INTERVIEW: Leo and Oliver Kremer on Building a Burrito Empire at Dos Toros

Today's classic episode will help you get the first version of your product up and out this weekend.

We use a three-part framework to help you focus in on the one core feature you've got to nail that can be built by someone with no technical or product building skills in an afternoon. We also find your customers inertia and ride that wave to make it easier to use your product than not.

We get help from an airbnb for lawn equipment startup and move the ball forward on the chronic pain idea.

• Byldd
• Tacklebox
• Tacklebox Newsletter
• The Personal MBA

0:55 The Two Questions Entrepreneurs Have About Products
2:35 A Great Product Does Two Things
4:26 Entrepreneur Baggage + Airbnb for Lawn Equipment
6:29 A Mindset for Today
8:13 Step One - Process
8:53 Organ Donors
9:55 Inertia
11:35 Chronic Pain
13:07 Frank’s Process
14:50 Harry Potter and Being Chosen
15:43 Step Two - Metrics
17:12 Chronic Pain Ex-College Athlete SOM
18:35 Outcome not Features - The Product is Irrelevant
19:16 The Five Marketing Archetypes - STTC, Pain, Cost, Apparate, Urgency
20:19 Step Three - Delivery (The Product)
20:32 Warby Parker
22:23 The Twelve Forms of Value
25:49 The Venmo Accountability Group

Today, we talk through a 4-part system to generate ideas - one that'll tap into your brain's natural ability to develop novel solutions rather than just waiting (hoping) inspiration will strike. We'll do it with a little help from a baseball training facility, a corked wine bottle, and an MRI startup. 

• Tacklebox
• Idea to Startup Newsletter
• Fermenting Ideas
• Pod: Customers speak Problem
• Pod: How to Create a Strategy for your Startup
• Readwise
• Idea to Startup Bot

00:26 Idea People
02:47 A Baseball Training Facility
04:45 Inversion
07:46 Smooth Jazz
9:24 Part 1: Identifying the Problem
12:34 Part 2: Collecting
17:22 Part 3: Chewing
20:14 Part 4: Testing
21:37 The End + How to Start

Today's classic ITS episode discusses the Concierge MVP, an indispensable tactic early stage entrepreneurs can use to get the feedback of a full product without the money and time required to build one. We go through the 4-step method that'll get you data from customers you can use to raise funding, hire, or recognize the opportunity actually isn't worth your time.

• Tacklebox
• Idea to Startup Newsletter
• Idea to Startup Bot
• More Concierge MVP Examples

00:00 - Opening and introduction
02:00 - The chicken and egg startup
04:50 - The value of a Concierge MVP
07:20 - The four steps of a Concierge MVP
11:00 - Example story of coaching service Concierge MVP
14:20 - Challenges with selling/positioning the Coaching MVP
18:30 - Learning from Concierge MVP results
22:45 - The End - Momentum

Today, we'll talk about strategy - what good (and bad) strategy looks like for startups, and how most early-stage companies lack any strategy at all. Using a framework from Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, we'll explore the three core elements: diagnosis, guiding policy, and coherent action. We'll examine strategies from a stand-up comedian and GoPro as examples, before applying the framework to craft a strategy for launching a successful children's book.

• Tacklebox
• Idea to Startup Newsletter
• The Skeptical Startup Episode
• Good Strategy / Bad Strategy
• Get On Your Knees (comedy special)
• Go the F*** to Sleep

00:29 The Skeptical Startup
1:58 Strategies vs Goals
3:58 The Comedian Story
8:50 Smooth Jazz
9:30 Bad Strategy
11:38 Fluff
12:12 Failure to Face the Challenge
13:19 Mistaking Goals for Strategy
14:50 GoPro
17:16 The Kernel of a Successful Children’s Book
19:56 Guiding Policy
20:50 Coherent Action
21:24 The End + You

Today, we'll help you tackle the big question for entrepreneurs with startup ideas and jobs - when's it time to quit the job and focus on the startup full-time? You should think about this question the second you start working on an idea, and you should use the Skeptical Startup framework - a goal of $8k per month in 10 hours per week - as a guide. The Skeptical Startup framework is magical, and Brian will show how it'll help you focus with an example startup.  

• Tacklebox
• Idea to Startup Newsletter
• Idea to Startup Bot
• Farnam Street - Surface Area
• The Alchemist
• Natalie Imbruglia - Torn

00:30 When to Quit Your Job
03:25 Life Expenses Excel Sheet
04:05 The Skeptical Startup Framework
06:25 The Idea: Home AV Improvements
07:44 Smooth Jazz
08:22 The Logistics of $8k
11:26 An AV Marketplace
12:46 Reduce the Surface Area
15:27 The Search
16:30 A Lead for the AV Startup
19:16 The End - Your Goals
19:26 A Goal Framework

Today is an ITS classic - an episode that was listened to and shared a ton. It hits on a fundamental question for idea-stage entrepreneurs - what if the problem you're solving isn't an urgent, painful, bleeding neck problem? What if it's just something you think will improve people's lives? Should you still pursue it? How?

• Tacklebox
• Idea to Startup Newsletter
• Idea to Startup Bot

Today’s episode is for everyone who struggles to summarize their startup in a sentence. We lay out a framework to do this well with help from a sticker on the street, a hedge fund, and a Vietnamese coffee shop.

• Tacklebox
• Idea to Startup Newsletter
• Idea to Startup Bot

00:33 One Sentence Marketing
01:10 Train to NYC
03:04 The best marketing Brian’s seen in a while
06:42 Smooth Jazz
07:28 Choosing a Customer and the Knowledge Spectrum
08:54 Air Quality Idea
13:07 Inflection Points + The Conference Exercise
14:09 The End - Vietnamese Coffee

Today, we dive into a practical, resilient system to help you carve out and hold time for your startup amidst the craziness of your life. Most startups fail because the founders lose momentum when predictable life things pop up - you were supposed to work on your startup but your kid was sick or your job gets busy. You need to build a system that adjusts to this constant "failure state" - one that doesn't require Herculean willpower (wake up every day at 4am) and makes working on your startup easier than ignoring it. Today, we help you do that. 
 

• Tacklebox
• Loom
• OneTab
• Light Phone II

00:26 A System to Make Time for your Startup This year
02:55 Dad Fitness Club Idea
04:59 Smooth Jazz
05:41 Sell the Position
09:13 Life Inventory
10:11 Never Rely on Willpower
10:57 Previously On
12:42 The Five Minute List
13:44 Do The Thing
15:57 The End + The System

Seth Godin (!) and Brian go through startup ideas. Seth gives his opinion on how he’d start everything from a pasta truck to an updated CSA program. We dive into risk, emotion, tension and doing things that matter. Seth talks about the distinction between entrepreneurs and freelancers and the danger of thinking you’re one when you’re really the other. We talk about marketplaces and domain expertise and knowing what it is you’re actually selling.

This is Brian's favorite episode ever.

• The Song of Significance
• Tacklebox
• Purple Cow
• Linchpin
• The Dip
• Ted Talk - How to Get Your Ideas to Spread
• The Tribes We Lead
• Seth on Farnam Street - Failing On Our Way To Mastery
• The Coaching Habit - Michael Bungay Stanier
• Farmer Jones
• Ecosia Search Engine
• Poilane Bakery

01:45 How Brian and Seth Met 05:10 Idea #1 - Helping Doctors and Patients get 2nd (and 10th) opinions 10:48 Idea #2 - How to Start a Pasta Truck 13:01 Landlords and Renters 14:45 Bootstrapping the food truck - emotional vs. financial risk 17:13 Can you start a business if you’re not a domain expert? 18:42 Idea #3 - The Scalable Coach 22:50 Entrepreneur Pacs 26:15 - Idea #4 - Update to CSAs 31:20 - How to Pitch Something Uncomfortable - who takes the risk 34:15 - Idea #5 - Cost Transparency 40:37 - Confusing Freelancing and Entrepreneurship 45:08 - The Billboard Question - (outstanding, make sure you get here)

Today, we’ll teach you how to avoid sabotaging your startup. Most founders think the best way to build a startup is to mitigate risks - to optimize for worst case scenarios. But the actual way to build a successful startup is to optimize for tasks with the highest ceiling - to do the things that might give you asymmetric gains, if they work. This is unnatural and hard - the Problems and Opportunities Method, the second in our Method series, will help.  

• Tacklebox
• Idea to Startup Newsletter
• Day One App
• The Hail Mary Pass that Saved Hinge
• Loss Aversion is Paralyzing Your Startup
• Feast of the Seven Fishes

00:22 Problems and Opportunities
02:26 Find Your Lobster Story
08:10 Asymmetric Progress
10:00 Smooth Jazz
10:45 The To Do List Monster
14:20 The Obstacle is the Way
15:12 Ambiguity Aversion, Loss Aversion, and Magicians
15:55 Helping Parents Plan Dates
18:22 Scheduling and the Actual Downside