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Good morning! Hi, this is Alexis. and I wanted to share with you in this video a quick first week review of my hundred day restorative yoga challenge. why should you watch this? I want you to take inspiration, be inspired, learn a little bit along side with me, and maybe find your own 100 day challenge. That’s, that’s good for you. So I’m very excited. and I want you to a how to get the best out of this. Watch this video, follow me along and, at the end, comment below with a challenge that could be good for you. So for me, it’s yoga. I’ve been, I decided that I’m going to do a restorative yoga, every day for the next a hundred days. And I want you to at the end of the video, comment below what would be good for you?

Is it yoga? Is it running, whatever, whatever it is. So, here’s my review for the first seven days. so in the last seven days, every, every morning, I, I’ve taken about an hour, 30s, 30 to 45 minutes plus minus, to practice, restorative yoga. And, it’s been, it’s been pretty, pretty amazing. a week ago I decided I wanted to heal. So my attention intention for this a hundred days challenge is, is there’s one objective I have and this is the objective of healing and, and feeling, feeling, feeling good, and sort of reconnecting with my body and with my health and healing. And, I chose restorative yoga, which is a very, very soft, very smooth, very, very nice, very sweet type of yoga. and, I’ve been doing this for seven days and I wanted to share with you quickly what, what’s been, what’s been working, what’s maybe so, so what’s going okay and what’s been bothering me.

And, I’ll start with a bother because there’s not much that bothered me. So, I started a week ago, and because of my cleaning out and tidying up, I had gotten rid of my old Yoga Mat. And, and so this is about a month ago. So what bothered me this week was that I didn’t have yoga mat. I had to improvise. and doing even restorative yoga really sucks because without whether to having like a nice, for me a soft Yoga Mat. So I tried it out with, with blankets and it just doesn’t work. So, not having yoga, math sucked. And I ordered one a few days ago on Amazon, like a cheap one, 20 bucks, a basic yoga mat. and I got it and I did did it today already and it’s 10 times better. You get the grip, you get, you get the softness when you’re on your knees, especially.

It’s really, really bothered me. I actually, yeah, it really hurt when I didn’t have a yoga mat, so that sucked. Solve that problem. Next step. I, after the, the restorative yoga, I have been doing a meditation 15 minutes just sitting there and meditating on the concept of healing and concept of, of reconnecting with myself. And it sucked because I didn’t have, I didn’t have a meditation pillow. I, I, I threw out a meditation pillow I use much longer ago. and I, it just sucks to having to improvise every day with like let’s say yoga block or a pillow. So that sucked. and because I’m such an, it’s such a in, in such a space to do this, I have already solved it by ordering a meditation pillow yesterday, which should arrive today, which I’m very excited about. moving more. So this is all that really bothered me and these are two things that I’ve already taken care of.

Then the stuff that hasn’t been going or where I’m like little bothered or have questions, but it’s not like a huge deal. And there’s only one item here. the music. So I’m using an app, which I’ll tell you a little bit more about in a moment. But the problem with the app that’s been bothering me but not like upsetting me terribly is that some of the settings, whenever I do start the new session every morning, some of the settings, settings, specifically the music settings, the background music settings reset to the default. So every day I have to manually go in and choose the music and the type of sound background that I want. And this I think is a bug in the app. It’s not terrible, but it’s just, you know, like, I wish this, I didn’t have to deal with this every morning.

So, but I’m okay with continuing this way and moving on to what everything that’s going really, really well in the last seven days. first of all, I, it’s made me feel amazing. and I really like, and it’s really working for me, the combination of the intentional of self care. So when I talk about healing, it’s, if we’re talking about self care and making sure, you know, I’m in a good place, making sure that I take care of myself, that it’s something that I’m doing something really good for me, because I have personal growth in all other and have growing pains and all other aspects of my life. So I wanted to make sure that the first hour, like high priority first hour of the day is where I take care of myself and I, I make sure I generate energy and power and resources for myself.

So, and it’s already like seven days and I can definitely notice a difference in my energy levels and my tension levels and my just emotional balance. So it’s already, it’s already going really well. and I have a note of things that are going well. I really think it, the whole challenge stands and falls with having an attention set. And again, my attention and focus is healing and self care. And, and without it I think it would work. But with it, it feels, it feels like exactly the right thing. I really, really liked the app. what’s working really well? It’s the app I downloaded and I actually paid for a yearly subscription. the app that I’m using is called downdog and it’s available for android and iPhone. And I, what I do is I, prop it up in front of my mat in the morning, I press played.

I can select how long I want the session to be, what kind of level I’m using beginner to just keep it really, really simple. And what kind of Yoga? They have different yoga types, including restorative, which was the reason that I actually bought the app. because they actually have the sort of the category of restorative yoga, which is all about, you know, self care and very slow, very, very sweet little exercises that just make you feel amazing. So I highly recommend down dog and I paid for the subscription. It’s a yearly subscription for $34. And honestly like a regular yoga class here in Berlin already take costs like 25 bucks if you go to a good one. And so like this thing already paid for itself. what’s also going really well is the meditation at the end. So although I, it sucked to be sitting on a makeshift meditation pillow, otherwise the actual meditation is going really well.

And I think this is coming back to the intention that I’m setting the beginning. I’m doing this not to punish myself. I’m not doing this to, I’m not trying to do like a, you know, hardcore challenge to like sort of get out of my comfort zone. it’s challenging me in that I want to do it everyday, but, the actual practices super sweet and I’m enjoying myself, it’s actually a lot of fun. And so the meditation is less serious and it’s, it’s just a very sweet self supporting, type of type of experience. And last time at least I want to say what’s going really well is I just feel like I have more energy, I feel more open, I feel stretched, I feel, I feel like my body is responding really well to these exercise. Again, like 30 minutes, basic yoga exercises.

and so yeah, I’m loving it. so that’s my review for the first seven days. Oh, I should add what’s also really working really well and you can see it here behind me. Actually here, right here on the Whiteboard, you see like little, little smudge. I’m keeping track and I’m crossing off every, every day. So I have like a grid of a hundred days. And, I think if you want to do the challenge a challenge yourself at self care a hundred day challenge a then I recommend you make yourself a grid of a hundred days, 10 by 10 rows and columns, and, and have that practice of crossing out each day. So that’s actually helping me sort of stay on track and, and, and, and see my progress. All right. So that’s it. I want you to think about what kind of a hundred day self care challenge could you come up with.

So I think I’m realizing now, and I’m starting to realize that self care is the foundation for everything else in, throughout the day. And so I want to ask you, what do you think, what could you do for a everyday, for a few few weeks that if you did it, what’s the one thing you could do that if you did it right away, top priority in the morning would massively increase your wellbeing and your, your, your feeling of health and, and sort of it, so something that you could, that you can do to reconnect with yourself. I’m curious and please come below in the, in the common section. I would love to hear from you. It doesn’t have to be yoga. I chose restorative yoga for myself because I thought, because I, I thought, I know that this is what works for me. but think about what could it be for you?

And, and so there and, and it’s really important to stretch that. We’re not talking about a 100 day like self punishment, practice. So if, if, if it’s not, this is not, this is not like do something that you hate for every, every day, for, for a year or for a hundred days. do something that you genuinely enjoy and that’s healthy. so, so while I also enjoy eating cake, for example, I love eating cake. I know that if I ate cake everyday, this wouldn’t, wouldn’t benefit my healing and my health process. I’m not saying you shouldn’t eat cake, but think about something that, that, that you know about yourself that is low impact and has a high sort of wellness and wellbeing, factor for you. So a comment below. Looking forward to hearing from you. Thanks so much. Bye. Bye.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5oA\_XhlnP8

Tomás Moyano’s story how he and his co-founder used the “Reality Check” methods to deeply understand their market, their customers and run their first successful ad-campaign on LinkedIn.

Hi, I’m Tomas and I’m an entrepreneur.
I work for Hella FastForward and we work on new projects, new ideas for possible startups.
We were in the situation that we have an idea we had actually a technical solution to work on and we were trying to find what is a problem that this person had. This was very difficult.
What we learned from you and from your workshop – and it was really valuable for us – is to start always with the market or, ideally, with your passion In our situation it was not so easy to start with the passion so we started exploring the market and trying to understand who could be our potential customer?
And then from this potential customer we started to understand what what problems do they
have? And from having an idea of which products do they have we also wanted to know if they are willing to pay for this?
So we start checking if someone advertising to them and then what products do
they offer? What type of solution to they offer to the products that they might have?
This was really interesting we, learned a lot. We then defined personas and we
got very nice results.
In fact, we launched three ad campaigns in LinkedIn where we got on average a click-through rate of 1.4 percent. This is supposed to be very good according to LinkedIn average rate. And we also got some leads and the idea now is that since we see that there is some interest in the market we want to contact these leads to learn more about them and the problems.
I would recommend this workshop for any entrepreneur that wants to to start a new idea and not start by the technology – that is very tempting to do if you have very good technology – but you don’t know if someone wants this it doesn’t make any sense because no one will use it or buy it.
So thank you very much for this.

Tomás Moyano – Founder Sofa.AI, Berlin, Germany

Patrick Da Sliva’s story how he and his co-founder used the “Reality Check” methods to deeply understand their market, their customers and run their first successful ad-campaign on LinkedIn.

You came at a point in our development of our startup project that we had the feeling that we should have started this with the marketing and not with the technology. In the sense of like there is always those two big questions:
what does the market want and what can we do?
and we focused on what we can do for a long time and then we realized maybe it’s not the right way to start. And when Tomás, my business partner, found you and started having a lot of discussions with you he told me “oh let’s have this marketing workshop.” It sounded really good I was like “okay let’s do it, it makes sense” and then he invited me and I figured though I’m a bit busy… but let’s do it just too because I was curious.
And then I realized I couldn’t have done anything better. Going there was that was so useful for strategy because essentially it was not just going through the process of learning how marketers do their work but it is also we were also taught with you like what’s the reasoning behind doing those things and understanding why doing it this way it helps you not only as a person but as a company and to understand what you’re doing better.
I remember thinking like oh when I look at other startups are doing they’re always thinking like “what’s the craziest thing we could do” and forget the people buying your product are not worried about how crazy your thing is they’re worried about how good can you solve my problem and the craziness is just about trying to do in the best way possible
but if you forget the customer then you’re just thinking in the clouds and from my background thinking in the clouds was a daily basis thing so it was really good to see why things should be done not from the tech back to the customer but from the customer all the way down to the tech.
I guess that at a high level that’s the greatest lesson that I’ve learned but a bit more in detail it’s also that you know how to do this from A
to Z and we know what the process looks like we know that it can be applied to a lot of situations can be repeated on across pretty much any industry. so that was extremely valuable to us for sure.

Patric Da Silva – Founder – Sofa.AI, Berlin, Germany

Peer Soetebeer – Founder Nucaria, Berlin, Germany

Peer Soetebeer’s story how he and his team used my “Reality Check” methods to get back on-course with his startup by building for real customers.

Mit meinen Erfahrungen aus jahrelangem Konzern… Wie man eigentlich Produkte baut, digitale Produkte… habe ich mir schon vorgestellt, was wir in etwa machen.
Tatsächlich ist es doch viel überraschender und besser geworden als ich erwartet habe. Meine Erwartungen wurden übertroffen.
Liegt vor allem daran, dass wir selber, als junges Startup, unsere eigene Persona, unsere eigene Zielgruppen definiert haben und da schon so ein Bisschen Probleme mit hatten.
Wir uns an eine Agentur gewandt haben, das professioneller durchzuführen, heisst eigentlich genau zu schauen wer sind die Leute. Wie alt sind die. Die Demographien. Was für Marken mögen die, was für Getränke trinken sie…
Und dann hatten wir gedacht, wir haben die Zielperson, die wir brauchen, und es ist absolut das Beste und man hat darauf Customer Journeys aufbauen können…
ABER erst als wir die Marketing-Session mit Alexis hatten, haben wir festgestellt – und das war das Überraschende – wir können uns ja wirklich REALE Personen uns “anfiltern” – und dann auch bewerben. Und das sind andere Personen als die, die wir dort mit der Agentur definiert hatten über Tage, Wochen und mit mehreren Schleifen.
Die haben wir dann so gar nicht finden können. Weil es in Real solche Personen gar nicht gibt.
Und es kommt aber drauf an, die zu erreichen.
Dadurch war es ein Riesen Mehrwert und ich würde es immer wieder machen und liebend gerne einmal im Monat um die neuesten Sachen zu lernen und sich weiter zu entwickeln.
Also: Vielen Dank!

Peer Soetebeer – Founder at Nucaria, Berlin, Germany

Jonathan Najarian’s story how he and his team used my “Reality Check” methods to get back on-course with his startup by building for real customers.

The day that we met I thought everything was fine. I was like “Everything’s great! We’re building for the right person, we’re building the right product. And everything’s smooth sailing. We don’t need to worry about a thing.”
And then, after an hour, I realized… “Oh my god, we’re building for the wrong user. And our outlook is for the wrong user.”
And it’s because of an investment pitch that we prepared for that brought us totally off-course for the wrong persona and I didn’t realize it. My team didn’t realize it.
And so very quickly, after that one-hour session I went back to my team, we changed the whole thing. One day. Done.
So… Thank you, man. That was awesome!

Jonathan Najarian – Founder & CEO ScripeApp, Berlin, Germany

Related

• I Want To Do This EVERY MONTH – Market Reality-Check Testimonial – Peer Soetebeer
• We Figured Out WHO Our REAL Persona Is – Soeren Soetebeer
• SO USEFUL For Our Strategy – Market Reality-Check Testimonial – Patrick Da Silva
• I Recommend This Workshop To ANY INTRAPRENEUR – Market Reality-Check Testimonial – Tomas Moyano

Yesterday, I was reading in Grant Cardone’s book “Sell Or Be Sold” and got stuck on the idea that “To the degree that you’re sold yourself on the product, idea, company, service, support you will sell to others. If you’re not 100% sold yourself, you can’t sell to others.”

Could the story of your confidence in your vision be expressed in both, “The Startup Curve” and the Dunning-Kruger effect? Are they potentially the same?

Paul Graham and Trevor Blackwell beautifully and cheekily captured this in “The Startup Curve” sometime around 2008.

What struck me is, how much it reminds me of the Dunning-Kruger effect. I think there’s a correlation because, in the end, what sells and makes a company move forward is utter conviction. That type of motivation is abundant in the beginning but, as we learn more, we get our slices of humble-pie and have to wade through ’the trough of sorrow’ aka. ‘Valley of despair’ until we’re ready to gain wisdom to once again climb the ladder of success.

Anyways, even just for entertainment value, here are the two curves to illustrate:

Source: Blogpost by Andrew Chen, Discussion on HN

Source: MarketCalls

3 months ago I canceled my internet service at home for two reasons:

1. The service provider sucked and
2. I wanted to spend less time online and be less distracted

So, for two months I lived without high-speed internet at home.

I read 9 books.

I slept better because no more Netflix or Youtube before bed.

I generally planned my media/information consumption better.

I liked it very much.

I felt freed and less distracted.

But, a month ago I started working on a project with a company in the US.

The time-difference means the time I can interact with the team is from 3pm to 7pm CET.

At that time it became awkward to find a spot to be online, like a cafe or going to the Factory co-working space.

So, I asked my neighbor if she would be so kind to access to her network.\

She did (thank you very much!) and for the last 3 weeks I’ve been online at home again.

Needless to say, I got sucked back the old habits.

I again checked news, reddit, youtube and wasted hours on Netflix…

So, last night I made a pro/cons list and decided to go offline again.  

But with a twist… It’s not black and white:

• I need to access work stuff on my laptop. I have kept the network on my laptop.
• I like having Alexa there for music. Alexa’ll stay online as well.
• I wasted too much time on my phone. I removed the network from my phone.
• I wasted far too much time on my iPad. I removed the network from my iPad.

I cut the cords on my phone and iPad yesterday afternoon. 

And I already spent the evening reading again and slept better.