How to Start a Startup: Step by Step Guide by 8-Figure CEO

1. How to get business ideas:
We’ll go through how to study 100s of companies in an industry in order to become an expert. I go through dozens of competitor products break down what I learnt from them, and how I incorporated different ideas in ContactOut’s final product. We’ll study the marketing channels that different firms are using and how to reverse engineer them in order to get traffic, via SEO, paid ads, partnerships and social media. I go over developing a sales process by booking sales demos with dozens of competitor companies, recording all of them and taking the best parts. And taking all the sales collateral and pitch decks as inspiration. Then I’ll share what I learn from hundreds of conversations with users, ex-employees of competitors, founders and industry experts in the space.

2. Testing startup ideas
We’ll talk about how to test startup ideas by talking to users and validating that there’s demand before building.

3. Finding mentors:  I’ll talk about the exact email I sent to NYTimes best selling author James Clear to score a mentorship session with him. Then I’ll show you how I interviewed business leaders at competitors of mine, and how I eventually convinced them to join my business. Including Harvard grads and accomplished business leaders who’ve built unicorn companies. Finally I’ll share how to get mentored by Bill Gates.

4. Product development: I’ll share Figma designs, JIRA boards, and ContactOut’s exact product development processing, including our weekly goals for individual team members, meeting recordings and how we communicate on Slack.

5. Product Market Fit:  I’ll share lots of real world case studies of how companies found product market fit. Companies like Zoominfo, Pilot, Rupa Health, Luminai. We’ll cover building product in the leanest way possible via: – manually providing the service first – building one product line first – building on top of open source software – white labeling a competitor’s product

6. Growth and Marketing: How I got 1million monthly visitors from Google using programmatic SEO and how I converted that into 10million in revenue. We’ll start with keyword research. Then we’ll talk about sourcing datasets and how to use ChatGPT to interpret and add value to datasets and generate programmatic SEO pages. I’ll show you our process of indexing pages, and talk about our process for link building in order to build site authority and help us rank. I’ll share our process for hiring and training our link building team as well as the outreach email templates we used to build over 800 links. Finally we’ll talk about monitoring results and adjusting as needed.