Category: Starting Your Business

The Always Say Yes Challenge and how it has a dramatic impact in my life.

For SXSW 2018, I got invited to speak at a panel about accelerating business growth. As I set foot in Austin, I was hit with a ton of nostalgia about the last time I was there…

When I was first starting ToutApp, I was a solo founder, I had no network, didn’t know any investors, and I knew I needed to make a huge splash in a big way with a $0 marketing budget.

And so I went to SXSW and took on the Always Say Yes Challenge. The impact of that trip was huge as I walked away from SXSW with lifelong friends, angel investments and more.

As I went back to SXSW in 2018 to speak on a panel about accelerating business growth, I recorded this episode reflecting on how much life has changed and how that trip to SXSW when I was starting my business was just such a huge inflection point for my startup journey.

If you’re looking to make a massive change in your life, if you’re looking to take your business to the next level, I highly recommend taking on the Always Say Yes Challenge to break out of your comfort zone.

Behind every great business, behind every great entrepreneur, is a great idea. Ideas can come from all different places. It can come while you’re in the shower. It can come during adversity. It can come from carefully crafted market analysis.

The toughest thing about starting a company is finding the right idea. You find the right idea, and you can look forward to decades of tremendous success. You find the wrong idea, you may not find out until you’re a solid 18 months down the road of blood sweat and tears.

Find Your #unstoppable Business Idea

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In this episode, I’m going to be sharing my three golden rules for finding the right idea for your business. They’re my rules of 10.

Rule #1 – 10,000 Hours

The first rule is the rule of 10,000 hours. So many times, I see entrepreneurs want to go into solving problems in spaces they just know nothing about. I once saw two single guys start a company to help with wedding planning.

You could be wicked smart, it’s always good to have people approach spaces and disrupt it with a beginners mind, but as you grow in your career, you’re going to be so much better off if you pick to solve problems in a space that you’ve had your 10,000 hours of training on. Where you know the industry. You know the people. You know the dynamics.

It’ll be just that much easier, it’ll be one less thing to learn, and it’ll allow you to focus on the harder stuff.

Rule #2 – Next 10 Years

The second rule is can you see yourself working on this space for the next 10 years?

Why 10 years? It takes real time to build a business! And it goes through real ups and downs. On those tough days, you still have to be in love with the space to be able to keep going on!

A lot of people go into entrepreneurship because they’re looking for a change. So just because you’ve been in the construction business and have 10,000 hours of knowledge in it, it may not mean you want to spend the next 10 years of your life working in the same space.

It may be that you’ve had a hobby in art or cooking or gaming and you’ve put in your 10k hours there …. and now that you’re thinking about starting your own thing, that’s the thing you want to spend the next 10 years on…

Rule #3 – $10k/100k/1m/month?

Lastly, how big of a business are you trying to build? $10k/month? $100k/month? $1m/month?

I live in San Francisco and any time you hear Entrepreneurship, everyone assumes you’re looking to build a high scale venture backed business with funding.

The reality is there are so many kinds of businesses out there and so many different scales, all that allow business owners to earn a fantastic living profitably.

Figuring out how much money you want this business to make helps you figure out the type of business you create and also helps you figure out if the space you’re going after and the problem you’re trying to solve is big enough.

Ever since I was a kid, I’m taking like TEN years old, I knew I wanted to start a business.

If you had asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up…this is how much of a nerd I am… I’d say I want to be running a company with a crack team of badasses with an incredibly high employee to revenue ratio…

BUT, it wasn’t until I turned 28 years old, did I really take a run at building a real business. It wasn’t until I was 28 did I really take the plunge. And even then, it was the hardest thing ever… to quit my six figure finance job, to downsize my life, so that I could pursue my dreams.

Entrepreneurship is hard! It’s a huge risk. And I see a ton of people either stay stuck in the limbo of trying to get into entrepreneurship, or they take a plunge way too fast and way too soon without a plan.

In this episode, I talk through three things you must do before you quit that job, while ensuring you don’t get stuck in the limbo of wantrepreneurship.

#1) Don’t quit cold turkey.
Before you quit your job, make the commitment to spend 4 to 6 hours of your day working on developing your business.

#2) Talk to customers and validate your idea.
Before you quit your job, use those 4 to 6 hours to develop your idea by talking to real actual potential customers so you can really validate how this idea will do in the market

#3) Execute.
There will never be in a point in time where the clouds part and stars align and the gods tell you that it is time to quit your job and double down. Life often isn’t that perfect, and in fact, life finds ways of testing your commitment. So while I’m encouraging you to slow down before you quit and #1 and #2, in #3 I tell you to that once you see the early glimmers of the idea, once you see the first 10 customers whose eyes light up about what you’re looking to build, you need to take that plunge one way or another.

In this episode, I also share my personal experiences of how I managed #3 because I didn’t have the luxury of quitting my job cold turkey.

Entrepreneurship isn’t easy but it has incredible rewards. If it was easy and highly lucrative… everyone would be doing it. Is Entrepreneurship for you? Start allocating 4 to 6 hours of your day to start working on your idea.

 

I quit my finance job 6 years ago and started a company. In 2017, I sold that company after having raised venture capital, building a team, and scaling the business to millions in revenue. Here’s EVERYTHING that’s happened since then, through the highest of highs, lowest of lows, and the triumphs in the end.

My personal goal for 2018 is to build a brand from scratch and grow it using the best ideas in marketing so I can have even deeper conversations with my clients and customers.

As part of that goal, I’m excited to be starting Unstoppable.

Unstoppable brings together a number of things I’m incredibly passionate about.

#1 My passion for blogging and sharing what I’ve learned. I’ve been blogging for nearly 10 years on TKKader.com and Unstoppable takes my passion for teaching to the next level. Everything I’ve learned across Personal Development, Startups, Building and Scaling Businesses, Sales & Marketing Strategies and more will be shared on video episodes with some companion blog entries.

#2 My passion for spending time with growth oriented people. It also couples with my passion for forging a deeper relationship and building a community around growth oriented Entrepreneurs and Business Leaders, a group of people I love spending time with.

#3 My passion for the craft of Sales, Marketing and Building Businesses. Unstoppable at its core is a vehicle for me to share in my journey and connect with others that share the same values as me: to be growth oriented, to have belief and optimism while pursuing wild and crazy goals, to have meaningful work and relationships. At its most extreme, Unstoppable is a brand and a community. There’s a lot of strategies that go into play to make something like this tick. And so I’m excited to use this as my test lab to explore all the cutting edge ideas we talk about with CMOs and CROs.

Overall, I’m pumped and excited. I hope you watch the episode and share your feedback: tk@getunstoppable.com.