🎙 Inventive Journey | Real Stories From the Startup Survival Club

I would recommend reading the book "Good To Great" by Jim Collins. I found that really helpful. I was lucky enough to have a Ph. D. advisor that had me read it in grad school which was great. I did not know I would be in a leadership position at the time so I think my thoughts were formed really pure before I had any sense of entitlement. So now that I am in it I can compare myself to my thoughts...

Don't overthink it. I think we can get in our heads and, we can overthink things. I like to think of myself as a perfectionist and, I have learned in one of the books that I have read it's bad to be looked at as a perfectionist. That's because we are constantly chasing after something that's not real. Perfect is not real. We are driving are selves crazy. People who are looked at to be perfectionis...

Work from what you know. And that is going to give you your edge over everyone else. As Jack Trout says, "differentiate or die." You need to have your product be unique. What sets it apart? If you start with your knowledge, you're different. Everyone is unique, so build that into your product. What do you do that is unique? What is it that sets you apart? Do that for your product. Don't stop there...

Keep going. Never ever ever give up. Always keep that fire, keep that passion awake. And always remember what is the purpose. What are you doing here? What is your potential impact? Why you are doing this for real. Keep that passion alive and, it's going to be worth it in the end. Keep going.

You've got to get some experience first. There are so few and far between of the Mark Zuckerberg or the Bill Gates that drop out and create something amazing. Most people have gone and got whether it's experience working in a start-up or experience working in a big corporate entity, that experience is invaluable. It also starts to build up your network, which also translates into those soft skills...

So one of the first things we suggest for business owners that are starting to launch and grow is, at a minimum, start paying yourself a salary. That's equal to what you have to pay somebody else to do the job that you are doing. The first starter is to make sure the business is viable. If you had a CEO of a company, and what you need to pay them is 120,000 a year, and you can't pay yourself that,...

Be ready to keep trying and keep reformulating. Even though master Yoda says there is no try, only do, it's going to feel like a lot of trying for a while unless you are extremely lucky and/or skilled. If you are not coming at this already from having the full skill set and the full finances and the full social relations that are just going to guarantee your success no matter what. If you come fro...

It's better to try than to talk about it. I have had so many ideas over the years that I never bothered to realize. They could have been great, ahead of their time. Who did not think of the iPhone, or this and that? Yes, everyone had similar things in their mind where they say: oh yeah, this could be great. The difference is always in the execution. So there has to be biased for action. Do it earl...

Go work with either Score or the SBA- The small business administration and let them guide you. A great resource that will save you from making tons of mistakes that I had to make starting out thinking you know everything. Go ahead and get some people to help you know it. They are here to assist you. I would say to go and use your resources.

It's just a sense of denial or not even a sense of denial. Being in denial about something very important to the business. And maybe as a founder or entrepreneur, you are not seeing clearly, So finding colleagues that can be brutally honest with you. Whether that's friends, family, business partners, or other partners, it's very important. I think you can kind of self realize every day, but that i...

One we are boot-strapped so we are trying to get the most out of every dollar that we can get in the business. For us, we are always trying to look at different ways to market, sell and attract leads. We do the things that we can get the most out of every dollar that we can. We started initially with a digital marketing campaign but our messaging was incorrect. We had to change that. We had to piv...

I would have to say cash. Make sure you really understand your runway. So you know where your money is spent. How long do you have? And aside from cash what is your personal runway? Because there is the money aspect and, there is your personal mental health being. Can I sustain these ups and downs for the next six months without a paycheck? Am I feeling depleted that I need to not be doing this or...

When you ask for money, you get advice. When you ask for advice, you get money. When I was doing my research interviews reaching out to centers of influence I was only asking for advice. I was letting people share with me what their feedback was. Those conversations have led me to other connections where if I was reaching out to somebody and said, hey, I am going to be doing this virtual reality e...

The best piece of advice is around time. Time is a constant. You can't mess around with time. Leave it to Elon Musk and Bezos to mess with space. But still, no one can mess with time. With time it's either for you or against you. When you first start, it's really important that you don't want time to be against you. The thought is as a side hustle, nights and weekends you have a salary, you have y...

Surround yourself with people who inspire and challenge you. We are braver when we are feeling inspired. We are more committed when we are feeling challenged. You're going to run into hard things and, you're going to struggle. But when you do, who do you want in your constellation? Who do you want in the group of people that you know? Do you want people around you who say, I knew this was going to...

Save your money first. That was one of the big things we did when we knew we were going to start our own company. We set up the initial business formation in 2009 and did not quit our day jobs and go full time until June of 2010. We did not want to quit our jobs, start working and realize well crud I either have to say yes to everything because I don't have any money. Or I have to go find another...

Focus on MVP-minimum viable product. We have all heard the term before but, when it comes to hardware it's particularly important. It crosses lines into all elements of a business. Whether it's a service or software, you need to think about how to make your best feature. The real innovation, that golden nugget that you thought about. How do you make that shine and nothing else? We have a motto tha...

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 t...

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 y...

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 a...

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,...

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 j...

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...