🎙 Inventive Journey | Real Stories From the Startup Survival Club

Try it out and experience it for yourself. Really put yourself in the shoes of the next generation of shoppers. I feel that it typically costs a shopper an hour of their day to visit any one store. Even if they decide to go to that store, they have to decide whether or not it's worth the trip.

Start small and measure everything. There are so many people when they are starting a business that gets sort of turned one way or another of how they should be spending their money. If you can't measure it, you don't know what's working.

Look at it as a continuing journey. There is not a start into it. It's something that you learn every day. You get better at it every day. I equate it to sports because I played sports. In business, athletically, you don't have to lose. Your mind can just get sharper and sharper. I know now based on my experience in having made decisions. The decisions I could have made better earlier in my career. There is no way for me to improve on myself if I am not a continuous learner throughout the process. My number one advice would just be to be open to learning for the rest of your life or as long as you want to be an entrepreneur, not getting stuck in your own mind.

The importance of one, getting a team that will support you since this journey will take a lot longer than you think to reach any milestone you have in mind. Any projection you have initially, you might think in terms of days or weeks, or months. It will probably be years and, it will be longer than even your wildest dreams are. Have a team that will stay with you through the end. Those people are the ones that will make the journey worth it. They are also the ones that will keep you there and make you not doubt yourself if things don't go according to plan. I guess another piece of advice is to try to do as much research as possible. Understanding key parts of the process. Don't let your excitement impede you from getting the knowledge for you to do well. Know that you won't have enough no matter how much you try you are still going to make mistakes.

Scratch an itch. Build something that you are intimately familiar with that has been a real problem for you in real life. The closer you are to the problem, the easier it is going to be to solve it in a way that other people will understand. The people are experiencing the same problem. I will give you two. Be persistent.

I share too much. I tell too much. Maybe it makes people nervous. Maybe they don't need to know that much to do their job. I always thought I wanted to know a lot therefore, I want to share a lot. Learning how to not do that and I am still not very good at it but, I am better than I was. I don't want to fail my people. I don't ever want to be not always thinking of my team first. I know clients are going to come and go. But, keeping a really good solid team and being considerate of them and genuine for them. I am always double-checking just to make sure that the decisions I am making are ones that in my heart of hearts I know I am doing what I need to do.

Find what people are buying. If their product is fitting that, great. If it's not fitting that, then tweak it until you get there. That's the easiest way to succeed. Find out what people are buying and figure out how to position yourself with someone that sells that. Don't go try and create a new market. Just find what people are buying right now.

Sometimes you have to focus on what you don't need instead of what they are asking you or making you perceive that you need.

Jump into it. Just jump out of the plane and figure out how to rebuild your parachute on the way down. That's really the only advice I can give.

I think as an entrepreneur, one of the real blessings or curses you have is that you have these hunches and ideas that pop into your mind. That is just entrepreneurship. It might not be a business it could be a song your playing around with if you are a songwriter or anything else. Try to tinker with that on the side for a long time before that emerges as its own thing. Otherwise, there might be too much at stake, and the weight of the business and the need to support yourself and your family for example which cause it to collapse. You will go crazy and run yourself ragged trying to do fundraising. So I think if at all possible side Hustle is the way to go. There seems to be a natural incubation period for business that is not a month or two but is more like a year or two.