🎙 Inventive Journey | Real Stories From the Startup Survival Club

It's a marathon, not a sprint. We are in it for the long run. We are thinking about making that impact in the long run to make a big-scale impact. We both understand that if we want to make a big impact in the world it's not going to be overnight. Be ready to be in it for the long haul.

Start with one thing and only one thing. Don't worry about whether it is working for you or not. The reason why I say that is, for it to even reap results, it will take you a good six months to know if it is your thing or not. It is easy to get carried by the noise that you see in the world today. Everyone is shouting at your ears to purchase their product. You have to spend a little time trying to figure out whether it is your thing or not.

As a startup, you focus more on your product and strategy. This is very important because when doing a startup. If you spend too much time on your presentation of your idea you are just wasting your time. As a startup, your time is valuable. So focus on a small step at a time.

You can lose your biggest account. You can have a new competitor come into town and start to take a bunch of stuff away from you. It's constant uncertainty when you own your own business. And when you are working for someone else, and you have a steady paycheck. It is a vast difference. So if you think ok, I don't want to scare people away from it. It's not impossible to do. It's a mindset where you go ok another body blow, so what. I'm still standing. Just get up and get going again. So if you can't deal with that, then you will have a tough time in business for your self.

Think about media. As Entrepreneurs, you think about advertising. 80%-90% of entrepreneurs do not even think about it and they are not familiar with a ton of opportunities that are even free with a little investment of time. Don't just put out press releases but look at some of those resources we talked about earlier to see where media is looking for sources where you might be a source. Don't be afraid. A lot of that is a mindset too. You are an expert as well. You would not be doing what you are doing if you were not an expert. Don't be afraid to put yourself out there.

The number one slide that every investor spends time on is the team slide. Who are the founders? Who are these people? The number two slide is the business model. How are you going to make money? After that, it goes down very significantly. All those slides about how this is going to be a giant market in five years. What I tell people to do in their presentation is to focus on the funding window, and what you are going to achieve. You should have a slide in there that shows in five years it's going to be a big market but that does not matter. The more important slide is what is your business model? What is your operational plan for the next twelve to eighteen months that is going to get you into the market?

It's going to cost you more than you ever thought it was going to cost and, it's going to take more time than you ever thought it was going to take to get where you want to go. That being said, have fun. If you're not having fun starting a business, and that includes all of the angst that comes with it, you need to back up the truck a little bit. When it stopped being fun for me, that's when the juice starts going out of it and I needed to reinvent myself.

It's really important to surround yourself with great people by being a great person yourself. By that, I mean something that has been super beneficial to me is I have put a lot of effort into being a life long learner and being hungry to learn, and being humble to learn. I think sometimes we love our ideas as entrepreneurs saying this is it. I think as I have had the mindset of this is an awesome idea and, I am excited about but, there are so many ways to go about this and collaborate and create. Every day I am trying to learn something new.

There's a lot of noise in the world. There are many different coaches, books, and self-development things telling you what you should or shouldn't do. While some of that might be helpful, sometimes what it does is brings your mind into multiple different directions. There is so much conflicting information that you don't know what to trust or believe. Then you try one thing and it brings you down one path and then you are going back. So it is creating more space to trust your intuition. Know that your intuition, Science might call it quantum physics, and spirit will call it trusting your soul or what your soul message is but, it is that inner voice. Trust that to guide you along the way. You feel it in the lower part of your belly. It's that gut feeling. That is what's going to lead you to your greatest inventions.

My advice is to just never give up. If you have researched to know that this is a good product that people would buy or even if it's not a consumer product. If it's a business you know that people are going to use or a service that people need, just don't give up. You never know. It might be the tenth time you get knocked down that you get back up again and turn that corner and take off. You can't let yourself stay down. You have to get back up and keep pushing forward with it.