🎙 Inventive Journey | Real Stories From the Startup Survival Club

Figure out what makes you different. I think the biggest thing that I have seen so far because of all the things I am working on. I am a small-town guy, I don't have a huge network, I am not the smartest guy in the world by far, and even for the things I am working on, they are very small right now. The zap idea I have been working on is just wireframes and a decent pitch deck. My YouTube channel even still only has about 200 subscribers. The company I am working on is only doing about four or five figures in terms of revenue so it's not major. Putting yourself in the right places, taking chances, and being different more than anything will get people to notice you.

Choose an SMB renderer that will do a holistic view. You can say that I just want to start with email or ads or web analytics. That's fine but choose a renderer that will have all of those so you can expand in the future. As my business grows, can this support me? Can this support use cases as my business grows? I chose one renderer that just does analytics. Now I have to choose another one that does email. You don't want to be in that situation. Try to see who will help you grow. As you grow, can they meet your needs? That's super important.

What most entrepreneurs who are launching do is they take easy to use and they build what they think is easy to use. Then they put it out into the market place and it does not get the result they want. So the second question that you ask is, what has to happen? How do you know that it is easy to use? What happens is the buyer gives you what I call their buyer blueprint. They are going to say I want it to be mobile. I use an IOS on android. I want to pay for it once, not every month. They will give you all those things. As an entrepreneur launching, what you do is build at that. Just build that and push that out and, it will give you a much higher chance of being successful at the get-go.

First, I will tell them to get your marketing right. When I say marketing, that encompasses everything. If you get that right, I believe strongly that what makes a business successful or fails is the business model. Get your pricing right is extremely important. Because of what we do, we are working with more than sixty different industries. So we tend to see this a lot. Business entrepreneurs start to have ideas and, the next thing they want to do is go and start without sitting down and get your marketing right.

Take walks. I do thought walks every single day. It feeds the soul but, it also feeds the mind. Sometimes if you try to think about the problem all the time, you are actually getting farther away from the solution. Whereas if you just take a walk you notice something in nature and it sparks the idea you have been looking for. That has really fed my soul. It's helped me get my steps in every day. That is probably the most productive thing I do every day are my thought walks.

Streamline. Laser focus. It's amazing that advice is out there and it's so important. Try to figure out that one small thing that you can do better than anyone else and then strip that down even more and try to really nail that one thing. especially in software. Keep it really simple.

Really understand whether you've got the passion to stick with it. Really understanding yourself and what you want out of it. Really make sure you have a good, pure intention. These things are very challenging and take a very long time. In general, they are marathon journeys. The ones that have the grit to stick with it, have a lot of creative ability to connect, and bring in the right people are successful but, most aren't. Most are not very successful when it comes to building and growing high-tech companies.

Just go for it. Don't overanalyze everything too much. Put your feelers out and see what your audience is. See what kind of options you have. It's very easy to get caught up in the planning and, by the time you know it, it has been five years and, you still have not launched a company. That's my big advice is to just take it by the reins and see what you can do with it.

When you are inventing, there is a concept and, I forget the name of the designer who came up with this concept, He an amazing guy from the nineteen fifties. The concept is called MAYA, which is most advanced yet acceptable. The struggle is that if you make something too advanced, you are going to have a difficult time getting people to adopt the product. So there needs to be effort put into making something, whether it's the interface or some aspect of it acceptable to the general public so they can understand it.

There are going to be difficult times ahead when you start something. You're going to sometimes want to throw in the towel. Lots of financial hardships that I went through and a lot of discouragement from people around you. The only way you are going to be able to make it through is to really know your why and to recognize that if other people are out there discouraging you, it does not mean that they don't believe in you it just means they don't believe enough in themselves. If they don't believe in themselves, how can they possibly believe in you? So that's a key component.