Idea to Startup: How to Get Two Months of Work Done in One Weekend

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This Episode

Today, we'll help you get two months of work done in a weekend.

We break down a four-part sprint framework that’s actually realistic and manageable for founders with full-time jobs, families, dogs, or just generally dense and unpredictable lives. We also walk through how this exact sprint framework helped launch Habit Kangaroo, one of Brian's side projects.

Here’s the framework:

• Goal: Define a singular, customer-facing goal with a natural scoreboard — something that ends with a launch and feedback.

• Prep: Prepare both your work (clear tasks, location, tools) and your life (childcare, meals, dog logistics) to clear space for deep focus.

• Hook: Create urgency with a commitment you can’t back out of — like pre-sales, a public promise, or a demo scheduled with an investor.

• Reliance: Don’t go it alone. Invite someone to build with you, even just for the sprint. Momentum and joy both come from shared effort.

This one’s tactical and hopefully immediately useful. We dive in more on the nuances of the four steps in the pod and give some flexible examples for people with different types of constraints.

Happy sprinting!

Pod References

• The Let's Actually Run Customer Interviews Workshop - a 10-day program that'll help you actually, finally, run proper customer interviews. This will kickstart your business. $150 through July 31 with code "EARLY"

• Graham Weaver Talk

  
  00:26 - Three Things: Thing One: A Weekend Sprint
  01:30 - Habit Kangaroo
  04:37 - Feedback Loops
  09:45 Smooth Jazz
  10:10 - Sprint Structure: Goal, Prep, Hook, Reliance
  10:15 - Goal
  12:36 - Prep
  14:56 - Hook
  16:53 - Reliance
  19:38 - The End - Happiness

Transcript - feel free to read like a long-form article

Today, we’re going to try something new. It’s an episode type I’m calling Three Things - these are three things that have been coming up a ton with our members at Tacklebox. The stuff they’re stuck on and the stuff that’s helping them get momentum.

The original idea for a three things pod came from our pod consultants who said the current pods take too long for me to write. This was supposed to be a way to get them out quicker - they suggested that I rattle through three ideas off the top of my head and move on.

Instead, I spend like three times as long as a normal pod agonizing over which three things were good enough to deserve a spot, then spent so much time on each that we had to break it up into three episodes. So, the complete opposite of what the consultants wanted. I guess that’ll show em for trying to teach a middle aged dog new tricks.

Anyway, if you like the show and don’t already subscribe please do that, if you love the show and haven’t given us five stars please do that, and without further ado, let’s get to the first of the three things: a framework for sprinting.

And to do that, we’ve got to talk about reliance and kangaroos.

There’s an interesting phenomenon that’s happened over the past 10 or 20 or 30 or 50 years: Humans have become less and less dependent on each other.

And now, today, we’ve reached the point where any human contact at all is a choice. You could - and lots of people do - sit in your apartment as a freelance developer or PR consultant or countless other jobs that require no human interaction and make enough money to support yourself. With that money you can order your groceries and a vitamix and a slow cooker and make shakes for breakfast and chili for dinner and order Thai on Thursdays and watch interstellar every Friday, desperately trying to figure out why everyone thought it was good. Today, you don’t need… anybody.

The point of any business is to find friction and remove it, so, I guess this was inevitable. But that doesn’t mean it’s good.

Self-reliance seems like a good thing, but in the case we’re going to talk about today - and a lot of other cases, most cases - it isn’t. It’s just not how humans were meant to live. Relying on each other is our evolutionary superpower. It’s a good thing. It’s not a hassle - it’s freeing.

I remember going to my grandparents house on Sundays growing up and the delicious pasta dinner my northern italian grandmother cooked would feature tomatoes from one neighbor and olive oil from another and greens from a third. Dinner relied on them and we talked about how great their tomatoes or their olive oil was. Centuries before that, obviously, everyones survival depended on the health of the community.

Being a part of your community was never optional. Now it is.

Being reliant on people was never optional. Now it is.

This is all going to come back around to sprints and your startup idea - I promise.

Back in 2017 I had an idea for a habit tracking startup with a good friend named Trevor. He’s a full stack developer, a brilliant strategic mind, and a hell of a guy to get lunch with in NYC. I used to play a game with myself that he had no idea he was a part of where I’d point out random, hole in the wall restaurants as we walked through downtown manhattan and say “ever eaten there?” and he’d reply matter-of-factly that yes, of course he’d eaten at that Afghan restaurant with two tables and a half broken AC dangling out of the window and that they had, quote, really good Mantu. Some of the best Mantu around, unless you went uptown, obviously.

In nearly every way, he’s the flip of the coin for me. A great person to rely on.

We both also really enjoy the habit stuff and had been looking for a project to work on together. So, we started hacking away on the side on a business called Habit Kangaroo.

The high level idea was that it takes 30 days of consistent work to create a new habit. If you want to start, say, exercising before work, once you’ve done it 30 days in a row your brain will pass it from an active decision to a passive one. It’s now equivalent to brushing your teeth or eating breakfast. Something you’ll do unless there’s a reason not do. The big goal was to become the Mastermind of habits - a place with a bunch of specific, 30-day programs to help you add habits and transfer them from active to passive.

We did a bunch of market research on the habits people most wanted to build but struggled to stick to, and whittled it down to a few with the best, most obvious feedback loops.

Quick note on feedback loops.

A massive part of any business is making the success of your first customers wildly obvious. That’s the only way you’ll grow - if that success is somehow public or easily shareable. This feels like a no brainer part of the ideation step but tons of founders miss it. And it’s generally a good indicator of an iterative startup idea - if there isn’t a massive, weight watchers esque before and after picture for your very first customers, if it isn’t blindingly obvious to your customers and their friends that your thing worked, your value is iterative not substantial - and people don’t buy iterative products. So, you need a new customer or idea. The before and after picture is how your business grows, so the difference better be stark.

For Habit Kangaroo, this narrowed our choice down to people looking to build a personal finance habit or an exercise habit, and we chose finance because of the obvious value we could provide and the lack of competition. Once we helped a customer start using tools to find and cancel unnecessary subscriptions, negotiate monthly fees with vendors, and implement a tool like you need a budget to start creating spending limits and create transparency, the before and after picture became stark. And, we built the product around the before and after. We could show, easily, that this was how much they spent two months ago vs this month. Or, this is how much we were able to pay down their loans. We’d make shareable cards - mementos - to show this off.

The actual habit we’d help them build was monthly budgeting, but the feedback loop was that initial before and after and we could show that immediately - possibly on day one.

We also thought budgeting would be a better initial bet than exercise because budgeting is theoretically easier than exercise. Exercising for 30 days straight requires a ton of effort and willpower. Our finance habit would only require a few clicks each day. Or so we thought. Unfortunately, we dramatically underestimated how emotional finances are and how difficult it actually is for people to look under their financial hood. But that’s for another pod.

Once we’d validated channels to acquire our first customers - a combination of newsletter advertising and SEO worked well for the automated acquisition, and going through alumni groups and offering discounts to college alumni a few years out of school worked for manual acquisition- Trevor and I split the building of the business into two parts. First was the content, what was actually in the daily emails - and the product - how those emails were sent, how money was collected, managing of accounts and passwords, and so on. I handled content, he handled the product.

We both worked asynchronously on our parts when we had time - mornings or evenings after our other jobs. We agreed to get in at least an hour a day each.

And it all went… fine. We made slow progress and weeks and then a month or two went by. But there wasn’t much momentum, because momentum comes from closing feedback loops. And there weren’t any to close. We were just kind of hacking away at an endless to do list. That’s not fun, so it wasn’t an urgent priority.

We both felt this lack of urgency, so Trevor suggested a weekend sprint. We’d get a room at a wework for saturday and sunday, show up at 6am each day and work as late as we could.

To add urgency and structure, we sent out an email first to the people who’d signed up to be notified when we released the finance habit. We said it’d be ready the first of the following month, and maybe 7 or 8 people paid us $199 bucks for it. Our marketing said we’d save you that much money by day 10.

We said we’d picked the first of the month to make it clean for our customers finances, but really it just bought us an extra 15 days to get the product finished.

Then, we sat in wework and cranked for 15 hours saturday and 15 hours sunday. We ate Afghan food and got stuck on stuff and worked through it and laughed a lot. We got more done in those two days than the previous two months, built enormous momentum, and had the product ready for launch.

How it all went is a different pod, but the point is that sprint.

Nearly all of the founders we work with at Tacklebox have full-time jobs and are working on an idea on the side. They’ve all got other stuff going on, too - kids, dogs, family responsibilities - whatever. For this reason, we built Tacklebox around 1-3 hour blocks of time - the crevaces of your life.

But, introducing a sprint to this cadence - the occasional, call it quarterly - weekend or three day block where you put 25 or 35 or 45 consistent, focused hours into something are absolute game changers.

You can’t do them too frequently, and you can’t do them willy nilly. If you don’t structure them properly, they’ll fall apart.

We’ve come up with a four part structure for a great sprint:

1. Goal

2. Prep

3. Hook

4. Reliance

Let’s knock out some quick jazz, then we’ll dive into each.

Ah, sorry, worded that wrong so I couldn’t do the thing. We’ll go through the four part structure of a great sprint… after…. a little smooth jazz.

Much better.

The four part structure of a great sprint includes:

1. Goal

2. Prep

3. Hook

4. Reliance

We’ll start with the Goal.

The goal part of a sprint is straightforward, but hard. It’s unlikely you’ve ever done a 35 hour two-day sprint before, so picking what you can get done in that amount of time is tricky. It’s also a great way to set up your weekend for failure. If you say you’re going to write 10 pieces of content and get the landing page built and set up SEO and send 50 cold emails, and you only get those 5 pieces of content written and nothing else, you’ll be upset. You also won’t feel a ton of momentum. And the point of sprints is the opposite - we want to optimize for fun and momentum.

So, the first rule for sprints is that the sprint should not be used for what I term as maintenance. Do NOT set up a sprint to get a bunch of stuff that’s been floating around done. If you’ve got a ton of emails to respond to or want to get ahead on content or catch up on… whatever… - that’s… not a great use of this time. If you want to get 50 cold emails written.. I don’t love that, either.

A sprint should be used for stuff that you can’t do without there being a sprint. What is going to take you a few hours to get into before you’re really cooking with it? What’s a hard thing that’ll help you take a real swing on this business?

A sprint weekend shouldn’t feel like a given, and the unlikely part shouldn’t be whether you can, physically, write 50 emails in 35 hours. It should be whether you can pull something ambitious off. Can you figure out a way to get a full product live? It should be strategy alongside horsepower.

The goal should be singular and customer facing and it should have a natural scoreboard - customers should use it and you should get feedback from it. It should be obvious when it’s done.

At the end of a sprint is a launch.

If you’re having trouble coming up with a goal, revisit our old friend Graham Weaver’s talk at harvard. Grab a piece of paper and write out, long form, the story of your successful business 5 years from now. Tell the best case scenario - where you’d love to be.

Then, tell the story of the first version of that product. How it came to be, how you tested it, what’s the first thing that got in customer’s hands.

Then, make that the goal.

Rule two: Prep

There are two types of prep a good sprint needs: Work prep and life prep.

First, is work prep.

When I ask our Tacklebox members how their working sessions go - the ones they do before or after their real job - a huge problem is prep. They’ll hold an hour - say, 6-7am. They’ll wake up at 545, make some coffee, put it in their get shit done mug, throw on their headphones on, sit down at 559, and… not know what to do. So, they’ll reflexively start answering emails or checking linkedin. Then it’s 6:27 and nothing’s happened and they go let the dog out.

Every time you sit down to work you should have a plan that was made at the end of your previous working session so that you can jump right into the most important thing.

For sprints, this is 10x more important.

Take the goal you’ve chosen and break it out into projects and tasks that need to get done and do it all before the weekend. Have a full, scripted gameplan.

Trevor and I showed up with a stack of post its with tasks that needed to be done and we put them on the wall when we started. We moved them over as we finished them. It was clear what was next - I don’t think I checked my email once.

The other important part of work prep is location. You can, theoretically, do a sprint from the same place you do non-sprints. But I wouldn’t recommend it. It’s a cousin of the old saying you can’t heal in the same place you got sick.

This whole thing should feel different - like an event. Rent out a conference room or ask your local coffee shop if you can use their back room or go to the library or your parents basement or something. If you’re doing this with a group, get an airbnb. Prepare yourself for a different 35 hours. Environment matters.

The second part of prep is possibly more important than the first: Life prep.

You need to be ready to take 35 hours off from the rest of your life.

If you’ve got kids, arrange with someone - your spouse, your parents, whoever - to take them. Over invest here until you feel confident. If you’ve got three kids under 5 and you’re leaving them with your husband who might need some support, get a sitter to help out in the afternoons. Half-assing the sprint is a disaster. You need to be focused.

Rule 3 is the hook.

A sprint needs urgency, and that’s where the hook comes in.

Our hook at Habit Kangaroo was that customers had paid us for a thing we’d have to make exist.

A huge part of a sprint, as you’ll see more of in rule number 4, is happiness. The goal of a sprint is to get a big chunk of work done, but it’s also to get you back excited about your idea. Happy you’re doing it.

The happiness equation is simple - it’s just expectations minus reality. When reality exceeds your expectations you’re happy. Or, put differently, you’re happy when you surprise yourself. When you do something you weren’t sure you could.

If your hook is that you’ll get something built that customers can use - even if it’s a concierge MVP that’s you doing the majority of the wizard of oz work - that’s… great. To ensure you do it, get customers to pay first.

We’ve done sprints where people said they really wanted to get something done and that was the hook. And, not surprisingly, they got 70 or 80% of the way there. Which is a disaster for sprints. You want to finish.

If you’re early on and can’t have the hook come from customers - meaning it’s too early for them to pay or the goal isn’t something that can be paid for, find another way to create a hook.

Here are 3:

If you’re into the public commitment thing, post on linkedin or wherever that you’ll have X done at the end of the weekend. Then, post a video walk through when you’re done.

If you are interested in raising funding at some point, schedule a demo of what you’ll finish with a handful of investors for the following week. Maybe these are warm connections, but the meetings need to be on the calendar.

Get a call with a mentor or buy one of those super expensive mentor calls from intro dot com to get feedback.

The hook needs to make it impossible for you to back out.

And, finally, rule number 4: Reliance.

Habit Kangaroo didn’t work. There are a bunch of reasons why, and, again, maybe it’s worth it’s own pod.

But the sprint did. We shipped a really good product at the end of it.

And you know what I remember most from the sprint?

Trevor popping off his headphones, motioning for me to take mine off, and saying something like “infrastructure for the onboarding emails is all set - you can start popping in content. They’ll send every other day and a/b testing is set up to try upselling the personal finance coach.”

Then I’d smile, give him a “hell yeah,” we’d do the jim and pam air high five, then I’d start putting in the content. I relied on him, he relied on me.

This year, 90% of Tacklebox members are solo founders.

In 2017, 10% of Tacklebox founders were.

YC just released their “requests for startups,” a comically transparent list of companies that benefit their model not companies the world needs or should be aspiring to build, although, I guess that’s obviously what it should be, it’s their list - and on the list is the first 10 person 100 billion dollar company. This is extreme, but nearly everything I see out is how AI and other tools are so good now that you don’t need other people. You can build a company and get it funded and make billions of dollars and guess what - you can keep it all. You don’t need to give anyone else any of it. Except for YC, obviously, but the rest is yours.

The problem with this is that that’s not the point of any of this. Or, at least in my opinion it’s not.

I remember the sprint because of Trevor.

I enjoy Tacklebox because of the members, of course, but the time working through the product with Tamara is what I’ll think back on in 15 years.

I’m not saying you should search for a cofounder.

I am saying that, like community, it’s becoming a choice rather than a necessity. Cofounders create friction because there’s no perfect cofounder. AI has removed that friction so you don’t have to figure out how to work with someone. But it’s also removed the air high five. The fun. And, the fact that you’ll likely build a better product with someone than without them.

If you’re a solo founder - get a friend to come work with you for the weekend. Pay them or buy them lunch and dinner or give them some equity to do a quarterly sprint with you. Or, find a few other solo founders to run a sprint with in the same spot. Present to each other at lunch and dinner.

It won’t give the same value that relying on someone will, but it’s better than nothing.

You don’t need to rely on anyone, but you can choose to.

To recap: a successful sprint needs a clear Goal, work and home Prep, a Hook you can’t back out of, and someone you’ll rely on. Nail all four and you’ll have magic.

—

I’ve spent the past decade working with idea-stage founders with jobs trying to help them become successful founders without jobs.

I spend an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out why some make that leap and others don’t. There’s tons of stuff on the idea and the background and the timing and luck and on and on. But there’s also a consistent variable for the successful ones:

They’re happy. They’re enjoying the process.

And I haven’t seen anything boost happiness like a full-weekend sprint set up and run properly. And, that happiness comes from closing loops - shipping things.

Obviously, this can’t be an every weekend thing or it’ll lose the magic. Once a quarter - still magical.

So, try one out. And if you’re interested in doing it with some people, email team at get tacklebox dot com. If people do, maybe we’ll set something up.

Next week, we’ll talk through number 2 on our list of three. The To Do List Monster in Action.

And, if you are on 9th avenue, Ariana Afghan Kebab is fantastic. Trevor was right.

—

This was the idea to startup podcast.