🎙 Inventive Journey | Real Stories From the Startup Survival Club

People nowadays are too quick to go out and look for investors and funding. Rather they should just put a little extra thought into "How could we start this on our own? and how could we implement and get cashflow from that?". If you don't need to get investors, you've come up with a very clever system. It's also not like if your system requires an investment don't shy from that as well but you still got to write up your business plan so it would invite investment.

Many entrepreneurs struggle to talk about their business in a way that people on the other end of the conversation find engaging. When you can openly talk about your business and make people take an interest, it can lead to new relationships and possibly even new clients.

Focus on finding the right people or finding the right co-founder. If you want to start on your own, that's totally fine. It's like if you want to go fast go alone or if you want to go far go together. Find somebody that compliments you.

Get out there and meet as many people as you possibly can. There are so many different networks where you can get on and have a random meeting with a guy for 45 minutes each week. It is transformative. You can move from having this small circle that you are surrounded with to a broad one.

The one piece of advice is to try to partner with someone that is good in an area where you are not. If you could find a partner it doesn't have to be your wife it could be a colleague, it could be someone else out there that would really compliment you and participate in the business and do much for that business as you can but just in a different area because you're not gonna be able to do everything by yourself.

Keep an open mind to everything you do. If your customer is talking to you listen to them. You can't tell people how to use your product you can't say you're holding it wrong, you're using it wrong. You're there to serve them. If they need something and they are willing to pay and you can do it which wouldn't impact you that much you can try it.

The best way to figure out what to do is to test it out. Once we start testing even on just 100 or 50 customers, the needs are really clear. They don't care for example about the package of the box or the big logo. They just want to feel comfortable with the high-quality item. There are so many small details that we don't know or even can't imagine but once we start testing people would tell you the same thing. So testing your hypothesis is a minimum viable product.

Be on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is such a treasure cove for building your brand, growing your visibility, and really finding your audience so that you can create new opportunities.

Having a network is important. Having people that you can talk to, having people that you can share your challenges with who aren't gonna judge you who aren't beholding to you in some way so that you get some honest feedback. It's surprising how differently someone else might look under the same set of circumstances that you do and give you the complete insight you might not have thought of. If you're starting a journey and you don't have a network of peers, create that network of peers because you're gonna need the moral support if nothing else and you're gonna need somebody to talk to.

Once you start growing teams and managing people, the power of being intentional with your decision-making as a leader whether you are a leader of one or leader of 100 is incredibly important. When you make intentional decisions, even if you're just holding intentionality to yourself you're doing the right amount of do-diligence, you're exploring why you're making that decision, and also you're weighing out if you have multiple options, what are the pros and cons of each of these options and then when you go and make that decision or you're helping your team understand why that decision was made and helping your customers understand why that decision was made they are able to see that intentionality behind it because of the way you are able to express it.