🎙 Inventive Journey | Real Stories From the Startup Survival Club

The biggest advice is to make sure you are improving yourself first. There is a really cool statistic out there that some of the most successful companies are started by forty-year-olds. People in that age range. Why is that? Probably because they have all this professional experience that they had where they know the opportunities. They know how to execute things. They have made mistakes and learned off of other people's dollars how they can go do it for themselves.

The clearer and more specific plan you give when you start to notice the expectations slip, the more likely you are to actually act on it. Now you have a clear plan lighted steps forward to be sure that to say ok, I need to engage and, I feel scared and default to comfort and avoidance if I don't have something. If I light this staircase up and I have the exit ramp lined up for me now I am more likely to engage in the behavior I know I need to do for the benefit of me, my relationships, and my company.

Outsource to experts whenever possible. Whatever you don't need to be involved in, outsource to experts because if you don't have time and money to do it once you for sure don't have time and money to do it twice.

Don't believe your own lies. I think from a young age we start telling ourselves a lot of lies in our self-talk. Why do I think I can do that? Why am I the one that could be able to do these things? We have a lot of that negative self-talk and I think we just need to change that to why not?

You have to decide to start and actually start because I have heard people that have had this plan. I've known people that have been on these albums. They have been working on the album and never finished them. So you have to decide to start. Then right along with that is to put some sort of date on finishing and actually launching.

Just avoid judging the podcast harshly. Tell yourself I am not going to judge this podcast until my hundredth episode. Until I get there, I am going to just put out content. In that process, you are going to get better in all kinds of different ways you did not even think of. The thing that kills most podcasts is people just get too self-conscious with it. The delta of where they are and where they want to go just seems too high to climb. Just keep doing it. Nobody is listening to my podcast. Does not matter, record another one. I don't have the right cover art. Does not matter, record another one. Keep going. Get to that hundredth episode, and you are going to have the main expertise in all kinds of ways you did not even expect.

It would just be not to wait until you have a ready product to start building your community and start marketing your product. If you have an idea and you know you are going to go after it, create a landing page, create a newsletter, create any social media page Twitter, Instagram, etc. Just start talking to people about it. Get them to start talking to you because their feedback is everything. You will figure out their pain points and opinions. Even before your product is ready, you can start implementing it. It will also help you to market your product better. You know the terminology they use. You know exactly what their pain points are. Once you have your product ready you automatically have an email list you can send a blast to. You can already start talking to your community and say hey my product is ready and hit the ground running instead of starting from zero. We started from zero, and that was terrible.

The piece of advice that I would give is, start. You have no idea what beauty lies beyond that first step. A lot of us are afraid to try. We are afraid of failing. We are afraid of a lot of things that could go wrong, but what if it goes right?

Definitely get everything in order right away. It kind of falls back on the worst business decision I made. Getting everything set up to where you have contracts that are in place. And you have a legal framework you can work off of to give you accountability. Then also give your clients accountability. The thing I wished I had done a little bit differently was I viewed my business in the very beginning as I needed to be a cheap as possible. And just kind of survive. Where I wish I had been I am going to invest all my resources into creating a great contract, getting invoicing set up to where it's reoccurring. Clients can save credit cards. Different processes that I did not do just because I did not want to spend the money that now I am having to spend the money and wish I had done it before.

My greatest fear is running out of innovation. To me, innovation is what keeps us afloat. It keeps me going every day. Sometimes that worried me. As I grow older, will I get more out of touch with what's happening in social media new apps coming up? How much do I want to keep up with? Technology continues to advance. So as you grow, you wonder how much of this technology do you need or handle? So my fear is not being able to adapt because once I stop adapting, that's when I will stop growing. Then it will be time for me to hang it up.