Will It Fly?: How to Test Your Next Business Idea So You Don't Waste Your Time and Money by Pat Flynn: Summary and Notes

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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.

Favorite quote from the author:

“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.

Main Takeaways from Will It Fly?: How to Test Your Next Business Idea So You Don't Waste Your Time and Money by Pat Flynn

The book is divided into 5 parts:

The following are important lessons found in each part of the book:

  1. Building a successful business is not always synonymous with building a successful life

  2. Take time and make an effort to develop your business idea properly

  3. It is important to understand your target audience or target market

  4. Validate your business idea based on how much it actually sells

  5. Keep the momentum going!

Lesson 1: Building a successful business is not always synonymous to building a successful life

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.

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.

Lesson 2: Take time and make an effort to develop your business idea properly

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:

Lesson 3: It is important to understand your target audience or target market

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

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.

Lesson 4: Validate your business idea based on how much it actually sells

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:

The process of validating the ability of a product to sell well follows this sequence:

Lesson 5: Keep the momentum going!

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:

Wrap Up

From Will It Fly?, we learn the sequence needed to turn a business idea into a profit-making venture. The sequence is:

Pat guarantees that if you follow the above set up, your business will certainly succeed.

Who would I recommend the Book To?

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

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