Videos

EP11: The Always Say Yes Challenge

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.

EP10: SaaS? E-Commerce? Consulting? How to choose the right kind of business to start…

I’ve always wanted to start companies and build businesses. But as someone that lives in Silicon Valley, the only path I really took seriously for starting a business was to raise money, build a product, and scale, scale, scale.

One of the biggest lessons I learned as a tech entrepreneur who has founded and sold more than one company is that not every business, not every entrepreneur should build a venture backed company.

I know for a fact my next company is going to be venture backed… but…

In this episode, I’m going to talk about as an Entrepreneur, the three different kinds of businesses you can build, and how to pick the right one for YOUR entrepreneurship journey.

Picking the Right Idea

In my last episode about starting companies, one of the key things I asked you to think about when figuring out the idea for your business was to choose how much you want your business to generate. Do you want it to generate $10kmonth, $100kmonth, $1m/month, $1b?

Businesses exist and come in all shapes and sizes. Outside of Silicon Valley, there are wildly profitable software companies that exist and they never took a drop of funding.

There are businesses that churn out double digit growth and then there are businesses that grow exponentially and IPO in 7 years.

The 3 Types of Businesses I Love

So as you think about your entrepreneurial journey, I want you to think about three different kinds of businesses and the right one for you.

  1. E-Commerce leveraging Amazon, Facebook and other networks
  2. SaaS organic growth
  3. SaaS hyper growth

How to Pick the Right Type of Business

If you’re an entrepreneur and you don’t have a TON of deep tech knowledge, building E-commerce businesses are a great way to get in. They’re great because there are a ton of tools available out there, there are white-labelled products you can re-sell, digital goods that you can easily create with some help, and then it becomes a game of solving a unique need in the market. I know a ton of entrepreneurs that make millions a year purely focused on e-commerce, digital goods and services.

Often times, these get dubbed as a lifestyle business in Silicon Valley, and I think people are being silly when they do that. Some of the e-commerce entrepreneurs I know often lead better and more fulfilling lives than their venture backed “non-lifestyle” business counterparts.

The next two type of businesses I love are SaaS businesses. Usually these are software businesses that are sold as products with some services and that have really high margins and solve a unique problem in the market.

How Big of a Business Can It Be?

When it comes to software businesses, I always ask entrepreneurs two things:

  1. How much money is being spent yearly in this problem space right now?
  2. How much of that do you want to own?

If #1 and #2 lead a massive multi-billion number, and I can see how they can get there, then you’ve got a hyper scale SaaS idea in your hands.

If #1 is not that big and pretty niche, and #2 is a high number, then you’ve got a seriously awesome organic growth business number in your hands.

And if the market is not that big, and you don’t want to own much of it, you might just have a bad idea in your hands and a big slog ahead.

Building a hyper scale SaaS business is the Silicon Valley dream. But it’s not the only way to entrepreneurship and massive wealth creation.

Just like how I know tons of entrepreneurs who are making millions on E-Commerce, I also know entrepreneurs that are running boutique SaaS businesses with a globally distributed team, very little funding and just printing money.

In Conclusion

So as you figure out your idea, as you figure out the type of business you want to build, think through these three options.

On the next episode, I’ll be talking more about bootstrapping vs fundraising and some more factors to think about for your business.

EP9: Picking the Right Idea for Your Business

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

To help you find the right business idea, we’ve created a short worksheet for you, just fill out the form below to download it.

 

 

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.

EP8: Quitting Your Job to Start a Business

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.

 

EP7: Marketing Trends 2018

Marketing is changing! The average tenure of the CMO is shorter than all other C-level execs! It’s really a crazy time in Marketing. And so, in this episode, I walk through three things:

1) What is the current landscape in marketing?
2) What are the macro trends that CMOs need to consider?
3) What are the strategies that you can employ to win?

I absolutely love thinking about marketing strategies, so if you’re up for it, follow the link below to book a strategy call with me. Depending on timing and demand, I’m not sure I’ll be able to get to all of them, but I’ll do my best!

Set up a strategy call w/TK →

EP6: How to Bring More Meaning

Tired of wasting time on Facebook? Feeling restless? Are you just starting at your phone while you’re at the airport waiting on line? Wondering where all the time went? In this episode, I talk about how I’m embracing boredom in my life to bring more meaningful moments into my days. My word for 2018 is: meaningful. Meaningful work, Meaningful relationships, Meaningful connections, Meaningful time spent, Meaningful dialogue and debate, Meaningful insights from data, Meaningful love, Meaningful goals, and Meaningful contributions! In the quest of Meaningful, I found that I was losing a lot of meaning in my life by constantly staring at my phone.

I’m the type of person that is either doing absolutely NOTHING or doing a MILLION THINGS. Last year, I sold my company, took on a new role, traveled through 9 different counties. It was awesome. I took thousands of pictures, I even put together this travel video. I accomplished a LOT. But it was a blur.

It was awesome! But it was a blur. My goal for 2018 is to embrace the word meaningful. I want meaningful relationships, meaningful work, meaningful love, I want every moment spent to be meaningful.

And so as I took the first business trip of the year to Denver, I set an intention for myself to think of every moment in half speed.

This meant two things:

  1. I embraced boredom. If I had an idle moment waiting on line, I wouldn’t look at my phone, I’d look around and BE bored
  2. I thought about bringing meaning into every moment, even if it was just me in the airport, by embracing the boredom, creating space, and observing what was going on around me instead of escaping to my phone

As part of that, I captured some footage from my trip to Denver. And as a creative experiment, I put together that footage and played it at half speed for you.

The most surprising thing to me as I looked through this footage was all the beauty that surrounded me in even the little details. So for this year, think about bringing more meaning into every moment. Embrace boredom, and see how much more you get out of every second!

EP5: How to Market Your Business

Here at Unstoppable, we want you to become the best version of yourself and we want to help you build incredible businesses.

This will be our first Unstoppable episode talking about marketing your business, a topic near and dear to my heart.

As I kick off Episode #5 as part of a multi-episode series on how to market your business, I wanted to first pause and reflect on how far we’ve really come as marketers and how the craft of marketing is advancing.

What are the key trends you’re seeing in marketing this year?

EP4: How to Plan the New Year

I know you’re incredibly busy, but think about this: there is absolutely no worse feeling in the world than looking back at your 365 days at the end of the year and wondering… where did it all go?!

You know what’s the best feeling? Looking back at your year and checking off your FIVE KEY GOALS off your list because you did the work through the year to keep realigning to them and crush them.

In this episode, I talk about how I plan out my year to accomplish a growth mindset and crush my goals.