Hey, it's Andre and Shawn. Today we are talking about a topic that's just really dear to both of us. And it's something that really informs a lot of our thinking. It's an idea inspired by Jim Collins, Jim Collins is a business author. His interviews with Tim Ferriss are extraordinary, we'll put links to those in the comments, make sure you start with the first one, because that's just an absolute blockbuster. And a lot of what we're talking about today, Jim Collins will talk about hate really talked about in that interview. So the topic today is a concept called bullets to cannon balls, and the quick metaphor, we'll just do a quick overview. And then we want to bounce back and forth. And we're gonna give you an example, where we've done this literally, over the last weekend, and have final results this morning. So we're excited to share those.
So bullets, the cannonballs, the metaphors, you can imagine that you are in a ship to a pirate ship, and are in your sailing across the seas. And then you see, another pirate ship is coming toward you, and you're almost out of gunpowder. So you could fire a cannonball. And if you hit the ship with a cannonball, you could sink the ship and you're off you go and you're, you're safe. And you're you live live another day. But if you miss with that cannonball, then then you're in trouble, you don't have anything else to do. And then that pirate ship takes your ship. And you can imagine the metaphor extended here. So what the what Jim Collins has suggested in this metaphor is that rather than fire a cannonball, where you put all of your energy and effort into one thing and make it happen, and then the results of the results, that instead you take a little bit of gunpowder, and you fire bullets.
So the bullet is, it's as a small action, it's a, you're not putting a tremendous amount of energy, and attention and effort into something but you're calibrating with the bullet. So you can imagine these two ships are getting within range and are about to face off. And instead of putting all of the gunpowder and firing a bullet that are firing a cannonball that you miss her you don't miss. And it's over, you put a little bit of gunpowder on you, you fire bullets to realize like oh, that one was a little bit too high. That was a little bit too low. Okay, that's right. That's where it right right where it needs to be. And then the cannon ball, all the rest of the gunpowder is put behind the cannonball and then the cannonball is fired because you have dialed in and sort of cited in that trajectory.
Now, applying this to business, the idea is that instead of let's say, we'll use example of a digital course, instead of putting hours, months, weeks, you know, whatever it is, I got to think I got to that was that was a really strange progression hours. There we go. Instead of putting a tremendous amount of effort into creating what you believe to be the perfect course, on a subject that's near and dear to your heart, and doing, you know, let's say it takes you 90 days of three months of work to create the perfect course and you bring it out into the world. And nobody buys it. Right. So now you've made up fire to cannon ball, and nobody wants it. Contrast that with reaching out to an audience like bullets, instantly, you start to develop an audience and you start to ask them, Hey, I'm thinking about doing this thing? Where do you raise your hand? If you're interested in making a few hand raisers like okay, well, and then maybe you fire another boy. And I think maybe two, you know, in two months, I'm gonna take this group through the way that I've learned how to do XYZ and then get more hand raisers. And then you describe it, you add the traffic, and you get a larger audience. And you can and you continue to refine your messaging. And you notice that each time you fire these bullets, the response is improving until you've you've you nail your value proposition and realize, okay, now it's time, not necessarily to fire the cannon ball to build the course. But to fire maybe a little bigger bullet to say, alright, it's $997 for this course, and here's how you can buy it. It doesn't exist yet. And if I get 10 people to sign up, I'm going to make it happen. Like that's, that's bullets to cannon balls. It's just idea that we're not ever investing an enormous amount of time and energy into something until we've calibrated the interest. Our audience's excitement. Is there. Is there interest in it? Do people care about it? Are they willing to pay for it? So that's that's bullets, the cannonballs in general Andre, what's your I think? I think we both come at this in a similar way. But I think we also have, we definitely have different impressions of the implementation occasionally. So what's your 10,000 foot view of bullets? The cannon balls?
Yeah, that's what I like about metaphors. You know, when and when Jim Collins shares this in his in this idea in his various books. It's very, it's very broad general. And you know, He's, he's he's lifted for, you know, everybody to take what he's said that that metaphor and apply it in ways that can be slightly different but but the essence is a thing that you start off with these little small ideas, and you allow that to inform decisions, downstream decisions. And then so when you finally make that, that bigger decision or when you finally reach that, that, that, that point of success it is it has got there through this through this process of iteration, or this process of, of calibration, which is kinda like that, that that part of the, of the metaphor wears you constantly calibrating, you know, in the lean startup world, it's, you know, a suppose it's, you can think of that as iteration. But it's these these little steps, these little bits of gunpowder that we use, we never just start off with the big thing. And I think once you, I mean, it's a simple idea, right? So if you go back, if you go back, you can, you'll see us do this all the time. So we said, we really ever draw, draw attention to what we do. And we just, you know, we, we send out emails, we, we put things out into the world, and then something happens, and then something else happens. And it's largely invisible to our audience to you guys. Because we just we just implementing this idea. In fact, we have an entire course. That's, that's named similar to do this. Only just a thought of this. Just before we we started shooting this ideas to assets, and it's really it's the concept of, you know, ideas being the being the bullets, the and the assets being the being the finished thing, the the cannonball so yeah. I think I'm just gonna read. Yep.
Yeah, I think I think that I try to click attention to before you read that excerpt is that there really, there are a couple of things going on with this idea. One, the big one is risk mitigation. Right. So if you think about typical, and I've worked with clients, I saw this happen a lot, I would get someone would hire me and say, Okay, I've got this offer. It's, you know, whatever, eight week in depth training, and they've done all this work, they bought some like high level course, or I don't want to name any names, but there are some, there's some well known courses out there, that sort of dosages that are very expensive, like, you know, $25,000, a year kind of expensive, where you create everything in advance, and then you go through this process of making it available to an audience. And by the time, of course, then, if you're paying for traffic and everything else, by the, by the time, people were coming to me, I was realizing they had invested 50 or $60,000. and months and months of time and energy at minimum, and had no idea if they were going to sell a single one, and I saw many of them. So one to five in their first iteration. And you can imagine how demoralizing that is in the promise that's made. And I don't want to argue with the promise. But the promise that's made is that you know, like, okay, that's your first one, then the next one will be better, and the next one will be better. And, you know, I don't I'm not here to argue with that. But I know for me, I don't want to invest 50 $60,000 into an idea that I have no idea if anybody wants it, and three or four, six months of my time, sometimes even longer, and travel and like I don't I don't want to do that. I would I would. And I think what Collins is really getting at here, because if we get back to this idea of risk mitigation, that's a lot of risk. I'm risking a enormous amount of time. I'm risking a big chunk of money. And I have no idea what's what's going to happen. I've made a cannonball I crossed my fingers. And I hope it works and your bullets to cannonballs is a very, it's an entirely different way to think about risk and in how to mitigate risks. So instead of let's say, let's say that process I just described cost $50,000 And it took six months that by instead of getting all the way to month six and then seeing what happens you're seeing what happens along the way. You're saying you're determining can I find my audience online yes or no? When I do find them are they engaged yes or no? How engaged on a scale of one to 10 when I like all of this and this is a lot of what we talked about initially in the business so you can find these ideas there but it's that process of continuing to engage just occurred to me like it occurred to you that I ideas to assets as bullets the cannonballs The durable business, the entire first part of a terrible business is bullets bullets, the cannon balls, it's learning how to fire bullets with an audience get responses, if that's what the entire course is. So it's kind of funny to think about that as we're talking. But this in it, because we can't overstate how important it is to mitigate the big risks and the big risks of the time that you spend the opportunity cost of things that you don't do the money required to do things like all of those are really significant risks, and bullets, the cannon balls, mitigates those risks and says, let's, let's iterate our way toward an offer that we know in advance will convert, but we have not yet even created it. Until we've had people tell us that they're willing to buy it by giving us money to do it. That's the ultimate expression of bullets, the cannon balls. All right back over to you. I was wondering if that was fresh on my mind.
Yeah, I like that. So let me just read this, this this excerpt from Jim Collins. It's taken from his from his latest book. So he says, Great companies extend their flywheel by the principle of five bullets, then cannonballs, the ability to scale innovation turns, small, proven ideas, bullets, into success, which is the cannibals can provide big bursts of flywheel momentum. So that's the excerpt and you know, he's he's introduced a few concepts there flywheel we we don't have to cover that now. That's that we can do that some other time. But the essence of what he's just said, is, is turning small, proven ideas, which are these, which are these bullets. And then you you know, success emerges from that. You don't start the other way around. You can't start with what success is back in the day, and what you know. And the story that she wants to share is there's there's a whole movement of people that try and start it the wrong way around. In our opinion anyway. So. Yeah, so we've, we've just, we've just done this ourselves. And
this is just what a great example to share. Because it's conceptual. We just talked about the idea. But now we can, we can show it a little show and tell. So here's what happened. And I'll sort of tell my version, and then you add some color to it, because we both kind of came at this from different perspectives. A week and a day ago. So last Monday. Yeah, it's we had, I had spent the weekend I just had this, this thought in my head, I really had it, it was so clearly formed, I really wanted to bring something out into the world that I had experienced many years ago, almost 10 years ago. I wanted to bring it into the world. And I couldn't I just couldn't let it go into had a name for it. That sort of emerged called accelerator. And it was it was the story was really something that happened to be at exactly the right time in my professional career where I met someone who was incredibly demanding, showed me what it took to get things done consistently, and effectively held me accountable, and really changed the trajectory of my business at a time when I was at a real low point. And I I've had in the back of my mind, a sort of pay it forward idea that I've wanted to bring that into the world. And I just couldn't shake it. So last Monday, Andre and I talked about the sort of I outlined the idea. Now keep in mind, this doesn't, it doesn't exist. This is an idea. It's just this. It's an experience I had I can sort of see the structure in my head. And we went back and forth. And we said, okay, let's, and I don't think we explicitly said, Hey, this is what's what's used the bullets, the cannonballs, but it's not that it's just as part of our DNA. That's how we work now that we don't know it when the idea was just an idea. We didn't know what would it resonate with anybody. So that conversation happened on Monday that we made a decision as to what's what's in Friday's email. Let's include this idea, what's constraints time for people to respond to just simply the weekend into Monday. And that's it. And then we'll make a decision based on what, what result we get. So the I created a 20 minute, which is shocking. I thought it was gonna be three hours, I was stunned that I kept it the 20 minutes, I created a 20 minute overview of, of what I imagined the program to be just enough detail that people could get it if it resonated with them and architect them it was not the right fit if it didn't include the price and what they needed to do. And what they needed to do was send me an email to my personal email address that said, Hell yes, I'm in. And that was it. That's the bullet. Right? We are that that we fired that we put this idea out of the world is it doesn't exist yet. There's enough interest. We'll create it. And this morning, the deadline in quotes was yesterday for this initial interest. But we had 16 Hand raisers. Right? And that's, so we thought we, we fired this bullet, and we got, we got our initial response, and it's positive, we're gonna happen. We're going to now now the confusion And that happens? Well, let's do this. Let me Why don't you talk about your, your perspective on how that unfolded. And then what I really want to make sure that we touch on today is that it's it's not bullet to cannon balls. And this is something that I don't know that I saw as clearly at first. And I want to make sure that we cover the idea of how, like what the next bullet is, and how you continue to fire bullets before creating a cannonball. But before we do that, why don't you? What did I leave out of that process? Because I think I was a little too close to it. Like, what was your memory of that process? And how does it differ from mine? Or what did you think was more important than that, that I probably didn't address?
Well, I mean, so there's, there's an element of this, that that's not obvious, which is, and it is relatively new to me, in the sense that this, this partnership that Shawn and I have this collaboration didn't exist before. You know, it's, it's only two years old now. And so I'm used to doing this concept and doing the stuff with me, like, I have an idea. And, and the idea in my mind is either fully formed, or it's at least fully formed enough that I certainly understand what I'm going to do. And so then after those are because the bullet, and then there's a signal, there's some response that happens, and then that informs, you know, the next thing, and so, but in this case, through this collaboration, sometimes one of us can have an idea that we can't, that we can't easily or it's not obvious in how it's externalized to the other person, or what the idea is, and I think in this case, because it happens so quickly, Sean's texting me on WhatsApp. You know, there's this idea, we need to shoot this bullet. And but he hasn't communicated to me. That fully formed version that he's got in his head is not the same fully formed version I have in my head. So I'm not seeing it. But one thing I can see, and again, this is something that I've got better with and if you, if you operate in a collaboration, this is this is something that will be more, more meaningful to you is that I could hear the excitement in insurance language, even though it started off with just texting. And I think there might have been a little loom video as well. I forget now. The it was probably both. But there was a level of excitement that it really, it really didn't matter, that much that I didn't understand this idea in the same level of habitability that Shawn did so. You know, so for me, there was some apprehension, that's probably the wrong word. And it's just, you know, Shawn had this idea and then went the bullet. So there was just there was just a lot of funk for me like fog of war, this that idea that you can't see too far into the distance that Shawn could, there was no, you know, there was there was no fog of war for for for Shawn, at least, as I understand it. So this this was really an this this first bullet validated this idea that he really wanted to put out into the world. And I think he would have been very disappointed if nobody said hell yes, and raise their hand or if there was two people, then there would have been like a, like a death punch or a door kick in the nuts. But, you know, that didn't happen. So but we're not on the cannonball stage yet. We were still firing firing bullets at this point, even though that this is the things going to happen. So yeah, I think just wanted to express that piece here. And you know, there's, there's many layers or dimensions to this to this idea. It's not just a bullet luck, like Sean said, it's not a single bullet, and then it's cannon ball. It's it's it's it's never like that it's the bullet there's a signal that could have been two people that responded then then the same would have would have would have died to death, at least for now. Or we got to 16 and that's that's a strong signal for for the segment of people that we expose this to. So now we take it one step forward. Now we're going to go ahead with this thing. But at the same time as we there's there's bullets that we need to uncover. Win Win this well, actually. Thinking Out Loud here for a second. thinking aloud here for a second. The next bullet Somebody saying hell yes. Is not the same as them giving money. So 16 People who have said, Hell yes, there needs to be 16 People really that then translate that into giving us their money for, for doing this thing, not five people suddenly. So there's that hurdle to cross stall, and just again, thinking out loud, we we're going to do this and over, over the coming weeks and months, there's going to be few other things that that happen, one of which is, is this experience,
you know, isn't valuable to us, it doesn't lock us up, and, you know, the both of us. So that's going to be it'd be another factor that we need that we don't know, now we can, I think we, we, we almost certainly know that this is going to be exciting. But you know, once you know, until this is put out into the world, and we're experiencing it, experiencing it love, we won't know for sure. For certain so there's there's some of this, there's still a lot of bullets and a lot of iteration and collaboration. That's that's going to happen. So I'll I'll Stop yapping there. I don't know if you want to add any add in anything.
I was just thinking about this. This idea. It's just a quote from it's in the it's an interview with Boyd Vardy and Tim Ferriss, but it's boy parties book, several places. The lion trackers Guide to Life, I think is the title of the book. And it's a really nice, short book. I listened to it. I don't I rarely listen to audio books, but I enjoyed listening to that one. And there were some really interesting ideas in it. Boyd Vardy his parents
or his family created the Longfellow londolozi Reserve in South Africa, which was adjacent to Kruger National Park. And they and he learned, it's fascinating to learn, I had no idea what was involved with my interest. And these are, these are wild, they track wild animals and wild lions. And it's fascinating to listen to the like, you know, you're tracking an animal they don't, they don't have guns or anything with them. They often have like, you walk on a corner, there's a 400 pound male lion sitting there, like you have to understand how to manage those engagements. It's a beautiful, beautiful, but fascinating story. But one of the lines that the tracker who Boyd already learned from says a lot, which I just love is I don't know where I'm going. But I know exactly how to get there. And it's it's such an it makes sense in the context of tracking of course, like you don't, you don't know where the animal is, if you knew where the animal is, you could just go there. So you don't know where you're going. But you know exactly how to get there. And that's, I feel that a lot. I certainly felt that in this. And that's I think that I don't know how that fits into bullets, the cannibals it's more of my personality, I think that, like I don't know exactly where accelerators going to be six months from now. But I know exactly how to get there between now and then. And it's the way to get there really is it's firing bullets. Because now is, as you pointed out, we've we've fired the first bullet, which is, hey, this, we're going to do this thing. And there's a timeframe for a response. And then we got a response. And today, I'll fire a second bullet, which is, I promised everyone that they will get a response from me personally, today, everyone's going to get that response and in that response is going to be a link it, there's going to be some explanation of what happens next, and then there's going to be a link to pay. And that's the next hurdle. Now 16 people have raised their hand, what percentage of those 16 people are committed enough to make that next step, I hope it's 100%, maybe it's 90%, maybe it's 95%, whatever it is, but then then we have to evaluate it at that next phase. And then there's going to be a period of time, where 3060 90 days where there will be some percentage of people who the idea of what they signed up for in the reality of what they signed up for are not the same. And those people are going to very quickly there will be some level of attrition that there are just going to be people who wash out. And that's fine. That's that's the reality. Now is that 50% 60% 5% I don't know I have no idea. But rather than build out the most sophisticated, you know, coaching, prioritization and getting things accomplished program in the world, we could imagine, we don't need to do that yet. What we're going to do instead is iterate our way toward that in there make it's not binary. It's not just a collection of bullets, and then one day boom, there's a cannon ball and the whole program exists. It's more like a staircase. And we've we've stepped on the first or a ladder, I guess it we've stepped on the first rung of the ladder, and we've got this interest and now we want to step on the next rung of the ladder and gradually what we're going to do is continue climbing this ladder. And as we take each step, we're building out the the structure, so that when we do the cannonball will emerge, rather than be something that is that a deliberate thing that we created the program, what we'll discover at some point, and I'm thinking it'll probably be somewhere between now and September ish. But in in September, I can imagine that we may do some formal promotion for TLB accelerator, but at that point, it's a fully formed thing. It has five or six months of, of refinements, it has success stories, it has like all of the component parts in that will look a lot more like a cannonball, it'll be a real thing that exists within our overall structure of the business that we started to really imagine last November and really put on the paper, what are we what do we want for our business, but we're going to get there one step at a time. And that's really what bullets the cannon balls is about, at its essence, I think, is to take the big destination. And to realize that, going from A to B, from that, from nothing to huge destination, a really robust outcome. That's hard, and it's risky. And then the question, the way to think about it is like, Okay, if I want to go in that direction, what what would I need to do first? What would I need to know, first? So in the case of TLB accelerator, we needed to know first is what was the value that I believe I could bring out into the world from an experience that I had, I had to get clear about that. And then the next bullet was, can I describe that value to others, that was the presentation, that was my conversation with Andre. The third bullet was, okay, let's put this out in the world to our audience only to a segment of our audience only, and see if there's interest. And then we got a result from that business, that bullet. Now we're at the net for that next day, like, okay, let's, let's see who's truly on board who's going to vote with their behavior, but their credit card information in and off we go. And then who's going to show up on the first call, who's going to do the work consistently, who's going to wash out over 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, 180 minutes, like those are all the next things, and we will wake up at some point over the next three to six months and realize that we have this fully formed, functioning cannon ball of an idea that emerged bullet by bullet by bullet.
I think that's, that's how that's how I think about it. Alright, let's wait longer than we thought it was going to, which always happens. So take us home, what's the last word of wisdom we can share about boards to Canada? Before we wrap up for today?
Yeah, I don't have much, much more to say, I think it's all been said. Now. I mean, it's, it's really, it's a really, it's a simple idea. And I think you've, you've summed it up nicely with, with with, with your ending there. That in by September, Tom, this, this thing, if everything goes according to plan, and the bullets keep keep, you know, calibrating correctly, we're gonna have a cannonball, that we can then fire in, you know, that our audience fully formed, we know that it's going to work at that point. In fact, it'll probably be, you know, it'll be a little six figure business at that point or little thing at that point, even before it's accountable. And I think that that just demonstrates what this what this concept really is. It's just these little ideas. And you turn them you know, it's it's, it's, it's, it's proving that that idea over and over again, and it gets bigger and bigger. Maybe you put a little bit more gunpowder in each time. But you're always learning. And it's it's heading towards a point where, where the cannonballs going to be fired. Which point it's it's almost a homerun at that point, I suppose. But, yeah,
that's an advance, right? I mean, it looks successful. I mean, it looks so easy. We're like, oh, like, it's what you think about what people will see. Let's imagine we fast forward to September. And we've we've built out the front end of the business, we're adding a lot of interest to the business and within that, there is a path for people who are have a certain level of interest to raise their hand and go through a journey that takes them through a through the the description of in getting excitement around like a story power promotion around accelerator like that, that can exist at some point and there will be people who are going through that, at some point in the future. That that cannonball is reverse its reverse engineered with almost a pre its pre determined success. And it looks like a thing that just showed up at exactly the right time for the right people or whatever. But it only exists because of the bullets fired months prior that with no, no, it's never definite that it's actually going to happen. And that's very different than saying, hey, in September, we want to have this program that existed, let's build it all out and have it ready. It's just an entire it's, it's doing the thing in reverse. And there's something but it's also you have to have a sense of where you're going. But more importantly, than where you're going, you have to have a sense of what's the gap between where I am right now? And what signal do I need to know first, and let me focus my energy and attention there. And then when I get an answer, I'll focus my energy and attention on the next thing. And then I'll then the next thing rather than try to do all of this from 10,000 feet and do it without not informed by the information. This is actually something else that not to open too many loops for Jim Collins. But this is something else Jim Collins mentioned in passing in that first interview with Tim Ferriss where he mentioned the simplex decision making method, which I've looked it up, it's mathematical, I think it's around linear equations, I don't understand. I don't understand what I've found about it. But the way he describes it as fascinating, which is a systems, traditional systems theory says that the way to build a system is to is to is to really build the whole system to get the result that you're optimizing for. And what the simplex method says is that you can actually build a system by iterating, step by step by step and making the best possible decision in the moment, you can build out the best system from that approach. And you can see that bullets, the cannon balls, is the simplex method in inaction. And it's this at every decision point, because you know, the direction you're going, so you know, what you want the system to do. But at every decision point, you're, you're, you're stopping and calibrating, like, Okay, what is the next thing that I need to know, to move this idea forward? What is the next most important thing I need to know? And how do I get that information? Or how do I get that signal? What needs to happen? And then you do that, and it either brings the whole process to a halt, or it gives you one more step on the road. So we went a little bit that was a little more tangential didn't mean to open up another loop and did Jim Collins we have a lot to cover with Jim Collins over the next few months, so we'll just open loops over and over to Jim Collins stuff more. This was fun. Yeah, this was fun. Thanks, everybody.
