A Week of Almost There 🤠

Alrighty people, I have been busy.

Busy cooking.

Cookinggggggggg…

This is Week 3 of The Unicorn Founder and a lot has been put into the oven and onto the stove 👨‍🍳

I have updates on the $$$ goals, the projects, the web development, and some pretty cool ideas getting put into action. Plus, some pretty solid direction.

This Week’s Update Overview:

• 😌 The Forgotten Monday: What trying to recall my Monday activities inspired.

• 🙋‍♂️ Lead Confirmations: Gaps in the market just seem to be opening up the more I dig.

• 🤝 Important Networking: Some very powerful insights & reflections so that you never miss meeting the right people.

• 📚 More Certifications: Would you believe it, I am now certified in a few more things… (this is getting out of hand)

• 🎯 Agency Checklist: Some of the things happening that are needed to make this agency thing real.

• ➡️ Direction: The next steps for this next week of life - it’s gonna be insanely good.

😌 The Forgotten Monday

In all honesty, I cannot remember what happened on Monday.

I literally have no clue.

So, I used this supposed erring as an opportunity to turn it into learning (see how nice that sounds?).

Going forward, I will be reflecting at the end of each day on all the work that was done.

Time-blocking the hours of the day and the general activities performed.

And then building that up over the course of the week.

This way, I’ll not only be able to give a more cohesive and accurate summary of the week, but I’ll be able to really dig into the data to find which points of work are moving the needle forward and which aren’t.

And that’s what matters.

So next week I’ll share a screenshot of how that looks on my calendar.

Get keen. 

🙋‍♂️ Lead Confirmations

Onwards and upwards ladies and gentlemen.

Real estate is insanely behind the curve when it comes to technology. Like insanely.

Which I am finding more and more about every single day.

Which is super exciting news because that means we can make some $$$.

Anyway, moving on.

Got leads to do the following:

• Software to manage home renovations to ensure work gets done properly and in a timely manner.

• Create a much more streamlined cold-calling process for real estate agents

• Build out a member directory for a local celeb creating a community around what they do.

• Build out a local directory for contractors for people who don’t know who to contact when it comes to getting housework/renovations done.

• Build out the technical component for a local South African startup.

And that seems to be it for the leads right now, need to execute on these all asap and get them into the marketplace in the next few days.

Further down the email you’ll see my plan for these leads and the next ones on their way.

🤝 Important Networking

I attended a few events this week where I got to connect with entrepreneurs, founders, and investors which was great but there were only a few people/conversations that stood out to me.

In addition to the people and convos, it was a particular reflection that I found myself doing that had the most meaning for me.

I connected with some great people, some of which were building some awesome things with crypto, blockchain technology, and a guy not too much older than me who had received around R70 million in funding for his venture in the last 1.5 years.

That was the largest amount of money I have heard being invested into someone standing right in front of me in South Africa.

The current narrative is: No money comes to South African/African founders, we are doomed.

So that was a great confirmation that it’s always important to look further than the naysayers and complainers (who always have the loudest voice).

The biggest thing for me however was that I caught myself being a classic human: judging.

I found myself continually scanning the people thinking about whether they are someone good to get to know or not based on appearances that I thought mattered.

Yet, I found that the best people I met were the most unlikely of characters in my “big book of judgement”.

Which continued to confirm the importance of being open to literally everything and everyone.

You never know who’s who, so don’t be the reason you don’t get to know them and find yourself limited in the social spheres of the world.

It’s a challenge, but I move forward with the mindset that everyone should be valued as equally important regardless of any sort of distinction you use to judge value.

📚 More Certifications

There were two main things I got certified in:

1. Google Digital Marketing & E-Commerce (6-month online course)

2. Webflow (web design & development with 5 tiered levels of exams)

If you know me by now you’ll know that I don’t like to follow the traditional path, ever.

So, I managed to get the Google Digital Marketing & E-Commerce certification in a day and a half and the Webflow certification in a day.

I admit that these certifications took some time away from me this week, but they were necessary in the following ways:

• To complete my knowledge of marketing, ads, and ad campaigning to make use of in the very near future.

• To develop the incredibly empowering skill of being able to build powerful websites - more on that later.

• To have an understanding of both skillsets so that I can easily lead delegates doing the work for me in the business.

Sorry - no proof yet, certifications are being produced from both providers still - so slow….

🎯 Agency Checklist

I have been hesitant to tell people that I am building an agency because in my mind I have always seen them like this:

A group of freelancers all sitting in the same room together and giving the room a fancy name.

And I don’t know, probably the spamming I get on twitter from freelancers that just makes me think: ugh, freelancer.

For me the agency is such a pivotal stepping stone to get inside organizations to find the bigger problems → which then turn into startups.

It actually becomes the perfect customer discovery process of finding real-world problems that genuinely need to be solved - the key to building successful startups.

And when it comes to the agency thing, this is what I believe:

To become a category of one.

In marketing terms a Category of One is when there is basically no competition because you/your product/ brand etc. are so unique and innovative that everything else falls away.

Think Google, Apple, Uber, Airbnb etc. you get what I’m saying (hopefully haha) - they are all Categories of One.

I don’t just believe this for the agency but for my life as well.

And so that’s why everything the agency does needs to be special in that kind of way.

The website, the branding, the name, the marketing, the client process, etc. which all make up The Agency Checklist.

And all of that combined helps me to become proud of building an agency, which is a category of one, and a stepping stone to building great companies on scale.

➡️ Direction

One of my big boy goals for this week is to get real revenue coming in.

i.e. start chipping away at that $50k goal fast.

The main focus is narrowed down to spending all time and energy on the software dev side of things → removing all distractions.

The lead confirmations will be completed in order to build the portfolio for future potential clients to view.

And that’s that - keeping things simple, distraction-free, and tunnel vision focused on what matters.

Really keen to see what happens… hope you are too!

😖 If you hated this, tell me.

All you need to do is reply to this email to tell me your experience versus expectations.

I’ll see what I can do to improve either a) the experience or b) the expectations I am promoting.

🔋 Power in Community

Life is not easy, but having good people around you helps a ton!

• 1 Referral = Thinking of starting a startup/business? Get the Billion Dollar Case Study to get some points on where to start from the ones who have done it already.

• 2 Referral + = Are you interested in knowing more about other billion dollar companies? There is a lot of exciting research conclusions I’ll be releasing shortly as rewards.

• 5 Referrals = Exclusive access to a private slack channel of founders/entrepreneurs and even some investors from all over the world.

Did I miss anything? Hit that Reply button and let me know what you’d like to see.

Did someone forward this to you? You can follow the billion dollar company journey here.

Want to connect? Here is my LinkedIn.

Ciao, see you next week!

Ethan