Each week I send a detailed guide on how to start a side business to supplement your income during COVID-19.
Eager to launch a business during quarantine but don’t know where to start? I want to change that.
Whether you already know what business you want to build or are still searching for that perfect idea… I created One Week Startup to show you step-by-step how you can take a great business idea and start testing it in one week or less.
During COVID-19, I want to get these guides out to anyone whose income has been affected by the crisis so I have one favour to ask, please share with a friend or subscribe yourself!
By subscribing, you’ll get first access to my weekly guides and bonus content on how to build your one-week startup into a permanent side business.
Find all my guides at: oneweekstartup.substack.com
I want to help as many entrepreneurs (pro bono) as possible during the crisis.
If you are building a business and need assistance, please reach out to me at: brett@leafforward.org
In this week’s guide, you'll learn…
👾How to create an online trivia product to sell
🖥Setting up an e-commerce site (that any one can do!)
📰Pitching your product to media
🔜Next steps once you've validated the idea
What I’m listening to in quarantine…
problem
Quarantine sucks. It’s boring, lonely and all any of us want to do is go outside.
The only thing getting me through it is talking to friends and family. And in absence of physical contact, we’ve all become fairly creative about different activities we can do over video conferencing.
There are some great options out there… A few weeks ago I played a game called Codenames using this tool. We’ve also been playing Monopoly via the iOS app.
But the world needs more activities! Millions of people like you and I are searching for new, social distancing activities to play with friends and family.
solution
What does this all mean? It means you should be creating activities for people to play with their friends over Zoom! The obvious way to do this is to code a real video game, but those of us who are less tech proficient can also participate.
My friends and I play trivia on a near-weekly basis. Meghan, a dear friend of ours, does an incredible job at organizing rounds, creating questions and serving as quizmaster. I thought about doing this myself for a different group of friends, but quickly realized how time consuming it was to organize. So I thought… why don’t we take her work and put it to good use.
That’s when myself, Meghan and my friend Dan created the Long Distance Trivia League. The idea is each week we package and send you a trivia kit for you to play wth your friends and family over your favourite video conferencing application.
💼what business are we building?
I’m going to show you how you can create your own online trivia business. We’ve gone with general trivia for our launch product, but I’ll also propose some other versions that you could create.
💸why I like this business
timely: With quarantine unlikely to end anytime soon, there’s an increasingly high demand for things to do at home. Folks are seeking entertainment, and particularly social activities that they can do with friends and family. This is an obvious problem that lots of people are facing – and you can solve it!
scalable: Digital products are great businesses because there’s minimal labour involved in production. Meaning, the one digital product you make can be sold to an infinite amount of people without any additional labour.
recurring: If you create an activity that your customers love, they’re going to want more of it. In our case, the groups that purchase our product once will want more of it so they can organize a regular trivia night with their friends and family. Subscription revenue is the ultimate source of passive income.
low tech: Zero technical background is needed to get this off the ground, and it can be easily launched in a week or less.
resources
Long Distance Trivia League
– it's actually for sale and all proceeds go to the Daily Bread Food Bank (I'd love your support and the trivia's a lot of fun!)
Tools
Carrd
– highly recommended simple website builder
Gumroad
– lightweight e-commerce transaction tool
Audacity
– audio editing service
Colour Dropper
– Chrome app that identifies the hex code of colours
Documents
📊
Workbook – Tasks
(click duplicate in the top right to use yourself)
💸
Reflection Document
– What to consider about after you're done your one week test
day 1: product development
product brainstorm
Let’s start building! So the first thing we need to do is brainstorm which product we’re going to create. In our case, we chose general trivia since we already had a lot of the content created.
If you wanted to target a specific niche, you could create a trivia product for, let’s say, Harry Potter enthusiasts or Toronto Maple Leafs fans. Another idea is Zoom Bingo, where you package everything a host needs to run a bingo game with their friends.
Since this is a fairly new category (social distancing entertainment), you don’t have a lot of competition so get creative. Maybe even explore creating a game around a topic that you’re passionate about to make it more fun.
product development
Once you have an idea for the product, you first need to figure out the different components of the package that you will be selling. For our general trivia game, we needed:
● 20 questions for two rounds, presented in a slideshow
● 2 sets of audio questions (5 songs each), files need to be cut so not to reveal the identity of the song
● Answer key for quizmaster
● Rules for the trivia and instructions for the quizmaster
● A scorecard
branding
At this point, you should have a good idea what’s required to package up your activity for sale. Before you actually create those products, you’ll need to come up with your branding.
name
I started with the name. We didn’t spend too much time on the name (because it’s not that important) and went with the Long Distance Trivia League. The only advice I can give is try to come up with something that screams fun.
font
I used the font NEXA. There’s nothing special about it, just saw it on a typeface Instagram account I follow.
logo and colours
I recently saw a cool presentation with some colours that caught my eye so I used the colour dropper tool in Sketch, my preferred design tool, to find the HEX number for the colours.
If you don’t use Sketch, here’s an alternative colour dropper that works directly in Chrome. The hex code is a unique series of numbers that identifies a colour. You can copy the number and use it in whatever design tool you prefer to apply your preferred colours.
For the logo, I went with something super simple. I created a rectangular box in Sketch and added the Long Distance Trivia League acronym (LDTL) inside the box. I used Sketch but you could do this all in Keynote, Google Slides or Powerpoint.
day 2: product creation
Great. We’ve got all the branding done. Now, let’s actually create the product that we’re going to sell.
questions
Coming up with the questions is pretty straightforward. If you Google ‘trivia question ideas’, you’ll see a bunch of resources with questions that you can use in your package. Working on a niche topic, like a certain sport or TV show, might require a bit more research but if you’re a fan of that topic, it shouldn’t be too much harder.
When you’ve got the questions, you’ll want to present them on a powerpoint presentation so that the quizmaster can share them on their Zoom call. I used Keynote to make the deck this but you can use whatever presentation app you’re most comfortable with. To make it universally compatible, I exported to PDF for sale
answer key
You’ll need to create a separate document with the answers for the quizmaster. The quizmaster will refer to this document off screen to provide answers. You can do this in a standard Google or Word doc.
audio questions
In our trivia, we prepared two audio rounds. This means, we had to figure out how to capture audio from streaming platforms and edit them so that each clip was 15-20 seconds.
The easiest way to do this is using a free program called Audacity. This is a good guide on how to record computer audio (aka save music off Spotify). Once you export audio from your streaming service, you can edit it directly in Audacity so it’s trivia ready.
Export the audio, name them according to the questions that they match and store them in one file. Make sure not to put the answer in the file name.
For the trivia round, you should have a theme to each of the songs. In ours, we did a series of covers where players had to name the artist covering the song as well as the original artist.
rules and instructions
If you want the product to be truly plug and play, you’ll need to give the quizmaster step by step instructions to follow so that they can seamlessly host your trivia.
For rules, we added a slide to the front of the questions presentation so that all participants are on the same page.
scorecard
Lastly, we created a scorecard so groups of friends and family can track their trivia performance week over week. You can see an example here.
day 3: digital infrastructure
At this point, you have the product ready but no means to sell it. For Day 3, I’ll walk you through how to create a flow that will let you market and distribute your trivia product.
website
Start with the website. For our product, the Long Distance Trivia League, we used Shopify but if you want something really simple to get started with, I’d recommend Carrd. Carrd is a super easy to use website maker that I use for a bunch of my projects.
For this project, I used the below template in Carrd:
I made modifications and turned it into this:
note: I made the logo in Sketch but you can probably do it in Keynote/Power Point
copy
As you can see in the screenshot, I wrote some high level copy. Feel free to adapt it for your product.
check-out flow
You can use Carrd for a simple landing page that explains the product, but for an actual checkout flow, you’ll need to use Gumroad, a neat tool that lets you easily sell digital products.
Once you create an account, you’ll be able to upload all the files in our package as an item. For the Long Distance Trivia League, this consists of:
One week of questions in deck format
Audio files
Instructions for quizmaster
I created a button on my Carrd site that would forward customers to my Gumroad page for purchase. If you upgrade your Carrd account, there is an option to insert the Gumroad check-out directly on your page. You can find instructions on how to do that here.
pricing
We decided on a one-time purchase price of $10 but if you wanted, you could offer a regular subscription. To do this, select ‘memberships’ when you’re creating your product in Gumroad. This will enable you to charge a weekly fee. Useful if you plan to create a recurring, i.e. weekly or daily, version of the product.
To recap, here’s your e-commerce flow:
1. Users come to your Carrd site to learn about the product
2. They click a purchase button which brings them to the Gumroad page
3. Through the Gumroad page, they purchase your product
4. You can set it up so that they’ll receive a subscription version of the product if applicable
day 4-5: sales
Awesome work getting this far. You’ve got your product and website ready to go live. Now it’s time to put rubber to road! The great thing about this product is how timely it is. As I mentioned in the intro, lots of prospective customers are actively looking for this type of activity so there should be a strong product market fit.
To get the word out, I chose a few tactics:
media
If you’ve been reading the news lately, you may have noticed that it’s wall-to-wall COVID-19 coverage. Every section of the paper, from national news to arts, is looking for a COVID-19 angle. I thought our product had an interesting lifestyle positioning and wanted to take advantage of this.
So I did some basic research on reporters who have written about broadly about ‘activities to do during COVID-19’ or anything related to ‘good news during COVID-19’ and compiled a list.
Specifically, I made a spreadsheet with their name, outlet, email, and contact status. If I couldn’t find their email, I tried to figure it out by playing around with the name format (firstname.lastname@domain.com, firstinitial.lastname@domain.com) and tested them on Mailtester.
When I had a good list of reporters, I wrote a quick pitch email to send. Here’s what I came up with:
Hi [NAME],
My name’s Brett and I’m the co-founder of the Long Distance Trivia League. My friends, Daniel Asper, Meghan Ackland, and I have loved playing trivia over Zoom. And we thought, since we were putting work into creating the questions, maybe we could package it up, sell it to other friend groups and donate all the proceeds to COVID-19 relief. So we started the Long Distance Trivia League…
Here’s how it works:
1. Make a one-time donation of $10 to the Daily Bread Food Bank and Grocery Hero
2. Each week we send you a powerpoint with 20 trivia questions, pre-cut audio files, rules for the game and a score card
3. The assigned quizmaster organizes a Zoom call with their friends and has everything they need to run a game
It’s nothing huge but it’s our little way of trying to give back to the community during this challenging time.
We’re looking to get the word out and would be thrilled to be featured in [PUBLICATION].
I hope you and your family are staying safe.
Best,
Brett
The thing to remember with media is that your results will vary. A lot of it has to do with timing. Sometimes you get lucky and pitch the reporter on exactly the right topic at the right time, other times you get no response even though it sounds in theory to be a great idea. Don’t get discouraged. Do one round of follow-ups to any reporters who don’t respond and see if you get any hits. Best case scenario, you get a few articles out of it.
One tip I have is not to worry about the size of the outlet. For a story like this, all press is good press even if it’s from a small org. Any coverage gets the word out about your business and often one story can lead to interest from other reporters.
facebook + reddit communities
Similar to last week’s newsletter, anytime you’re targeting a specific niche, you should start by marketing to where fans of that niche hang-out. In the case of the Long Distance Trivia League, that’s trivia players. So we did a quick search of any trivia related Facebook groups and posted a link to our Carrd site. I’d recommend doing the same for subreddits.
If you’re making a trivia specific to a certain subject, search for Facebook groups related to that subject and post there as well.
day 6: reflection
Excellent work getting this product live. I’m sure you crushed dit!
Finally, it’s that time of One Week Startup where you have to evaluate if you have a real business.
Reflect briefly on the last week and see if you were able to validate your assumptions:
● Could you build your own trivia product?
● Were you able to create a website and check-out flow?
● And most importantly, did people buy your package?
As always, here’s a doc that you can refer to for reflection.
next steps
Congrats on building your online activity business in one week – incredible work! As you can see, these types of digital products can be great businesses. They’re infinitely scalable so once you’ve built the product, it’s purely a marketing exercise.
If you got some traction in your one week test, here’s what I would do next:
1. Build a brand – set-up social channels to make yourself more discoverable and create a month’s worth of social collateral on Canva
2. Set-up email marketing – start offering discounts on products and encouraging referrals
3. Explore new products – can you create trivia for another vertical?
4. Growth marketing – are you able to find channels to grow your sales? Consider working wth influencers to get the word out