🎙 Inventive Journey | Real Stories From the Startup Survival Club

When we first started out we said you know what we know how to make this. We have made a few of them here are there. We will just get the money that we require to set up the factory to make it so we can go from the lab to commercialization. And then we will make it in mass production. But then once we started looking at things and speaking with potential investors and potential customers we realized that everyone wanted to see what we had made. They were like ok so you say you can make it now we want to see it.

Reflect on it really carefully. If you don't love it. If you are not willing to put in ten years of your effort at forty to eighty hours a week, getting paid nothing in addition to earning your living income. If you are not willing to do that, you're probably not determined enough to make it. Some people win in a year but, the reality is most people, most millionaires, most self-made people are in their fifties before they develop the sort of self-discipline and determination.

Keep a flexible mindset and don't be married to strategies. Don't be married to a specific belief and set deadlines and tripwires. Go forward and be open to reassessing your strategies at different points.

Everybody thinks that the only thing you need to watch out for on email is to get out of the spam box. But, there are actually several steps to having an email gets delivered to the person that you are trying to reach before that system even decides to put it in the spam box or not. That process is called deliverability. Deliverability has a number of factors in it. Some of them can be related to your domain or whether you're on a blacklist, do you have the correct thing set up in your DNS settings for that. Those are all technical requirements.

The first thing you should do is read the book "Start With Why" by Simon Sinek. I truly, believe that if you know your why things will be easier. You will be on a good path. Know why you are doing something because that is going to dictate how things move forward. That has helped me tremendously; knowing why I made it, knowing why I want to work with the community that I am working with sets everything down a great path for me. You will also learn why you don't want to do something. But for me, that is the most amazing book. "Start With Why" I would read that.

You need to do your market research. You need to make sure that the market is healthy and that there is space in the market for your idea. And going back to the idea of validating, there is a great book. I do not remember who it is written by but, it is called "Nail It And Scale It". I think it was a book produced here in Utah. The book "Nail It And Scale It" talks about how doing short, easy market tests that allow you to validate or invalidate the demand for your idea/product in the market.

Start a business in an area that you know. You have a network, and you are passionate about it. It does not matter what you see as a business opportunity, people are going to invest in you as the beginning of a business. The only way they are going to invest in you is if you're authentic and you know what you are doing. You can read about it all you want but, It comes from your heart.

Don't worry about other people. I use to get bogged down with that at the beginning of my company. I would see other people running startups that were getting more attention and publicity. I would think they are not doing anything. I am here slaving away 22 hours a day and think no one even cares about me. They are out partying on the weekends and, they are barely doing anything and being published in the media. And they are realized that behind the scenes, it's all a façade. Now five years after that, look what it came to, my 8-9 years of no one paying attention to me is now paying off.

Realize your strengths and weaknesses. Understand that the people around you really do have superhuman abilities compared to what you may have. You need other people and identify where people are strong, so you can synergize and make something bigger than what you are on your own together. That's a real thing. You can't do it all alone, so you need to find the right people to help bring something amazing.

You, Devin, are a consumer. If you were going to hire you to do the job you do. What would you look for and, what would you want to know? And I think we forget that we are consumers. We look at it as business owners, marketers, and the person building the thing.