🎙 Inventive Journey | Real Stories From the Startup Survival Club

I think it is important to know this is not a one and done. Legal compliance is a continuing thing that will rise with your business. As you scale and grow there will be new issues that will come up. There will be new opportunities to kind of enter into strategic partnerships and those will bring there own separate issues around all of this and what kind of agreement you want to engage with a potential business partner to create a new offering or to pitch a joint offering. Those will all involve rights and obligations about intellectual property and liability. So those need to be negotiated properly.

I hadn't gotten any attention from VCs. So these who invested in me, some of them as many as seven or eight times, I have to honor those folks, I have to give them a great deal. They have been with me since 2014. Hearing out the idea of what we wanted to go after as a market was easy. Building the tech was harder. We founded in 2014 so we are looking at year seven and just now looking at monetization and talking about exit plans. So I have to honor those folks. I have to make sure they are rewarded for sticking with me. And if there is a nine or ten-figure exit, they absolutely deserve to be apart of that ride along with us.

If the market is telling you something, don't ignore it. You know the story about PayPal and eBay is there was an anomaly where people on eBay were starting to use PayPal. They saw this anomaly in their data and then pursued it. Then PayPal exploded because it became the go-to solution for buying stuff on eBay. But itinually it was just a blip in the data. like what was going on over here with eBay and why are people over there using PayPal. So I say look for those anomalies and look at why they are happening? Think is this something I could leverage? Is this something I could build upon? Then start small and iterate from there.

Being able to adapt to changes is very important. For us, the pandemic changed people's habits from housing to communication to transportation. This means we had to move fast to serve the people in the housing market. We started in the Bay area and right now we realize people are moving to Austen and Idaho Falls. So we have to figure out how we can help those people. It is challenging for us because we are in the real-estate sector and it's a local business.

In order to make a very successful company, in addition to what I said before with focusing on a bunch of different things marketing, development, and all of those things. You have to have a passion for it, and you have to put in the work for it. If you are just going to say I want to make a trillion dollars on the first day, it's not going to happen you need to put the work in. It's going to be a lot of hard work. But as long as you are passionate about it it will be worth it.

So for me something that was really important was trying to really take it one step at a time. There were a couple of times where I put it down and did not touch for a month at a time. And I do think that why it took so long to finally publish it. But, once I kind of set deadlines for my self, and they were very manageable deadlines. At first I felt like maybe they were too small because they were small chucks to work on at a time. It was nice to be able to take a month to only go over so many pages or paragraphs at a time. That way if I did not necessarily want to devote as much time to it and spend maybe more time with friends and family I was able to do that and not feel like I was putting on the back burner.

Don't have an entrepreneurial seizure. Don't just do it because you're tired of your job. Look at what it takes to run a business. Look at all the things you have to have in a row. If you need help, talk to Devin. He will help you. If you have a cool idea, talk to Devin. He will help protect you. There is one thing we have been so hypervigilant about that we have locked it down so much that it impeded our growth. So we have the trademark, now I want to look at a patent to help me protect the methodology more.

You really need to love and be super passionate about whatever your going to do. Because it is going to take away time from other things that you love to do like your family, or another passion whether it is golf or whatever it may be. Your going to have to sacrifice and take away time from something that you love to go and build this. Because most likely you don't have the resources to not be working and build it as a full time job. So for me whether it was Vibio or content creation I have has to do it on nights and weekends, I have had to wake up early and stay up late. That takes away from things that I love to do. So to really be successful I think you need to understand that commitment that you are going to be in and be super passionate about it.

First is start as soon as possible and don't waste your time. Define your priorities, each day study something new, and don't hesitate to ask. People are open when they ask. If you have a question ask someone and they will responded.

Research first. Do your research, do not jump into something without a deep dive into something that you have interest in. A lot of times these interest come from things that happen to you, and that's great.  Before you go diving into things I have a perfect example to share. I was competing with virtual private networks. So virtual private was a much better play because they were making money. They could sell where as I was free. I was stuck in the browser world which is free and I could not figure out how to make any money. So as I said do your research before you do anything.