GREAT THINGS ARE AHEAD

In addition to extracting lessons from Artin’s personal stories, you will also walk away with the following by reading “Side Adventure”. 

 

Artin Nazarian’s core message of his book, Side Adventure, is that you are one idea away from happiness. This doesn’t mean that happiness is tied to becoming a successful entrepreneur. It means by pursuing your own ideas, either within your day job or a side venture, you can more quickly discover the work that makes you truly happy and avoid settling for a job that doesn’t promote the fulfillment you deserve. Below are the hard and soft skills you will take away from his lessons and personal experiences in Side Adventure. 

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PAGE 29 - Embarking on the entrepreneurial journey requires a degree of practicality and foresight. To hold a productive job and pursue a venture in parallel, you need to become a ninja of time management. Artin helps you understand how you use your time now, identify where you need to be before pursuing a side venture, and establish the necessary habits for the marathon you will be running. But as the saying goes, “ideas are a dime a dozen.” This is particularly true when it comes to business ideas. Failing to properly validate an idea has sent many aspiring entrepreneurs down a rabbit hole. Artin provides you with practical steps to vet your idea and increase your venture’s chance of success from the beginning. 

 

PAGE 39 - Many people bring limiting beliefs to their work and rarely step out of their job description. Artin shows you how to leverage your current position to learn about the various components of a business, establishing a knowledge foundation comparable to that gained from an MBA degree. This includes looking past people’s fancy titles so you can build valuable relationships and navigate yourself to a role better suited to support personal endeavors. As Artin guides you in expanding your career, he simultaneously aids you in positioning yourself for faster promotions should you ultimately decide that entrepreneurship is not for you.

PAGE 55 - Personal relationships are as important as professional ones in pursuing your own side venture. Artin highlights that you must impress friends and family to garner their support rather than assuming it automatically. He teaches you the importance of communication in setting expectations so you can maintain positive romantic relationships and friendships while pursuing your career goals. Artin also provides examples of how you can involve your network of friends and family in the various stages of a startup, including raising funds. 

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PAGE 109 - Building a product prototype at a low cost is critical for founders without a track record. Artin teaches you how to build a prototype that will increase your chance of securing funding and producing a successful minimal viable product. As a founder that has no engineering background nor is connected to engineers, you must hire a vendor to build your prototype and MVP. Given the expensive nature of development within the US, you must rely on offshore firms for this task. Artin helps you understand the pros and cons of offshore development, differences between the regions, and how to use an RFP and online marketplaces to vet, qualify, and hire an offshore vendor that is reliable. Once you have hired an offshore vendor, Artin guides you through the best practices in managing it and outlines the different steps of the product development process and key decisions that you must make to position your product correctly when the time comes to scale.

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PAGE 149 - Branding, sales, and marketing can be large and intimidating topics on their own. Artin breaks down these topics and how they differ for an early-stage startup that has yet to launch a product in the marketplace. He provides simple tricks and secrets to establishing a brand identity and reviews the various marketing and sales options available. In doing so, Artin emphasizes thinking about marketing and sales tactics during the development process to help build marketing hooks and habit-forming features that cause the user base to spread the word about your product at no cost to you.  

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PAGE 171 - Of course, raising funds has always been the most daunting task for first-time founders. Artin explains the different fundraising methods to bring some clarity to this ambiguous but important topic. However, if you cannot manage your own finances, then you have very little chance of success in managing that of a business. Artin emphasizes the importance of personal cash flow management and shares with you his adaptable and success-proven personal-finance system. Using his system, you can identify when you are financially ready to pursue a side venture and begin your fundraising efforts. 

 

PAGE 187 - Pursuing a side venture automatically puts you in a leadership position whether you like it or not. Artin will share with you his leadership strategies which include how to hire the right people and manage a remote team. Effective communication is essential to leadership. Therefore, Artin offers some best practices in ensuring a remote team is marching to the same drum. As for the company itself, many first-time entrepreneurs do not understand the reasons behind forming a legal entity nor what the various options are in pursuing business ventures. Artin walks you through why forming a legal entity is important, what the different avenues in doing so are, and how to better position yourself for when you’ve successfully established your business. 

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