🎙 Inventive Journey | Real Stories From the Startup Survival Club

As a start-up, your weapon is speed. You are not corporate, so you don't have the bureaucracy, you don't have to have board meetings, you don't have to take 9 months to make a decision. But corporations are bigger, and they have more money and more resources. So the only thing you are competing on is speed. So move really, really fast. If you have an MVP, if you have an idea, just put if out there...

Be patient in the growth process of what you intend to build. Rome wasn't built in a day, but it WAS built. So lay the groundwork of the company. Create slow but steady systems and processes within your company that you can apply every day.

Don't do it alone. Find a coach, find a mentor. I'm not talking about your brother or your mum or your dad who has a business. Find someone who has been successful in that type of business. For example for yourself, in law practicing. So, if I was to sell in a business in law, I would come to you. I would come speak to you. You know? If I were to sell, you know, get my business to 7 figures, I wou...

Passion is an entrepreneur's mistress. Don't fall SO in love with your idea that you don't test it. Just because you think it'll work, [doesn't mean it will]. Make sure that the market wants it. I mean, beta test that like a son of a gun. That's what I find. People bring an idea to the marketplace, and the marketplace has no interest.

Oftentimes, you give other people too much credit, and you don't give yourself enough. I wish that the credit strategy that has been in my head for 10 years, that we just started a year ago, I would have started 5 years earlier. The amount of success that we are having now would have been incredible to be 5 years further. We plan, and God laughs, and so here we are. No problem. Right? So, original...

If you have a business partner who is an expert in something, and you're not, which was the case for us (like, we're both good at the opposite things), let that person be the expert. Just because someone initially came up with the idea, or just becomes someone thinks they have a good marketing idea, doesn't mean that it IS a good marketing idea. In our case, my co-founder is a brilliant designer a...

Don't believe all the crap rules they tell you. Most of it is made up. Ask for whatever you want. My job title is "Head of Equitable Design" which was NOT the job that they were hiring for. I have a history of literally making up my own job. That's the thing about tech. It calls itself very innovative, but it's actually a very risk-averse industry. And so one of the lessons that I've learned is th...

Know the problem that you're trying to solve and fall in love with it. Don't flirt around it, don't think about the money, don't think about any of that stuff. Think about what you're trying to solve. Be really, really, really good about that. Go very narrow. Think about it, go broad, but really narrow in on one thing that you can be really good at and solve. The moment that you lose your focus on...

There are people out there that really want to help. I have a couple of advisors, just people who have worked in business, that have been so helpful for me. I didn't have a mentor when I did my podcast, but I do have a mentor now. Even though I am accomplished in many areas of this "business" (quote-unquote). So I think it's really important to have a mentor.

I know I know a ton about that, but I am a first-time entrepreneur, and there is a lot that I don't know. So the biggest thing for me was "I need to figure out how to be vulnerable." I had to be willing to ask people around me, to learn, to be open to learning every day. To understand that it's ok to say, "You know, I've never written code. How should I evaluate people who write code, for my compa...

It comes down to "You don't know what you don't know." I mean, you have to assume that everything is wrong, and you hope that everything will end up right in the end. From your perspective. You've developed the business plan, you're hopefully working on what we'd consider a minimally viable product

As Entrepreneurs, we always think, widely to some extent, that it's up to us to make a decision. The buck stops with us. We have to make a decision. We have to stick with it. Hey, that's life as an entrepreneur and a leader. Having said that, a lot of times, the right decision when you are genuinely uncertain about something is to test the alternatives. As an analytics person, we tell our clients...

Be ready. It's never as easy as it looks. It's something that you learn to manage time like we were talking about earlier, and you commit to the effort...

It doesn't work as you planned. It's just like life. I mean, as much planning as you want to do, you start, and it's totally different than what you expected. So you have to adjust. You have to be very flexible. You need to be ready to burn money. You need to realize that it takes a long time, and it costs a lot of money, and you're going to have to navigate through that in order to get to the oth...

Network. Network as much as possible. Let's say you're a lawyer, let's say you're an electrician, let's say you're a medic, let's say your ANYTHING! It doesn't matter what you are. Or what profession you are in. Speak to viewpoints outside of your bubble and get a better understanding of what their pain points are.

Getting into a startup is exciting, but it's also scary. Like, when I did it myself, when I was the actual Founder, the Owner, the CEO of the company, responsible for everything, and all of the money, and how your build the product, and all that goes in, it becomes scary. You're no longer that right-hand person because you always have someone taking care of it, you are THAT person...

Be humble enough to ask for help. You know? That's twofold. Being humble and humility goes both ways. So ask people for help. Don't ever think that you know everything. You can always go out to your network and ask people for help. That's the first thing about being humble. Then the second thing about being humble is: be able to take criticism in terms of what you've built and poking holes at it.

It's a long road, and you have to be resilient and passionate. Otherwise, you burn out. It's just as simple as that. Being an entrepreneur, having been in different startups, you can't survive unless you have that mentality. View video: https://milleripl.com/blogs/inventive-journey/resilient-&-passionate

Make sure you are ready for it and be prepared because it's a long, hard, tough road. But be incredibly stubborn. There were at least a half a dozen times at Simple that I was ready to just give up & just be like "We can't do this!" like "This is just undoable!" There are so many [moments] where you think that everything is fine, you have it all figured out, and out of the left field you just get...

I think trying to get multiple perspectives on something [is important]. It sort of contradicts what I said earlier. In a way, you don't want to be distracted. At the same time, when you are building plans and when you are basically looking at everything and deciding whether this project is something that may grow into something big, I think various perspectives from people with different backgrou...

The more focused you get, the better. Something you NEVER want to say is "I want to just podcast about everything and I want it to be for everybody." If it's about everything, it's about nothing. If it's for everybody, it's for nobody. It's the truth, the more focused you can get, the better. I had somebody that I've done some work with, and her name is Vanessa Edwards. She has something called "T...

I'd just go back to my slogan that "Easy is Hard, and Hard is nearly impossible." Where, if you're going at it with a small group of people, you want to have something competitive. However, if you overdesign and overreach on features...

SME. Are you an SME in the field? Are you a Subject Matter Expert. If you're not, partner with someone, or get a bunch of advisors who are. You have to answer, as an innovator, you have to answer, every call has to be, "Why the heck do you exist?" And if you can't answer that, please don't start a company.

Make sure you find the right partner. It's all about people. Business is all about "If you want to solve the problem", it's all about the people! By yourself, you can do certain things, but you need to have somebody that will be able to challenge you at the same time. So try to find a lead, a partner that will align with your personality and your culture. Whatever is it is, make sure you find the...

You are optimistic anyway, so you tend to be aggressive. But then you say "Ok, I'm aggressive, so, therefore, I want to try to be conservative." So you make some estimates and then, maybe, you double it. Well, you're really probably wrong by 6x. What I've always found is that things are 3x as long and cost 3x as much as I tend to think when I go into it. So you have to prepare for that.