🎙 Inventive Journey | Real Stories From the Startup Survival Club

It's along that product-market fit. You've got to get out there and take advantage of every introduction that you can get. Talk to those potential customers or those potential people who are not customers. They may just be someone who knows something about the domain or has tried or seen it before. Get out there and take advantage of every introduction you can get and have those talks and learn from them.

Surround yourself with people who are going to challenge what you are saying in a positive way. But also that you can learn from. Before I moved to Austin I did not have a wide network of people that I could leverage from a connection, network, or from an intelligence standpoint. Nor did I have people who would challenge my ideas. Not in a bad way just why do you think this? Why do you think this product is important? I think the last couple of years especially over Covid I have tried really hard to bring in a vast amount of people that I trust and have backgrounds that I can learn from and continually educate myself but also can give me feedback.

The best way to get the highest evaluation for your business and sell your business for maximum value is proprietary. The fourth P is proprietary. This is the number one value driver. This can take you from a five multiple to an eight multiple to a ten multiple to a fifteen multiple. This is all proprietary. Why am I saying you should start with this? Because if you get this wrong, then you can practically be out of business.

Start. Do it. Just do it. Figure out what your risk tolerances are, leave everything else behind. Give yourself a period of time. Do it. Just do it. Once you put it out there, people are going to rally. It's amazing.

I call it a discovery task list. What we do is we take inventory of everything you do for a week. Then we figure out is this something that you can delete? What happens if we just don't do it? How much effect does it really have on the business as far as ROI vs people's perceived value? Then the second thing we ask is, can I delegate this? And the question that we must ask ourselves for each one of those is if I knew I was going to be hit with a mac truck tomorrow, what would I do today to transfer that knowledge so that my business would not fall apart? That is the most important question because you have asked the brain a different question. And it will give you a different answer. It will come up with creative ways of how you can actually delegate a task that you thought was not possible before.

It might be boring but planning before you start is a big key to success and then obviously executing on your business plan. But first, you need to write it down.

Do it. Do that thing you need to do. I mean, you have that idea go chase it down. Go learn what you need to learn to get it done and get it done.

Start. I think people really struggle to get started. I will say that action is the most important thing. If you are thinking about an idea and you can't quite decide, you just gotta go. And you have to go fast. You are going to bump into walls and say, oh, ok, we are going this direction now and, that's all normal. Startups are not normal. I think that's something a lot of people struggle to understand. It's like these are these really weird experiments and, you just have to test and see what works and keep that feedback loop tight and just keep going.

Talk to maybe another business owner. Just because you talk to someone does not mean you have to hire them. If someone wanted to contact me and has questions, that would be fine. I would not mind talking to them. Just ask, ask around, ask people you know. Or, if you have emails for a virtual assistant, shoot them an email and ask them questions. If they are good enough and, classy enough they will answer any questions that person has, without expecting them to automatically become a client.

Try to surround yourself with people who believe in you. So in that same example that I mentioned, that was my biggest mistake and biggest learning. My wife was absolutely amazing. She was a rock and, she was picking me up off the ground when I was in the corner crying and rocking back and forth when the project was going south. She was like, no, you've got to keep going this is just a part of the journey. We are going to get through it, and it will be fine. So she really picked me up. You have to surround yourself with people that are going to tell you that because there are going to be days where it just sucks, and it's not a good day. There are going to be days where this is the greatest job in the world, and you love it. Some days it's just nothing is going my way. You've got to be able to get through those. I think a huge reason why I was able to get through those days was my wife and the encouragement people were surrounding me with.