrepreneur’s intended field
Understanding the potential customers’ problems through one on one real time conversations, conducting surveys, and running paid promotions online
Learning and understanding the language of your target customer by understanding the questions your target customers are asking, finding their complaints and finding out what keywords the target customers use in their search engines
Finding real life anecdotes, which are short relatable stories about the target audience
Creating a list of your target customer’s needs
Once this is done, the entrepreneur can now formulate solutions to his potential customers’ problems through his product or service. By testing the solutions one at a time, the entrepreneur gets to see what works and what doesn’t and can further develop what works.
Numbers don’t lie. It is essential to test out the newly created product to a fraction of the target customers identified in previous exercises to gauge whether they will purchase the product.
Here are some benefits of a pre-sale:
A failure to generate purchases during a pre-sale shows the entrepreneur what isn’t working and allows them to pause developing the product further
A pre-sale is great practice for greater product launches and mega sales in the future
A successful pre-sale gives the entrepreneur cash upfront
A successful pre-sale is great motivation for the entrepreneur to continue putting in the work required to deliver great products
The process of validating the ability of a product to sell well follows this sequence:
Getting in front of an audience through guest posting, targeted advertising and private targeted advertising in forums and social media groups, as well as interacting with offline audiences
Fine tuning the target audience to inspire interest in the exact people that the product is intended for
Creating engagement with members of the target audience that express interest in the product and noting down lessons learned from the experience of interacting with people who are not interested in the product
Asking the target audience for a transaction
Keeping the momentum going is a call to scale up from serving a small sample from the target audience to serving a larger group of people through running a fully-fledged and validated business. Many of the books in our growth series also say the same thing.
The Growth Series:
From Will It Fly?, we learn the sequence needed to turn a business idea into a profit-making venture. The sequence is:
Find the four most important areas of your life and create a picture of the experiences you desire in these areas five years from today. This will help you determine whether your business idea fits the life you desire
Develop your business idea
Conduct thorough research to learn your target market
Run a pre-sale to validate your product
Take your idea and launch it as a full scale business
Pat guarantees that if you follow the above set up, your business will certainly succeed.
I recommend this book to aspiring entrepreneurs or to anyone with an idea they can turn into a successful business. Given that we all have ideas, I also believe that this book is for everyone
GET THE BOOK ON AMAZONRate this book!
This book has an average rating of 5 based on 2 votes.
