🎙 Inventive Journey | Real Stories From the Startup Survival Club

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...

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 ar...

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 t...

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...

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 d...

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 wan...

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 sta...

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. T...

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...

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 makin...

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...

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 realiz...

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...

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...

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 every...

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 mark...

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 publishe...