For the next few weeks we’re going back to basics.

I’ll be running through, step by step, how to build out a business. Think of these are foundational lessons.

We’ll be following my BATON framework (Business, Audience, Tribe, Offer, Network)

• Business: what value are we going to provide and to who?

• Audience: how will we let them know about the value we have?

• Tribe: how do we get permission to offer our value to prospects?

• Offer: how do we package up our value and sell it to customers?

• Network: how do we scale what works into a business?

This week is super important - what on earth is your actual business?

Let’s get started

Go wide

The Paradox of Business Ideas

Your business idea is simultaneously the least and most important part of your business.

It's the least important because ideas are cheap. Implementation is everything. Anyone can have an idea, but unless you build it, it's worthless.

Yet it's the most important because choosing the wrong idea early on could lead you down a blind alley for years.

In fact, it's the first component I always teach entrepreneurs. It's part of my BATON framework:

- Business

- Audience

- Tribe

- Offer

- Network

We start with Business and work out what value you're going to provide to the market. If we nail this part the rest is (relatively!) easy.

During this Playbook, I'll be running you through a set of AI-assisted processes to coach you through deciding what business to start. This is also valuable if you have an existing business and want to improve it - running it through this Playbook's process will sharpen your focus.

At the end of the week, you'll have a repeatable process for rapidly deploying new business ideas.

Going Wide

We start by coming up with a lot of business ideas and winnowing down from there.

Remember that ideas are cheap. For every 50 you have, maybe one will be solid and the other 49 can be safely trashed. If that's the case, you know that the remaining 1 is solid.

We're going to use an adapted version of the ikigai framework to hone in on the best business for us personally.

Here’s a useful graphic of the ikigai framework in case you aren’t familiar

Source

Let’s get to work with our first prompt

You are an AI assistant specialising in business ideation using the Ikigai framework. Your task is to guide the user through a series of questions based on the Ikigai concept and then generate business ideas tailored to their responses. Follow these steps:

1. Introduce the Ikigai framework:
   Explain that Ikigai combines four elements: what you're good at, what you love doing, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for.

2. Ask the user which of the four Ikigai elements is most important to them right now. Use their answer to prioritise that element in your later responses.

3. For each of the four Ikigai elements, ask a series of questions to gather information. Ask these questions one at a time, waiting for the user's response before moving to the next question:

   a. What you're good at:
      - What skills have you developed over the years?
      - What do people often compliment you on or come to you for help with?
      - What achievements are you most proud of?

   b. What you love doing:
      - What activities make you lose track of time?
      - What topics do you enjoy learning about or discussing?
      - If money were no object, what would you spend your time doing?

   c. What the world needs:
      - What problems in your community or the world concern you most?
      - What changes would you like to see in society?
      - What groups of people do you feel are underserved?

   d. What you can be paid for:
      - In what areas do you have professional experience?
      - What industries are growing in your region?
      - What skills or services are in high demand?

4. After collecting all the information, analyse the user's responses. Pay special attention to their answers related to their chosen priority element.

5. Based on this analysis, generate 10 potential business ideas that align with the user's Ikigai, emphasising their priority element.

6. Present these ideas to the user, explaining how each idea relates to their responses and Ikigai elements.

7. Conclude by encouraging the user to view these ideas as starting points, which they can combine, modify, or use as inspiration for their own unique business concepts.

Remember to be creative, encouraging, and responsive to the user's unique combination of skills, passions, and values throughout this process.

This will run you through a process and at the end generate a handful of business ideas you could pursue.

Here are the first 5 for me

Pretty bang on! I already do a lot of these! And the one I don’t do (the first) is something I desperately want to do.

Importantly there’s a tweak in this prompt that’ll take into account what you want to focus on right now.

Ikigai is a great idea but sometimes we need one component more than the others

• maybe we need money first so that we can leave our job and focus full time on our business

• sometimes we want to make an impact on the world and the other elements just aren’t as important

It really depends on you and your situation. So I’ve built into this prompt a “weighting” mechanism that’ll prioritise what’s most important to you.

For now choose the ideas that most interest you. We’ll be running them through a series of other prompts and processes over the rest of the Playbook.

Specifically

• Part 2: Value proposition. Every business must produce value. We’ll work out what your core business model is and the primary value you need to provide the market.

• Part 3: Business validation. We’ll run some processes to validate whether business idea is a goer. Both an automated AI process and manual steps for real-world validation.

• Part 4: Business plan. We’ll then pull everything together into a actionable business plan for moving forward.

• Part 5: Project plan. We’ll finally convert this into a step by step implementation plan with a focus on getting started ASAP.

Sounds good?

Premium subs, see you in the next Part.

Keep prompting,

Kyle