Any advice to people who are starting a startup?  

Toni: Sean’s the perfect person to ask.

Sean: The most important thing is cash flow. Make sure your revenue is greater than expenses. Don't let other people tell you otherwise that passion is the most important thing, sleepless nights’ the most important thing. It's not. It's cash flow. As long as your revenue is greater than your expense, you're doing well. If expenses are greater than revenue, you're screwing it up and you're bleeding out and you have to stop that.

So anything to make sure your cash flow is good, keep on doing that. If you have to sacrifice your own lifestyle, to make sure cash flow is positive, do it because I did it. If you need to sacrifice sleep for it, do it because I did it. You have to sacrifice a lot. That's why they say your startup is like a baby, it needs you. It needs a lot of nutrition. It cries, you know, it brats out.

Toni: Attention.

Sean: It needs a lot of attention. There you go. So you have to sacrifice a lot for it. The word sacrifice. That's why they say passion is also important because passion, the Latin word is pati, which means sacrifice. If you're not passionate about your startup, you're not going to sacrifice for it. But that doesn't mean if you're passionate about it, it's a good business. If cash flow is negative, no matter how passionate you may be about it, it's not a good business for you during that time.

So, yeah, that's my advice. You really have to save. Sacrifice. You're going to go through a lot, but here's the great thing about it, you learn a lot. You learn a lot, not just about business, but about life and you learn a lot about other people. That's your tuition fee. The tuition fees are your sacrifices, the tuition fees are your effort, and if you lose money, that's also part of the tuition fee. I know people who started up and lost money in their first few startups.

Now it's a blessing for me, I didn't have to go through that. My first startup SEO Hacker is already doing good, but I still had to pay the price by learning a lot from the wrong people I got in the company during the first years. So yeah, maybe that's the second advice I'm going to give you, make sure you hire the right people. Prolong the hiring process. Take your time in hiring them and hire ahead.

Don't hire when you need them, because you're just going to hire whoever comes along because you need them. So hire ahead. If not, you’re going to be a hostage. And if you hired the wrong person, they're going to burn up your company, your startup. They're going to burn your baby. And since it's a baby, it's very vulnerable. So yeah, I hope that helps.

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