HOW TO LAUNCH A BUSINESS WHILE WORKING A JOB

Tips on how to launch a business while working a job with Tommy Griffith

ClickMinded was not my first idea to launch a business. It was probably idea number 15 but I ended up working on it on the side, while I was working at these big companies. A few years in, it ended up eclipsing my salary and then two years ago, I just decided to go full-time on it.

Being miserable and in debt is like the single greatest force in human nature, right? It was so motivating for me.

I think "The 4-Hour Workweek" was the start of the tsunami, that butterfly flapping its wings that got a lot of people going.

They say like, okay, markets are really important. I'd rather have a mediocre product and a mediocre team in a great market than a great product and a great team in a mediocre market. And I get that from the venture capitalist perspective but I actually very much disagree with this in terms of small business and side projects and sort of small-time entrepreneurship.

What's work for other people should feel like play to you.

I actually gave myself too much time to plan. And what ended up happening was I set my expectations so high for how it was going to go that it ended up being miserable. I highly recommend leaning more towards the side of pulling the trigger to launch a business than giving yourself too much time to plan.

They're very cognizant of the fact that you can get stuck in a purgatory where you're trying to make it perfect and it never launches, right? So I'm always leaning towards pulling the trigger to launch a business, especially if you're new.

You can launch a bunch. Airbnb launched “three times.”

Right now, there are more than 50 universities in the United States that offer a Master's Degree in Digital Marketing. These degrees are garbage.

I still think today if you have an idea and you're kind of thinking about different side projects, meetup.com is one of the most underrated channels for new users because it's the single fastest way to bootstrap an email list.

And so, I highly recommend, even though it doesn't scale and it takes way more work, I actually highly recommend starting offline because you also end up face to face with your users and you figure out what their problems are.

The big mistake a lot of people make is they say, okay, think about how great this is going to be in my life when I get this business going. And the reality is, the first couple years, you're mostly in the business of getting your ass kicked, right?

They want their problems solved and that's sort of the impetus for where you need to be starting from, you know what I mean?

But what ended up happening was this. I started offline and I ended up learning a lot. And actually, the first way I got started was with meetup.com

I really do like the idea of starting really quick, starting offline and then pivoting it to an online version.

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HOW TO LAUNCH A BUSINESS WHILE WORKING A JOB

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HOW TO LAUNCH A BUSINESS WHILE WORKING A JOB

Be cognizant of the fact that you can get stuck in purgatory. I lean towards pulling the trigger to launch a business, especially if you're new.

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Doug: Well, welcome back listeners, to another episode of Real Marketing Real Fast. Today in the studio, is Tommy Griffith. Now Tommy has been in the SEO business and doing SEO search engine optimization for more than 10 years. He was previously the manager of SEO at both PayPal and Airbnb and now runs his own company called ClickMinded, a digital marketing training platform for marketers and entrepreneurs. Tommy started ClickMinded as a side project while working full-time at Airbnb. He grew it until it started generating more revenue than...