🎙 Inventive Journey | Real Stories From the Startup Survival Club

Number one, you are either built for this or, you aren't. You either have the fire in your belly or, you don't. Nobody will push you harder. Nobody will make you deal with and overcome adversity harder than you. Don't look to anybody else. Don't look to clients, partners, employees, or vendors. It's either you are committing to this, and you have the fire in your belly, or you don't.

Don't allow yourself to be blinded by the purity of your own vision. I have seen too many people who are so convinced that their vision is pure and presents the best and the only solution to the problem that they fail to see that some of their assumptions are flawed. If being an entrepreneur requires great intellectual curiosity but, also intellectual honesty, you really need to be nimble, humble, self-aware, and honest so you can adapt and recalibrate. Drive and focus are really important, but honesty and the ability to process what you are learning even if it means you need to pivot or call it a day is really important.

The short version is "quit or become rich". This is actually by Po Ram, so it is his quote. A longer version is my own version, which is to have faith in yourself, have faith in life, and be very focused on what you are doing.

Be a little bit more prepared in the beginning. Understand the true costs of what it will take. I had the fortune of having a little bit of a savings plus retirement income. Plan out your I can do this. I have six months to start making some revenue. What is my minimum revenue point?

For all the early people you bring on or cofounders, invest into your equity and into your position because you are getting married to somebody. In some cases, you might not know the person very well. Maybe you have different opinions or something several months into it or a different direction you want to go. A pivot you want to make. So if you don't invest in your equity, it makes getting a divorce very difficult. If you and I were in a business and I said Devin, hey, we are just going to split the equity fifty-fifty right from the get-go. Then we get to a point where we decide we want to go in different directions. Now I have to deal with you. You have fifty percent of the equity and, I have fifty percent of the equity. As opposed to if we were in an investing schedule. Where every year, we are investing ten percent till we get to what it was and we decide to part. We would have some sort of recourse to not have to give up half the company or not buy out the company.

Build a pitch deck. Google pitch deck and find a way to build your pitch deck. The reason for that is who knows you might need to go out and get funding so, that is the first reason you might want it. The main reason is it really does bring home and drive home what it is you do. Why you do it, and why somebody should care. If you do a good pitch deck you touch on your finance, marketing, operation, and founders. You've touched on every single thing in a very short time frame but, it's incredibly valuable.

Definitely, what I said earlier of really looking at what already exists in your community. Not just well, no, I have never heard of someone who is doing this. No, you need to dig in. Most of these have nonprofit councils of some sort. Dig in and see who is at least serving the demographic of people that you want to serve. What in the area are you doing with them? Can you partner with them on adding something to those services?

Definitely get your paperwork and everything in order, and then be ok with the mistakes because that's part of the fun and part of the learning. No matter how much you study or how much you learn, actually going and doing is going to give you better results even though you make a million mistakes than if you just think about it forever.

When you are starting a company, you don't need to decide what you are going to be you should actually focus on what is really going to sell and, can you really add value? In the process, can you learn? It's obvious that you have dreams and aspirations. If they are very big, such as wanting to create a very large company, then focus on finding something very unique that you are going to do. If you don't find it and you still have that ambition stop. It's ok to close down the business if your ambitions. But if it is not, then know in your heart that you still have a better company and have gone through the same pain that other companies have gone through.

If you can get a CRM and set that up and then use that to build out send email marketing. That gets further down the road. Start to collect data on each person you are working with. Use that to further conversations and start to realize how you can plant those seeds. Whether they enjoy a local coffee shop or they are a huge foodie. They love an NFL team. Find things that they enjoy and use that data to plant those seeds. So I think, get a CRM. Start adding people in there. Existing connections, people that are new. Then start to build out your CRM. Start to learn how to use that better. Then effectively within the next year, you should be able to have this referral engine that you can start working with.