One time I was walking down Lindell Boulevard with some of my family in St. Louis. The street was lined with old-timey mansions on big lots across from a large city park—scenic and pretty. My nephews were joking about living in one of those mansions, throwing parties, and having exotic vehicles like a hot dog mobile.
My sister asked me out of the blue if I had considered going into business for myself. I said I liked the concept but didn't know where to start or what I would sell. My youngest nephew started throwing out the usual kid ideas like selling lemonade or candy bars.
I'm still in that state a year later, which is why I sometimes grab books like Dane Maxwell's Start From Zero.
Dane's Origin Story
Dane's story is a bit scattershot, but from what I pieced together in the book, he was first involved in real estate because his uncle owned a brokerage. He noticed brokers had a hard time recruiting agents and saw this as a potential business model for an online tool brokers could use to help with recruiting.
He validated the idea with his uncle, who both encouraged him and fronted him the startup costs in exchange for lifetime service. Dane then hired a Russian developer online for $2,200 to create the online tool and rolled it out. It ended up making Dane about $50,000 a year for six or so years. Not bad.
That could have easily gone sideways. The Russian developer could have run off with the funds and never been heard from again. But it worked out and gave Dane a taste of success. He went on to develop other businesses—some successful and some not so much—and now coaches other wannabe entrepreneurs using his method for creating sustainable, profitable ventures.
The Personal Development Foundation
Start From Zero begins with touchy-feely exercises about personal identity. Dane himself credits years of therapy for helping him overcome his personal roadblocks.
Two recommendations he starts with are:
Understanding your personality and strengths through a free exam called HEXACO. Dane even conducted a small study to find how his most successful students scored on the exam and found patterns. They scored highly in areas like creativity, self-esteem, diligence, fairness, and altruism. They scored low on fearfulness, anxiety, dependence, greed avoidance (LOL), and perfectionism.
I took the exam myself and, funnily enough, scored high on nearly everything on both sides. I am diligent and fair but have some anxiety and perfectionism.
Working on limiting beliefs based on a framework inspired by Byron Katie's The Work. Dane suggests putting your hand on your heart and asking what it is you really want. Instead of asking yourself "why is this important," he says it's better to ask "what's most important." You don't want to create justification; you want to uncover hidden motivations.
What's most important to having your own business? So I can have more control of my environment and have a chance at greater income. What's most important to having control and greater income? It gives me a greater sense of satisfaction and being rewarded for my value creation. What's most important in feeling rewarded for value creation? And so on.
The Four Stages of the Business "Farmer"
After a few more chapters of psychological material, he segues into the more practical business frameworks. He seems to use farmer analogies for whatever reason—maybe because he's from Iowa.
First, be the "surveyor" brain. Look around and see what people are actually wanting. The framework for this is Customer-Pain-Solution-Offer (CPSO).
Who is the Customer?
What is their Pain?
What is the Solution for their pain?
What is the Offer?
An example he gives is Poo-Pourri—a portable spray to use in the bathroom before taking a dump (yes, seriously).
Who is the customer? People who are embarrassed by their smells, like someone visiting their in-laws and stinking up the bathroom. What is their pain? Feeling embarrassed and anxious about pooping. What is the solution? A pleasant-smelling spray that can cover the surface of the water to trap noxious smells and leave a nice floral scent. What is the offer? Just $10 a bottle.
The point isn't "OMG, someone became a millionaire from this!?" It's that this way of looking at CPSO is literally everywhere. Any business you look at—from Apple to McDonald's to your local mom-and-pop service businesses—are all following this pattern whether they realize it or not.
Start From Zero goes on with three more frameworks. I won't go into details on those, but briefly they are:
The Tiller - Asking five questions to potential customers to better understand their needs and desires.
The Planter - A framework to move from idea concept to concrete results by first validating ideas with potential customers and limiting financial risk with prototypes and mockups. Dane has an entire map for this and recommends readers hand-copy it twice in blue pen to really nail it down in their subconscious. (Something about blue pens being more receptive, he explains.)
The Gardener - Once an idea is proven in the planter stage, get users to provide feedback and use cases, then use those to further scale and sell the product to more people.
Key Skills and Mindsets
After going over the “farmer” frameworks, Dane highlights key skills and ways of thinking he considers critical.
I won't cover all of them here, but the few major ones to note are:
Shifting from "expert" to "owner" thinking. Your job isn't to be an expert. It's to own and manage the system that connects the solution to the customer.
Dane would often find a pain and a result customers wanted, then go out and find an expert to create the solution and turn around and sell that solution himself, giving the expert a cut.
Why don't experts just do that themselves and keep all the money? Dane explains it's a mindset difference. The vast majority of experts want to focus on their expertise, not learn to sell and manage businesses. These are two entirely different skill sets to master.
Another key mindset: it's not about "passive" income; it's about owning assets that create income.
Dane talks about how his former college professor bought a business building in downtown Des Moines using clever financing hacks. He applied for historical building tax credits and received them—over a million dollars. The professor then sold those tax credits to rich people to use (apparently this is totally legal) and used the raised capital for the down payment and renovations. The professor now makes a high six-figure income just from that property.
Dane's own businesses often required a lot of work upfront, then became profitable businesses that had their own momentum and generated cash flow.
The last major skill to note is learning copywriting. Copywriting is the art of persuading people to buy something from you using just words. A letter in the mail, an ad on Facebook, a website landing page, a message on LinkedIn—the list is endless.
Dane said that learning to do copywriting well tripled his income.
"To my knowledge, the fastest and best way to acquaint yourself with building the skills for making money is to study the greatest money-making advertising letters of all time."
He shares a list of seven letters and recommends copying them slowly by hand to absorb the flow and techniques the masters used. Many of these classic sales letters generated millions with fewer than 500 words each.
A lot of these letters are collected and freely available online. One good resource is swiped.co.
Most importantly, Dane emphasizes multiple times that the structure of a business is straightforward:
Customer has a need
The entrepreneur provides a mechanism
Customer gets desired result
Dane says the majority of entrepreneurs overthink #2 and should shift focus to #1 and #3. Deeply understand who the customer is and what they want, then figure out the mechanism. He even says that the product itself is only about 25% of business success.
Success Stories and Patterns
Dane wraps up the book with interviews with a dozen or so of his students who went on to create successful ventures. A couple had immediate successes, but one common pattern was that most of them had to go through four or five failures before something finally caught on and became a success.
In other words, a 10% to 20% hit rate is most common. You have to get the tries in without losing your shirt. But once you finally get a hit, the momentum can quickly carry you to success.
More info about Dane and his work can be found on StartFromZero.com. He also has a free podcast where he recorded calls with his coaching students that gives a flavor of how Dane teaches and thinks.
My Takeaways
While reading this book, I was reminded of my sister, who struggled with two of her own startups.
One was a job-specific hiring board. She spent a lot of money on web development and got one customer, but momentum quickly flatlined and she had to shutter it, taking a loss.
The second was selling flowers from her garden to neighbors at rock-bottom prices. She thought this validated her idea but had no more flowers to sell. She jumped through hurdles to purchase from a wholesale florist and built up an inventory. When she tried to sell again at higher prices, it was crickets, and her entire inventory died.
What would Dane say about these attempts? He would probably say it's super common and explains why people fail. They shoot in the dark and pray it hits something. Maybe if she had these frameworks in hand, she could have avoided the time and money lost in those attempts.
I haven't started a million-dollar business yet, but I'm walking away with some things to try.
I took the HEXACO exam and dumped the results into ChatGPT to help interpret the review. It's helping me understand areas I work well in and should aim toward.
I started hand-copying famous sales letters. I have read books about copywriting before and heard this advice in the past, but now I'm trying to take it seriously. If Dane claims it tripled his income, I definitely want to give it a try.
Lastly, I'm trying to mentally think through CPSO whenever I come across a business that intrigues me. Who is the customer? Their pain? The solution and the offer?
If I get an idea starting to roll in my head, I would revisit this book to see how I could validate it with potential customers while keeping my financial risk as minimal as possible.