Will It Fly? Summary

How do you know if your business idea will be successful or not? Pat Flynn’s Will It Fly? helps aspiring entrepreneurs uncover the answers and lay a strong foundation for their ideas.

1. Align Your Idea with Your Personal Goals and Values

Entrepreneurship is more than just building a profitable venture; it’s about creating a business that supports your ideal lifestyle. Flynn emphasizes that entrepreneurs need to evaluate how their ideas fit within the life they want to lead. This alignment ensures not just success but also personal fulfillment.

To identify the right idea, Flynn suggests a process of self-exploration. A simple exercise involves dividing a piece of paper into four categories—Family, Career, Well-being, and Money. List what you want your life to look like in each area five years into the future. For example, you may envision financial stability, time for loved ones, a healthy routine, and meaningful work.

This exercise allows entrepreneurs to analyze whether their business venture fits their long-term aspirations. If an idea doesn’t financially support paying off a mortgage or doesn’t allow the flexibility to enjoy family time, it’s wise to reconsider or adapt the concept.

Examples

• A social butterfly choosing a business that promotes personal interaction, such as hosting events or teaching workshops.
• Imagining yourself in five years: Do you want to travel? Then, an online venture might suit your lifestyle.
• Entrepreneurs realizing that their dream business lacks the potential to fulfill certain personal goals and adapting the plan accordingly.

2. Leverage Your Unique Strengths

Understanding and utilizing your special talents or experiences is key to setting your business apart. Flynn calls these your “unfair advantages.” Your personal strengths allow you to offer something others can’t, carving out a niche in the market.

Reflecting on your past experiences is a way to uncover these strengths. What roles have you thrived in? What skills have you mastered over the years? For instance, someone with 15 years of yoga teaching experience could create a unique online yoga school, building on their extensive practical knowledge.

Your strengths can also guide your decision-making. Flynn himself transitioned to entrepreneurship after realizing his desire to influence outcomes wasn’t being satisfied in his former job at an architecture firm.

Examples

• A yoga instructor leveraging two decades of experience to create an online course platform offering authentic, niche content.
• An ex-chef launching a cooking channel to share recipes because of their expertise in culinary techniques.
• An author using communication skills to build an audience for workshops or coaching services.

3. Map Your Ideas and Focus on the Core Concept

Flynn introduces the concept of mind mapping as a tool to organize thoughts and channel creativity. This is an essential step to structure ideas and refine them into a single, clear concept that resonates with customers.

The process starts with jotting all relevant thoughts using sticky notes or a web-based organizer like MindMeister. From there, categorize and structure these notes into themes. Finally, summarize your idea in a cohesive sentence that communicates its core.

Distilling ideas into a short statement not only helps you stay focused but also makes it easier to present the concept to clients or investors. A food retailer might describe their store as “offering a wide range of fresh, organic foods with excellent customer care and step-by-step cooking tutorials.”

Examples

• A fashion designer summarizing their brand: “Affordable, eco-friendly outfits for conscious shoppers.”
• A food app developer stating: “Turning meal planning for families into a quick, enjoyable task.”
• A tech founder describing their product: “An app that simplifies expense tracking for freelancers.”

4. Test Your Idea Through Feedback and Research

No matter how passionate you are, an idea needs external validation. Sharing your idea with friends, colleagues, or target customers provides fresh perspectives and valuable feedback. Flynn highlights the importance of discussing your concept and reshaping it based on the responses you receive.

Engaging directly with people in your target audience is invaluable. For instance, when Flynn was brainstorming a food truck website, conversations with food truck owners led him to refine his idea—it evolved into a community hub instead of merely a service site.

In addition to feedback, market mapping helps you understand how to position your product. A spreadsheet listing competitors, potential collaborators, and existing products helps you add value by identifying market gaps or underserved needs.

Examples

• Flynn abandoning his initial website concept after food truck owners questioned his credibility.
• A fitness app creator joining gym members' forums to understand gaps in fitness tracking tools.
• A musician speaking to listeners to discover what they want from a new music platform.

5. Understand Your Customers Thoroughly

Successful businesses solve specific problems. Flynn encourages entrepreneurs to build a Customer P.L.A.N. (Problems, Language, Anecdotes, Needs) to truly understand their audience.

Listening for recurring problems reveals what customers struggle with—this becomes the problem your business solves. For example, by asking open-ended questions like "What frustrates you most about booking travel?" you might discover a lack of user-friendly itinerary apps.

Placing your customers’ language into advertisements and product descriptions builds trust and relatability. Use the words they use: whether they’re “stressed about deadlines” or “overwhelmed by cooking daily.”

Examples

• A travel planner creating a user-friendly itinerary app after hearing frustrations about complex ticket-booking systems.
• Personal finance workshops using customer terms like “overwhelmed by debt” instead of jargon like “debt restructuring.”
• Survey results highlighting customer pain points in housecleaning tools, guiding what features a cleaning service could promote.

6. Use Anecdotes to Relate to Your Audience

Anecdotes provide a goldmine of relatable, real-life stories that connect you to your audience emotionally. Asking customers to share stories about their experiences can help you tailor your solutions to their struggles and successes.

For instance, Nick’s story of learning fly fishing reveals obstacles like casting poorly and relying on guides for advice. Such insights give product developers clear directions for improvement — in this case, perhaps offering an instructional app.

Examples

• A beginner runner sharing frustrations about finding the perfect running shoes could inspire a tailored shoe recommendation tool.
• A mom describing her struggle to find quick, healthy school lunch ideas might lead to a meal planning service.
• An aspiring gardener recounting confusion over plant care could inspire an easy-to-use planting guide app.

7. Validate Interest and Build Momentum

Testing potential interest before full-scale investment can save time and effort. Even digital platforms allow easy initial testing. Create ads on sites like Google or Facebook and observe clicks or interactions to gauge interest.

Another strategy Flynn suggests is hyper-targeted outreach. For instance, post in online communities and ask directly if they’d want a product like yours, or hold public forums asking for hand-raises if people agree the idea solves a problem.

Examples

• Testing responses to Facebook ads for a new yoga retreat service.
• Launching a poll on an entrepreneurial group to measure desire for a financial literacy app.
• Asking webinar participants directly if they struggle with time management.

8. Engage with Customers in One-on-One Interactions

One-to-one conversations ensure both personalized feedback and deeper understanding of customer behavior. Share your solution during these discussions and observe whether customers express genuine willingness to invest in the product.

If you want to validate demand, ask for pre-orders. This final step shows the monetary commitment your idea actually inspires. Send out email links to customers for early reservations or invite people to invest through interactive events.

Examples

• Asking online course participants if they would pay to join an extended online membership.
• An indie game developer pre-selling limited-edition game copies to test market demand.
• A home consultant pre-booking five spots for hands-on interior design services.

9. Achieve Financial Validation

Flynn explains the relevance of a 10% rule: if 10% of the people you reach out to invest or pre-order, then your idea is set for success. This approach uses small testing environments to ensure larger potential.

Entrepreneurs should contact their first 50 leads and aim for at least five committed responses. If fewer people commit, seek feedback and tweak the idea. Your goal is not broad interest but actual financial commitments.

Examples

• Selling pre-orders for a new fitness tracker on a startup site and receiving at least 5 per 50 inquiries.
• Submitting e-books to early readers and charging a small fee for the full version.
• Hosting a beta group where participants reserve future-class seats after testing your new educational tool.

Takeaways

1. Carry out self-reflection exercises to deeply align your business with the life you want to live.
2. Use customers' language and real feedback in your presentations to resonate better with their needs.
3. Make financial validation of your idea essential; a few committed pre-orders can signal long-term promise.