Ep. #514 - What to Expect as a Startup Founder

Introduction 0:02
I’m an entrepreneur. I’m an entrepreneur on an entrepreneur, I entrepreneur.

Matt DeCoursey 0:22
And we’re back. Back for another episode of Startup Hustle. Matt DeCoursey here with Matt Watson. Hi, Matt.

Matt Watson 0:29
Hey, what’s going on?

Matt DeCoursey 0:31
Well, I got a lot of questions for you today. I am thinking about starting a start up. And I want to talk to you about what I should expect as a startup founder.

Matt Watson 0:43
Well, one of the things you hear from me a lot is expectation management is key. Right? So always gotta set everybody’s expectations.

Matt DeCoursey 0:52
So Lambos, jets, and a spaceship to the moon, right?

Matt Watson 0:59
Yeah, absolutely. You get one on the first day.

Matt DeCoursey 1:03
That’s what I thought I figured you got that when you signed up. Now, before we get too far into this, Matt, I wanted to remind you that today’s episode, Startup Hustle is brought to you by FullScale.io. That’s the company you and I on together. Yeah, I think you know that, right?

Matt Watson 1:15
Absolutely.

Matt DeCoursey 1:17
Yeah, we do software stuff. We help people build teams and find programmers because you know, there’s not enough of them here in the United States,

Matt Watson 1:25
or anywhere else.

Matt DeCoursey 1:26
Should, is that the first thing I should expect as a startup founder, if I if I’m starting a tech company, because this is the second episode in our 52 part series, are you going to show up 52 Straight times on time now?

Matt Watson 1:38
So far, so good.

Matt DeCoursey 1:41
You’re two for two baby you have to do for two, I knew that you’re short hiatus, from hosting episodes with me would really give you time to wrap your head around the gravity of the 52 part series. Now, look, Matt, you and I both have have a long history of starting businesses. And you know, I’ve written books about it, one of which you’re in, we’ve helped a lot of other people start businesses, we provide services for a lot of startups, and we’ve invested in a half a dozen different ones. That’s just the ones you and I to gather you even more. I think we know a couple things about what to expect as a startup founder. I mean, what you know, as we, we get into this, I mean, what’s your what’s your 10,000 foot overview of what to expect as a startup founder?

Matt Watson 2:27
It’s it’s hard. It’s really hard. I mean, it will test your your will. Maybe your will to live even. All the time.

Matt DeCoursey 2:39
Yeah, I can’t argue with you. You know, I think the the as we’ve now published our 500th episode of Startup Hustle and congrats on that, man 500. That’s crazy. It’s a lot. I know. It really is. And, and thank you for everyone that listens. And you know, we really wanted to and in honor of the 500th episode, and taking it back to the original format, where Matt and Matt and I were, you know, just hosted hosts on a couple of things. We spent a lot of time creating this and we want to share with you like what the real story, much like Startup Hustle TV, which will also show you the real story, we get the first episode coming out on February 1. Dude, you look good on film, Matt, you know, I 4k made me look worse, but it somehow really personified your beauty. Awesome. Yeah, yeah. Now now with that, I think you probably shouldn’t expect beauty as a startup founder. You know, like you said, it’s hard. And I want to really repeat that. If you’re not ready for the challenge of a lifetime. Don’t start a startup? Like not? Yeah, it’s it’s it. I mean, it starting a business is hard. That’s like, almost we could just end the episode there. But I think we should elaborate.

Matt Watson 3:53
Well, I think it depends on how you’re going into it. Right? If you’re like, Okay, I bet the farm on this, it has to succeed, or I’m totally screwed. It’s really stressful, right? Versus like, oh, I have a job. But this is kind of my side hustle. And it’s kind of fun. It’s kind of exciting. Maybe it’s gonna work, maybe it’s not, but it’s kind of fun to do. That’s a much better place. And like, No, I bet the farm on this. And if this doesn’t work, I am screwed.

Matt DeCoursey 4:18
Yeah, I’m gonna challenge you on that, though. Because if you if it’s just a side hustle. So I’ve always said that 50% of your attention gets 25% of your intended results. So you know, now while a lot of startups and businesses do start as that, you know, spinning play off to the side, and that is a that is a good, safe way to do it. Eventually, if you’re going to really have a business and start a startup, it is going to have to demand all of your time and attention which I find with a lot of people that I talked to and I know you do too, that they have a very difficult time making that step sometimes. So you know, at some point you are going to have to make that commitment. because one of the things that you can expect as a startup founder is if you go to try, try to acquire funding, and you have another job well, a lot of people I mean, well, you know, the same VCs, I know, Matt, and they’re going to not really be ended that, you know, or at least they’re going to say, look, okay, if we invest in nest, is this, is this gonna get 150% of your attention? I mean, do you? Do you find that exact sentiment with investors?

Matt Watson 5:25
Yeah, I think that’s always a red flag to investors is investing in a company to then just pay the founder salary to right, like, true that, you know, that’s not good.

Matt DeCoursey 5:35
So, like, probably one of the first thing she expects us to not get paid shit for a while.

Matt Watson 5:40
Oh, yeah, not to make any money.

Matt DeCoursey 5:43
Yeah, and we won’t name we won’t name, who but I remember specifically looking at a deal with you a couple years ago, and the founder was making 10 grand a month or something and seeking like $100,000 investment, and I was like, this is just 10 months worth of paycheck, this isn’t, you know, you know that. So I mean, you got to be able to live off the shoestring, be able to live off in the bootstrap for a while. So I want to start, I think we need to just in the spirit of Startup Hustle and the realism that we provide, you know, I think that we should start with the list of the bad things that you should expect. And we’ll end with the good, which by the way, is way shorter than the bad, just like I said, the very first one is, hey, well, I don’t think you should plan to fail. But you should expect you because the numbers are not on your side.

Matt Watson 6:34
Well, and I think part of that is defining startup, right? And are you trying to build a business that you’re gonna go raise VC capital and kind of a true startup that that way? Because those businesses definitely have an extremely high failure rate? Or is it more of a bootstrapped company, it’s kind of a small business, and it just kind of continually grows, which is a startup, but it’s a different kind of startup, right? Those ones that go raise a bunch of money, like 90% of them are going to fail. I mean, even if you raise $10 million, it doesn’t matter, your odds of failing are still very, very high.

Matt DeCoursey 7:08
It’s crazy to think that a $10 million deposit into your bank account still results in the likelihood of failure in many cases, but it’s true and a lot of fed a lot of adventure. institutional investors as guests in the past, and they’ll tell you straight out that they expect nine out of 10 deals to flop, which is kind of crazy. Like they’re only trying to be right 10% of the time. So now I think another thing you need to expect along the way is that if you don’t have the resources, like in your own pocket, now Matt, you and I, we we cash flowed our own businesses, you know, individually, and then we’ve done that with Full Scale. And that is something that isn’t always possible for a lot of people. So one of the things that I think you can have a high level of expectation for is there’s going to be a lot of frustration when it comes to finding people that want to provide people are places that want to provide the resources for you getting started.

Matt Watson 8:08
Well, and then that can be hiring people or, you know, everything, right? From raising capital. It’s, it’s, you start out going around, trying to beg everybody to join you for some adventure. That doesn’t sound like a great adventure to start, right? You’re like, we’re in Europe, and we’re gonna sail west, we think there’s land come with us.

Matt DeCoursey 8:27
We’re not sure. We might we might sail off the end of the earth. Yeah, we. Yeah, we also might die at sea, we might get scurvy. There’s a lot of things. And by the way, if we do get there, guess what? There’s nothing there. There’s no houses, there’s no food. There are no crops, like we have a whole nother challenge once we get there. And that that is I think that’s a very good example, Matt. Because when you start a business if you Okay, first off, if you’ve never started a business, if you’ve never been an entrepreneur, I’m going to just be realistic with you, you have no clue what you’re going to expect. Like you really don’t and and you have to respect that like respect the hustle in that regard. And with that, know, just know that you are going to have to learn a whole lot of stuff. I published a video on the Startup Hustle YouTube channel of you talking about why you call it the Startup Hustle. Do you remember some of the things you said share um, if you do

Matt Watson 9:29
Oh, because you got to learn to do something new every day that didn’t plan to do

Matt DeCoursey 9:33
Yeah. You’re chief you’re the chief cook and bottle washer.

Matt Watson 9:38
Yep.

Matt DeCoursey 9:41
But you know and so and you can find that on our YouTube channel. And you know, man, I really enjoyed that because in a mere 90 seconds I think you really encapsulated so much of what you can expect and you know, I say this because okay with the new business that nothing’s ever been done. You have no protocol, you have no owner’s manual Do you mean it doesn’t matter? It’s like the first time the phone rings, theoretically, you now have to figure out how you’re going to answer the phone, who’s going to answer the phone or answer the phone at all. Literally, everything’s a first.

Matt Watson 10:13
And it’s really important to remember that for your employees to write, it’s really hard to go hire a salesperson or a software developer or whatever. It’s like, oh, you have this cushy, corporate job, come work at this little startup, right? And then when they get there, they show up and they’re like, hey, what do I do? And you’re like, I don’t know, we have to figure it out. We’ve never had a salesperson before. We don’t have sales processes. We don’t have a CRM system. We know, we don’t have like 1000 things. So it’s really hard to hire people that are used to a lot of structure, and they bring him to a startup where there’s just everything is just kind of runs, you know. Just however,

Matt DeCoursey 10:50
I have a great point. Yeah. If if you’re starting to start up in someone you want to hire is like, can I see the job description? Not right person? Yeah. Hold my beer is what I would say in that case, you know, what’s my job descriptor? I’ll hold my beer, he’s gonna take him out. The people? Go ahead.

Matt Watson 11:10
I think the key here is, it can be really hard to find people. And it’s, it’s really important to find the right people that are going to fit the culture of a startup, right? That’s the challenge. And we talked about like hiring software developers is hard in general, right? Like, imagine, you know, trying to hire somebody who currently works at Google that makes $200,000 a year. So you come to work for your startup, which you probably can’t pay them that much anyways. And like, you’re just you’re, you’re always struggling for talent and everything to like, you can’t afford to hire the best talent and all of that stuff. It’s always it’s just a struggle.

Matt DeCoursey 11:41
Yeah, I went through this with GigaBook, because, you know, we had, I kind of tried to go out it alone. And I got to a point where I realized that I needed a technical co-founder, and that I had grown up next to a guy named John Berman, who was an amazing and brilliant programmer. And I needed his help. And I’d hired him as a contractor. But I went through some of that, because John says, a high-level software developer, he’s used to big pay and big benefits and cool places to work. And like, you’re like you said, all of a sudden, you’re like, hey, you know, let’s sail west. We might die. We might not I don’t know. But you look at your you know, and, and I remember, you know, some of the stuff because you know, John, just in reality, his reality is what it was he he has a wife, and you have a couple kids and a house payment. And yeah, you’re these people when they gotta go, like, tell the people that they live with, and they support it. They’re like, hey, so I used to work at Google, but I’m gonna go work at this startup that might fail. It has shitty benefits, and they have no clue what they’re doing. Yeah. Doesn’t that sound like a great idea, honey, and like you’ve done I mean, and that’s so you know, the talent thing. And we were talking about expecting some difficulty in finding people to join the voyage. Now, when you’re doing that you like, like, like Mr. Watson said, you know, do you want to find people that are versatile, that, that are the Swiss Army knife, you want a Swiss army knife and not a sword? You know, like swords are for a different battle later, you know, you don’t want to be at the frontline of the battle with your swiss army knife. And you don’t want to be back in camp trying to open a can of beans with a sword. And I say that, like the Swiss Army Knife analogy is, you know, if you can find people that have a diverse skill set and do a lot of different things, and really are you know, you don’t want people that are going well, that in my job, I don’t know how to do that. You know, guess guess who does know how to do that? Google. For real? Do you have you had over the years as you built your companies, if you had people answered ask you, you know, you’ve heard me say this before. So I asked him, like, yeah, people come and ask you a question. They’re like, how do you do this in Excel? Did you consider asking Google before me? But

Matt Watson 13:55
I said that to my wife earlier, she asked me a question. I’m like, I don’t know. But I guarantee you’ll find a video about it on YouTube,

Matt DeCoursey 14:01
or Google, or Yahoo, or really anything connected to the internet. So

Matt Watson 14:06
what one thing about employees is, I think it’s also really key we talked about, it’d be hard to find people in the right culture fit. But also thinking about, you have to hire really good people. Because if you only hire one salesperson, and they ended up not being very good, you may just wreck the whole, your whole company got wrecked, because you hired a terrible salesperson. Right? And so

Matt DeCoursey 14:27
that goes in every category. Three employees, and one of them’s terrible, that means 33% of your company is sterile.

Matt Watson 14:34
So you got to fire people quickly when it’s not working very quickly. That’s the key if if it’s not working, you’ve got to make a change quick.

Matt DeCoursey 14:42
They say hire hire slow, fire fast. Yep. Which Which, by the way, it’s hard to do. Now back to that all that experience, and I’m going to throw this in there. If you have not started owned, operated, or grown a business before, you need to expect that you’re going to have to have some time. Have conversations along the way too. And we see a lot of peep, I see, I see a lot of people just, they put it off, you know, and there’s one thing that I’ve learned about employees is they’re good right away, or they usually aren’t. Meaning like, if someone is terrible right away, you might have hired the wrong person. At best, you will end up with an average employ after a hell of a lot of work. And these are tough decisions. And if you’re not good at having tough decisions, then you are having tough conversations. That might that might, might be rough. Alright, so now let’s talk about some of the common pitfalls. Now, this is a series about how to start a tech company. So one of the very first things that occurs is with with tech, is people hire the wrong developers, or I’m going to put a tack on to this or they just choose the wrong technology.

Matt Watson 15:52
Yeah, and that’s always hard if you’re not a technology person, yourself, and you’re just trusting in somebody else, right? So you, you think you’ve hired somebody who’s good. And then three months go by six months go by, you’re not getting any results. And you’re like, they just keep stringing you along, they, they need even more money and like, you just keep throwing money into the fire. And it’s really hard to know if if you hired the wrong person, or the right, wrong company, or whatever. And we hear this so many times at Full Scale, right? Like people come to us because like, Well, I heard so and so and they didn’t get it done, and blah, blah, blah, blah, and now they’re looking for somebody else to actually get it done. And that’s a really, really common problem for founders are trying to create technology that don’t understand anything about technology happens all the time.

Matt DeCoursey 16:36
Yep. And you know, as my job at Full Scale, if you want to check out what we do go to FullScale.io. And now I’m gonna this following statement, I’m going to try to make completely unbiased from the fact that our company solves some of the problems that we’re talking about. But Matt, as you’re aware, as my role as the CEO of the company, I have a relationship with a lot of the people we do business are talking about doing business with. And you’re exactly right, they hire the wrong people they are, look, if you’re wanting if you want to start a tech company, you have to be ready to roll up your sleeves and have a do and have direct interaction on a regular basis with the people that are building your dream. And that’s that’s what I almost always the people that that are waving the red flag at our front door wanting to talk about a new tech service provider, they have contracted what what I call a Statement of Work contractor, which usually says we’ll do it for x price, and we’ll do it for so long. And then they they show them the product, like every 30 days or something like that, which if it okay is okay. If you have 100% confidence that you’re gonna get 100% of what you want. The problem is is, is a lot of times they don’t deliver on time, they don’t deliver the quality or it comes out like, you know, I think one of the things you can expect as a startup founder is that there’s a hell of a lot of stuff that you don’t know, that is going to guarantee and immediately make the plan that you thought was solid, not.

Matt Watson 18:07
Yep. No matter what you think, especially as software development is always going to take twice as long as you think to that’s, that’s another thing to expect.

Matt DeCoursey 18:14
Yeah, if if it’s even that even and you know, here’s the thing, building software is hard, especially when you’re building it from scratch, like I have, I gotta say that I have. Oh, my God, did you have so much more respect for everything that you use regularly? And how well most of it operates after building software for a decade?

Matt Watson 18:35
Absolutely. Yes, absolutely. Especially when you use a really good piece of software, you’re like, really appreciate it.

Matt DeCoursey 18:41
Yeah, yeah. And I do that too, like with, especially with something that onboards me quickly and gets me set up like that. I’m like, Oh, thank you. It’s like I dude, I just got a new My dad gave me an iPad for or the iPad Air for Christmas. And I just appreciated the fact that Apple has become sophisticated. And they’re like, put your phone near your iPad, and then says, Do you want us to set this up the same way as your phone? Yes, yes, I came an hour and my shit was ready to go. And I was like, Oh my God. Like, I remember years ago when the idea of switching or bringing in new equipment or doing anything. I’m like, Okay, I haven’t needed my email, my email, like server password, and like five years. So where is that? And yeah, so but but, you know, back to that whole thing of the startup founder like just that it’s a rocky road. Like if you haven’t provision for a lot of bumps along the way and a lot of obstacles on the way to the cash register, you are probably going to run out of money, because that’s likely to occur. So well, another common pitfall and Congress without is well running out of money.

Matt Watson 19:52
Absolutely. Yep. And if you know, anytime you’re a startup and you’re burning capital, there’s a brick wall somewhere right? You’re like, I’ve got so many months of runway and I run into a brick wall. And it’s sort of like you’re playing the game of chicken, right? Because you’re like, well, the investors aren’t going to invest any money if we don’t hit these, these deliverables. So it’s like you have to push hard and spend the money, you have to hire salespeople, spend the money on marketing, do all this stuff to grow, to hit those numbers to get even more money. And then if you don’t hit those numbers, you run into the brick wall. And it’s like, you’re playing a game of chicken at all times when you’re, you know, raising capital and going from round around around like that, and it’s a really tough place to be.

Matt DeCoursey 20:34
Yeah, do not assume that you will raise capital or find investors are that you will do it within a timeframe. Because you and you’ve been around this to like, just because you think you’re getting it. Okay, Matt, how long should you expect? If you if you get if you start, alright, so from first pitch to a VC, until you actually have money in your bank, like, how long do you How long would you expect that to take?

Matt Watson 20:59
I would probably say six months at least.

Matt DeCoursey 21:01
At a minimum?

Matt Watson 21:02
Yeah.

Matt DeCoursey 21:02
Five to six months at a minimum, usually more like eight. And I, we talked to people all the time. They’re like, Yeah, well, how much runway Do you have, like, I’ve got like three months, but you know, I just started talking to some investors, and I’m sitting there thinking

Matt Watson 21:14
You’re good.

Matt DeCoursey 21:16
Well, you’re out of luck.

Matt Watson 21:18
And here’s the other thing to keep in mind is everybody thinks they can raise capital. But most VCs are only going to invest in companies that they think can grow, potentially to do like $100 million $100 billion dollars a year in revenue. So if you’ve got this little thing that, that you think, Oh, I can grow up to $5 million a year in revenue or something like that is not anywhere near Big enough of an opportunity that a VC is going to be interested because they want to invest when your company’s worth five or 10 million and then grow it to 10s of millions, hundreds of millions, right? There’s got to be a huge ROI there. So they don’t invest in little things, they only invest in things that will be big.

Matt DeCoursey 21:56
Well, I want to reframe that a little bit, because we have had a couple of investors on and they’re not necessarily it wasn’t necessarily about the, the 100 million or more is about the 100x. They won’t like whatever they put in, like their expectation, their hope is because remember, they’re expecting to fail more than not. So they know that some of the money they put out there, it’s just not happening at all. You know, I think another thing that that I want to bring up and I don’t know if I invented this word or this term or not. But you know, I refer to middling and you’ve heard me say this. And middling is when you’re stuck in the middle, you’re not failing, and you’re not hockey sticking, and you’re stuck in the middle. And the problem with middling is, is well, people aren’t usually writing checks to those tiny kind of companies. So I think one of the things that you need to expect is to hear Well, Matt, what are some as you’ve gone out to raise capital? What are some objections you’ve heard about possibly being in the middling category?

Matt Watson 22:59
Well, it’s when you first start, it can be pretty easy to get those first five or 10 customers that are the kind of people in personality that are quick to try new products, right, that like love to try new things. And so you think like, oh, I’m having a lot of success, I got 10 new customers? Well, it’s totally different when you go from there to finding the next 1000, which are, you know, takes a more mature product. And those people are not early adopters of things, right? There’s, there’s a curve of this adoption. And there’s a book called Crossing the Chasm that’s all about this, about, you know, from from going from early adopters to eventually to more mature and enterprise customers and stuff like that. And a lot of people get stuck in the middle somewhere. It’s like they they get those first so many clients, but then they really struggle to get wider Product Market Fit wider adoption.

Matt DeCoursey 23:47
Yeah, I agree. You know, there’s another pitfall Matt, it’s very easy to find yourself with the wrong partners and the wrong investors.

Matt Watson 23:57
Absolutely. Yep. And the problem is have their own partners, you may not agree with them, they can actually be totally negative on the company and provide like no value and x and absolutely just be caused more problems than they even benefit. I’ve been through that as well. And but the hardest part is having people that are just in alignment on what are we doing with the business? Where are we going and seeing eye to eye about how to get there and what to do?

Matt DeCoursey 24:28
Yeah, and you know, I think we should probably throw the caveat in there of being careful about how you set up the company because you went you went through that just with the supermajority stuff or whatever. Do you have like 30 seconds about like, why that was what that what, you don’t have to relive the whole story, but I mean, knowing what you know, now, you’d never set a business up like that again.

Matt Watson 24:48
Yeah, well, I had a company and we had basically five major owners and we had set it up so they all five of us had to agree to do certain things in the business. And as you can imagine, it’s really hard to get that kind of supermajority. And so you definitely want to keep things simple to have a basic 51% majority. And we definitely can’t have an investor come in right investors aren’t gonna invest in a company where you have to have, like, an act of Congress for everybody to agree and like, it’s impossible. So that was a mistake that I ran through.

Matt DeCoursey 25:22
And, you know, we love and we learned, but back to that hole, not knowing what you don’t know. I mean, that’s, that’s the real thing. So, you know, so many of the things that we’ve talked about, kind of go to the next subcategory of what I want to get into, which is expect frustration. And, and, and hey, if you’re listening at this point, you’re thinking, man, these guys are really not super positive about starting a startup, I want to go back to the fact that it’s frickin hard. And we’re trying to help you understand what you’re gonna get into, because starting a new business is exciting, but that that new car smell is gone pretty quick, because it turns into work, it turns into stress, it turns into responsibility, and you need to be ready for it. And part of part of the X, the expectation with frustration is changes, challenges and chaos. Those might be our new three C’s, I love that, but you are going to have to be agile you’ve met, will you explain what Agile is for a tech company?

Matt Watson 26:22
Well, agile usually means that you’re you’re planning things in a more shorter cycle and flexibility, you’re like, Hey, I’m gonna work on this for a week or two, I’m gonna go get feedback from the customer. And then take that feedback and then make further improvements. And that continues to drive kind of the roadmap and the decisions that are being made. And working on those, those fast iterations with a lot of feedback, that’s, that’s really the key. And that’s really important for any kind of startup or new new product. Because if you go, you know, hide in a dungeon somewhere for 12 months and build something and then finally come out at the end, like, you may figure out people hate what you built. So

Matt DeCoursey 27:01
right now, Matt gave the overview based on building a software product or just a basic product, roadmap or timeline, I’m going to twist that same agile mentality and to a leadership and business growth thing. Look, you have when we say agile, you have to be quick, you have to be able to move and maneuver and get out of the way. One of the advantages of being a small company is your ability to show your agility, it’s it, you are maneuverable, you have the ability to change course, you have the ability to do things very quickly. Now you look at Full Scale. So once again, Full Scale, we can help you build your tech aid, your startup company, your startup, we could help you build a team quickly in avoid the pitfalls of hiring the wrong developers. But all of a sudden, you know, our company grew fast all sudden, we have 200 employees. And the issue with that is anytime you want to roll something out? Well, we have that that’s a bit of an undertaking, but 200 people to implement and give them all to follow. And whatever, when you are a small company, you have that you can do that in moments, you know, that can literally be a lunch meeting and decide to change course, but you are guaranteed to have to make changes in regards to the second set of challenges. Like there’s just a ton of a man like for example, like, here we go, we’re going to do our MVP launch. And here it goes. And we quickly realized that we’ve got a major flaw.

Matt Watson 28:28
Yeah, my the biggest frustration that I have, especially in the software part of it right is if things are never going as fast as you want, you’re like we need to get this done. And we need to get it released. We need to get it shipped. And especially if you’re not a technical person, and you can’t even help get it done. Because like you just sit around every day, and you have meetings every week with a team and you’re just frustrated. You’re like, why isn’t the shit done? I got people that want to pay us for it. But we can’t deliver the product, what is the deal, and that is really, really frustrating. And that kills so many startups, right? Because they only have so much funding, they run out of money in a certain time. But they’ve got to deliver the product, they’ve got to sell it and and they’re on a really tight timeline. Everybody’s under a lot of stress. And she like you’re just constantly waiting.

Matt DeCoursey 29:12
I got a couple of words for the wise from a nontechnical founder. When if you’re building tech, one thing you need to understand is just because you want it done by a specific date does not make it possible. I have you talked about challenges and frustrations that that you’re like, Why can’t fit Why isn’t this done? Why isn’t this we set a deadline for this a month ago? Well, look, deadlines aren’t always structured in reality, like people still need to make it happen. And I see a live man I’ve had just so I’ve had countless conversations with nontechnical founders trying to to level them out a little bit. I’m like, hey, look, just because you want the team to have it done in two weeks and you say that’s the deadline and that’s when you’re launching. It doesn’t mean that it’s humanly possible. Double. So you have to temper your expectations at times and, you know, patience can be a virtue in some cases when it comes to these things. Yes. In other cases, too much patience can be a little bit of a killer now. Now, the inability to handle challenges and changes often results in chaos. There any way are you? Have you ever used chaos as like an agent of transformation or any other way to? I don’t know, at least with chaos, you have movement, you have friction, you have energy.

Matt Watson 30:38
Yeah, I think there’s chaos is a positive and negative, right? Sometimes it almost requires chaos to get things accomplished. It’s like, forget about policies and procedures and security and this and all these things, right? We’re just gonna get some shit done. We’re gonna throw some stuff on the wall and see what sticks. And we’re gonna go do it. Too bad Sally. And whatever department doesn’t like that we’re doing this shit. The problem. The problem is Sally, and we’re gonna cause a lot of chaos to prove to Sally that there’s a better way to do this, right? Like, sometimes it’s the only way you can get things done. But on the flip side, that chaos can be very destructive. Sally might quit. And you know, some people don’t handle that chaos they don’t handle in startups like that continual change and kind of chaos that can happen because startups can be filled with a lot of chaos. Until they figure out their business model. They get the right people, the right policies, the right procedures, and things slow down and all that stuff. But when you start out, like you’re just kind of running from the hip, and things can be very chaotic. But that’s also sometimes why you move very quickly.

Matt DeCoursey 31:41
Yeah, well, like I said, chaos is at least you have energy, you have friction, like something’s moving. The opposite of chaos. Is everyone dead on the battlefield? Yes. Which is which is hard to resurrect. So I can work with chaos. Det, the, the entire platoon down on the ground, not so much. Now, I think that chaos and your response to it as a leader really defines you as a leader. And you know, we’ve seen it, I mean, let you know, Matt, we’ve talked about telling the real story. I mean, I’ve I’ve had to step up at Full Scale at a couple different times and be like, Hey, everyone, look, we’re good. We’re good. This is why stick stay the course. We’re gonna be all right. And so but that those are defining moments of your leadership, because I think the worst thing you can do as a leader at your startup is embrace the chaos and join it. Well, what the fuck are we gonna do?

Matt Watson 32:43
Well, there’s been a couple of times at Full Scale even right? Where he figured out like, hey, this part of the business isn’t functioning very well, or these employees aren’t doing their job very well. And you had to step in, and figure it out. Well, in the process of that you create a lot of chaos for everybody, right? Everybody’s like, Oh, my God, he’s involved in our thing, he changed everything. And I like this and, and, but you know what, sometimes what you got to do

Matt DeCoursey 33:07
back to that and having to do it all sometimes. Now. It’s not that I do it better, but I know how we wanted it done and how it showed or could be done. And I give everyone the opportunity to get that done. I always tell people I’m like when I start getting my when you can see my sleeves up and I’m in your project get worried. Yeah. Because Because my youth Matt, you hear me my goal is to not have to do others jobs. But sometimes you got to and and that’s that’s the thing. And you know, I think one of the things we need to put in here is you need to expect to become an excellent communicator, you have to excel. And if you’re not you need to figure out how because without that communication it well people lose track, they lose sight of what’s going on, like it’s very easy to become rudderless. Yep, absolutely. on that ship on that make believe ship that we’re sailing west, that has very little hope of finding the New World. Man, this is really inspiring and positive, right?

Matt Watson 34:13
Maybe not the reality.

Matt DeCoursey 34:15
It’s fucking realistic. I know that much. So yeah, now, yeah, I like those three C’s, like expect frustration. And with that you’ve got challenges, changes and chaos. So embrace it. It’s happening, whether you want it to or not. All right, now let’s talk about scaling. And I’m gonna let you lead this off, because well, for those of you that aren’t fully familiar with Matt, you know, dude sold his first software company was 29 for 150 million bucks. The next one, well, they’re already in the Inc 500. He knows how to scale a business. So I’m going to just hand the mic to you master Watson, because what is scaling and what are some of the problems and things that come with it?

Matt Watson 34:58
Well, there’s always a delicate back balance of how fast you grow business. Right? And, you know, how fast do you hire people? How fast you spend money on marketing, you know, how much money do you invest in the product, improve the product, like there’s always a balance around. You know how much capital you have and how fast you deploy it to, and then how fast you grow all those things, right? And people always say they, they want to grow as fast as they can grow. And they’d love to have that problem, like I’m growing too fast, actually had that problem that VinSolutions. And it was not a fun problem at all, because, you know, we would sell 50 new accounts a month. But the next thing you know, we’re on a four month backlog. And all my sales team does now is take calls from people that are pissed off that that paid two months ago for installation and everything, but they’re not installed. And now my salespeople don’t have time to go sell anything new, and we can even deliver it if they did, because we’re four months behind. And there was no easy way to solve that, right? We weren’t just selling like, you know, oh, we just need to print more discs and mail them like we there was a bunch of labor and, you know, all this stuff that had to happen to set up new accounts. And we built websites for them and all this stuff, right. And there was no like, easy button for that, beyond like hiring a bunch of people that we didn’t have money to do. And then if even higher than they’re not trained. So I mean, growing too fast is it can also be a really big problem.

Matt DeCoursey 36:24
Well, they often say, and I say they, whoever they are, you can go out of business, and you can grow out of business. And to support what Matt said, we ran into the same thing at Full Scale, because we went from starting a business that wasn’t Full Scale to three months into it realizing we had a tremendous opportunity when it came to tech services. That said we had 100 employees before we were a year old. And you run into these chicken and egg problems as I as I refer to them. So like, you know, we didn’t have office space or you know, like our human resources process wasn’t sophisticated enough or cashflow issues, learning how to Bill like the way that we build our first three clients as compared like, alright, I’ll give you an example. So we let our first three clients pay in arrears, like we did a month’s worth of service, and then we let them pay, which meant that we usually got the check about 45 days after that first day of service, which seemed fine in the beginning. And then all of a sudden, I sat down and I started looking at the math and I was like, Dude, the way this is growing, we’re gonna need millions of dollars just to float our own receivables, not to mention the fact we’re putting ourselves we might be in a tremendous position of liability. Like we could get them a couple months behind, you know, before we realized that someone wasn’t going to pay and we had to once again embrace change and start charging at the beginning of the month for the month we were about to provide service for and these kinds of fundamental changes, which then again, now we had to figure out how to do that. How are we gonna get you to get everyone on ACH? Okay. It’s great to say that, but how do you do it, you need a form, you need to get people on, you need to get them to trust you like all these different things. And I mean, it’s gonna come up, you know, and another thing to escape that people run into a scaling problems, like you mentioned, now, it is just the inherent lack of resource. And you know, we did that happen with us a Full Scale as well, because we had one month where we hired 30 new people. Oh, shit. Okay, so now we have to buy 30 laptops. So that’s almost 60 grand. We got to buy 30 desks, 30 chairs, 30 everything. And this is all before so we’re looking like at we’re at the point where all the sudden, we’re looking at like 75 to 100 grand before these people even show up on day one. A Wait, we got to have someone for somewhere for him to work. Yeah. Oh, that is okay. Now it’s more like 100 grand. And this is before they show up and earn $1 company.

Matt Watson 39:02
And that’s the thing, you can try and grow too fast. And you end up dying because you’re growing too fast. And you make one one mistake along the way.

Matt DeCoursey 39:09
Yep, yep. And we end Well, we made a few. There were times at Full Scale, especially in the beginning. Well, there was one two month period where we just had a waiting list. It was like And here’s the thing is that’s frustrating that like you have people that are ready to pay you can you kind of like you ran into with VinSolutions, you got all this business lined up. And then you can’t deliver it for a number of different reasons. And that’s frustrating because it’s about resources. It’s about and then in our case, you know, so when I hear scaling, so How scalable is your business? And I don’t think we for a tech for tech standards. I don’t think we gave a plain enough and fair enough definition of scalable so like at stack of phi, you have an application performance management product that could handle 10 times the number of users than it has now. Oh, with a very minor amount of adjustment, am I correct?

Matt Watson 40:06
We could definitely handle twice as many customers for sure. You know. And as we continue to grow, we find problems and we have to improve them. But it’s, it’s the key thing there is like 1000 people could go sign up for it the next month. And I don’t necessarily have to hire a bunch of people or anything to do that. It’s more self service, maybe I need to hire a customer service person. But you know, there’s not a lot of

Matt DeCoursey 40:27
turn the dial, you turn a dial-up on a server setting that increases bandwidth or capacity. But here’s the thing is, is so we found that Full Scale, and I still like Full Scale, even though as a tech company, we provide tech services, but liver at, but we but we rely on people. And it was actually Neal Sharma, the founder of D G, that said something to me. He said, Well, Matt, you know, the thing with software is it shows up to work every day. And that’s why it’s so valuable. Yeah. And you know that there’s a scalability so if your business is highly reliant on you, I don’t consider Full Scale to be scalable in the same way that we would we just reference with stacker Fie, like we can’t go, we can’t, we can’t double our current revenue without doubling the number of people we hire. The problem with that is we have very, very, very strict and specific, we want to only hire people that are at a minimum in the top 20% of their career field or experience level, preferably the top 10%. The problem is, is with that model, that means we got to talk to 10 people to hopefully find one. You got to find them, you got to recruit them, you got to assess them, you got to do it. And then you got then you got to wait. Because by the way, in the Philippines, where most of our employees are usually you get a 30 day notice they’re all that said that’s not scalable, like you said with stack up are you gonna have 1000 people sign up in the next couple of days. And at least in the interim, okay, we got to turn the servers up a little bit. So can you handle Can you handle get Be careful, because if you what we see a lot of founders talk about, they’re all worried about the sky falling. What happens if everything goes well? Yeah. Yeah. Are you ready for that? Because everyone’s trying to, on many days, stop from hitting zero. What happens if you go the other way? And we see lots,

Matt Watson 42:23
there were a lot of come here that went through that because of the pandemic, right? Think if they were in online education, or telehealth, telemedicine or, you know, certain industries that are booming, that all of a sudden are just like never in a million years that they think that this would happen, and they’re just growing like crazy.

Matt DeCoursey 42:41
You know, COVID gave me a whole new respect for a lot of shit. A lot of shit. And really like, you know, and it’s like, oh, man, you better save for a rainy day. Yeah, you probably should. Yeah, I mean, there was a lot we saw, we saw I had talked to someone that had a $30 million funding round fall through because of COVID. I haven’t followed up on that. Largely because oh, man, who knows? But how heartbreaking would that be? But you need to just expect now that said half about, oh, in May, or June of last year, my wife said to me, she goes, You’re you seem like you’re handling this pandemic pretty well. And I was like, I’ve been an entrepreneur for a long time. She’s like, What do you mean, it’s just a different kind of problem. It’s just a different issue, but expect problems and expect to have to solve them. So Okay, this next thing when it comes to scaling, or something you can expect, and we hit on this earlier, do you understand you truly understand your path to revenue, because if you don’t, and you’re wrong about it, game over, game over. And when I say your path to revenue, so different types of businesses have a different path to revenue. Matt, if you and I want to open a subway, we can expect that the day we open the store, assuming that it’s anywhere where people can see it, that someone’s going to come in and buy a sandwich and we’ll have revenue, right? Yep, yep. Okay. With a tech company. No, like, I mean, you can go i Well, some you talk about those $10 million companies that fail or even more, they never even generate any revenue sometimes.

Matt Watson 44:25
Well, and that’s the challenge that startups is a lot of times, and that’s why a startup as a startup is they’re building a new type of product and a new, you know, industry or whatever. And they have to find product market fit, figured out who is the best customer for this, how do I reach those people? And a lot of times, it’s not really known early on, you’re like, I built this widget. I know somebody loves it, but I’m not sure who loves it the most. And you spend a lot of time trying to figure out who to sell to and all that stuff. And it can take a lot of time and sometimes the assumptions you make are totally wrong. And that’s why people pivot, right? They’re like, Well, we thought we built this thing. This, but we figured out that with a few tweaks, it was a totally better solution for somebody completely different.

Matt DeCoursey 45:07
Yeah. And you know, sort of, from day one, tell dollar one, how long did it take you at sacrifi.

Matt Watson 45:15
I want to say it was two to three years. Say that, again, two to three years, I think at least two years.

Matt DeCoursey 45:23
It took us two and a half years to generate $1 of revenue at Giga book. And now a lot of that had to do with the fact that I was doing another job and running another business. It wasn’t my main focus, it wasn’t my main concern, and I slowed it down. And that’s that was part of where some of my statements at the top of the episode came from. Now, speaking of this episode now, and we’re racing right through it, it is presented and brought to you by FullScale.io, the company you and I own together, Matt and I have built a product and a service offering that’s for you. Like if you’re listening, if you made it this far into this episode, you’re interested in either starting growing or improving your tech company. And our business model was really simple. We figured out what all the problems were that people had with outsourcing and offshore development. And we did the opposite. We just literally did the opposite meaning. We talked to our friends, we talked to our guests, we talked to people about it. And that’s what we do. We specialize in recruiting, assessing, retaining and employing meaning we make it really easy for you to build a team, that’s your team. So check it out. If anything, contact us and let’s continue this conversation because like I said, our goal is to help you keep money in your pocket, make it further down the road and to avoid pitfalls. So, you know, now I’m going to race through this ugly last map because that was just the bad we only talked about that. You know, like, but I think some you know, there’s a few other things that you should expect. How about haters?

Matt Watson 46:59
Absolutely. Yep, you’re gonna have some haters. For whatever reason, they don’t like they think it’s a dumb idea or whatever. You’re gonna have haters,

Matt DeCoursey 47:09
haters, haters gonna Hey lovers gonna love is I was thinking of Dave Chappelle is version of an art Kelly song. Alright, skepticism. It’s a subcategory of hater,

Matt Watson 47:23
as well, you’re, you’re gonna get it from your friends and family and even your employees. Right. And you heard me talk about this for as a founder, a lot of times you got to be a cheerleader. And that’s especially important for your employees who are like they left their cushy job to go on this journey. You got to keep telling them that hey, we’re doing okay, we’re, you know, things are gonna be alright, we’re we figured out how to do this yada yada yada, like you got to keep you got to keep everybody rowing in the same direction.

Matt DeCoursey 47:50
Newsflash, no one’s going to be more skeptical than your friends and family. Absolutely. You if you haven’t done it before, you’re going to come into this expecting that to be your your pillar of support, not going to happen. And it’s like mom and dad, God, God bless you. But they want the best for you. And you’re taking on some really risky shit. So nine out of 10 times, mom and dad are gonna be like, I don’t know about this. And then you have like the dad, that’s gonna be like me where I’m already. I’m working with my six year old to build a minimally viable product for something. I’m not even sure what it is yet. It might be. Well, hey, have you seen my unicorn? Here you go. Those of you watching on the Livestream. There you go. That’s our that’s our MVP. Yeah, I like it. And, and she knows that I like gold shoes. So that’s real gold, according to her, but I’m pretty sure it’s not. And if my kid did get real gold and painted on something, I got other shit I got to deal with. Okay, now we have talked about this next one through and through. How about the ups and downs, buddy?

Matt Watson 48:52
Absolutely. I mean, a lot of times as a startup, you feel like it’s, you know, David versus Goliath, right? And you’re like, I don’t know how we’re going to do this. And then the next day, you you get a little bit of a win or you raise some capital and you’re up and things are going good. And then the next day, you realize you’re still fighting Goliath. And, you know, it’s just,

Matt DeCoursey 49:12
you know, those paddles that have like the little rubber string and the ball and you’re like, Pat, I think that’s one way that you can expect to feel the ball being your head, your pride, your wallet, your ego, and your reality and it’s just thumping and if and, and once you get it, right, it goes even faster. But you know, the ups and downs and look, here’s the thing, entrepreneurship, and we talk about this a lot on Startup Hustle TV, and that’s our new web series. Come check it out. Go to YouTube. Hey, folks. I finally saw it. After working on it. I had that moment where I sighed relief because I realized what we created doesn’t suck. And that was a good feeling. Now, with that, we talk a lot about the ups and downs and you know entrepeneur worship is not for everyone. And in fact, it’s overwhelmingly not for everyone, it is going to test you. It is going to test you. Okay. I’m Matt, have you ever had self doubt?

Matt Watson 50:13
Absolutely. I mean, I think if you’re a founder, and you don’t have self doubt on a monthly basis, it’s probably not healthy. And people run into, you know, impostor syndrome and different kinds of things that are all related to this. And just doubt in what you’re doing doubt in yourself, like all of it, and it can be tough. And I’m sure, most founders are prone to depression, even more so than regular people. So

Matt DeCoursey 50:36
we’ve been doing it now episode about that. And it is a real thing. Founder suppression is a real thing. Because, you know, I think as a founder, you should, you can, you should, and you can expect, at some, if not several nights to wake up at three in the morning and wonder if you’re going broke if you’re going crazy, or if every decision you’ve made up to this point was wrong. And, you know, I want to quote my someone I really admire Brendon Bayless, who’s the songwriter, and guitarist for unfreeze McGee, he said, he has a line where he says, I’m well endowed with all the doubt I need. It’s built into all of this. And I’ve talked to the most successful people and some of the wealthiest people I know. And they still have impostor syndrome. Yeah, they still have founders depression, and they still wake up at three in the morning, it’s just at a different scale. And that doesn’t really go away. So you know, I mean, now we’re gonna we’re gonna end this episode with so I have been crowdsourcing some of our content from our amazing man, have you seen how many people have joined Startup Hustle chat? It’s like, got a couple 1000 people in there. I mean, we really just got serious about this a couple months ago, but we have some amazing contributors in there. And I have secretly been so I asked them, I asked the group, what what should any startup founder expect? Oh, my God, dude, the answers in here. I’m gonna just start with the best one. Can I do the best one first? Yeah, let’s run through them. I love this one. This came from RJ pakora. And he’s the he was the founder of the fund conference. And an interesting guy, this is my favorite. I’m just gonna go ahead and get this out of the way. What can you expect as a startup founder, the million ways you can use the word fuck in a sentence?

Matt Watson 52:21
I pretty much don’t like that.

Matt DeCoursey 52:23
That touched my heart as someone who uses the F word as a pillar of communication, Matt. It’s so fucking true. All right, so and then hear my own my own quote my own answer to that to that same question was to have every fiber of your well tested, stretched, broken, bought and sold.

Matt Watson 52:46
Wow. That didn’t sound too good.

Matt DeCoursey 52:51
Do you disagree? No,

Matt Watson 52:52
I don’t disagree.

Matt DeCoursey 52:54
So, by the way, I want to correct myself, RJ co founded the fun conference with our very own director of strategic partnerships. Jessica Powell. If you don’t if you want to be on the show, she’s the one you have to deal with now, so yeah, good luck with that. All right. How about Michael Edgar from Select Chicago? Drop Dead panic.

Matt Watson 53:20
Yep, we got to cut. Yeah, we got to cover some good things in this episode.

Matt DeCoursey 53:28
We’re saving those for the end. Like we talked about delay having tough conversations. I like to do what I call a sandwich chain where you start with something good then you put all the shit in the metal and then you put another slice of bread at the end of it on your way to delivering a tasty shit sandwich, man. We should have an episode about shit sandwiches because you know that’s a term I use because if you eat a shit sandwich first thing in the day. Nothing else tastes great for the rest of that day. So all right, right J Lopez deviations from the OG plan changes chaos challenges and your your plans wrong. Their plans. The plan you made on day one is wrong. If you the faster you accept that and get to work fixing it, then yeah. Now do you want to read? Do you have this list in front of you? Are you to keep going? Are you would you like to would you like to pick one? Yeah, let’s make sure you call out make sure you call out the author.

Matt Watson 54:31
All right from Shona McGee Kinney, the transition into operations being super tedious. And I think there’s a good point a lot of us love to build stuff like we’re like mad scientists and we build some cool product. But then it quickly turns into brain damage of like delivering the product.

Matt DeCoursey 54:49
So yeah, yeah, so while we talk about shit sandwiches, the beginning the middle and the end of it, like the middle part of the business for me is the that’s it. It’s my least favorite. If you know, it’s like you said it’s that brain drain it’s into like, the meetings change from the exciting, fast moving nature of raising capital and building your first product to like, cool. I’m gonna spend the next two hours talking about customer service. Yep. Well, the very next entry is from our very own chief marketing officer, and also the founder of mixtape the game, which is something we have invested in. We’re pretty excited about mixtape the app we need to play again. We didn’t do another episode, you know, links, links up with Apple Music and Spotify now, and has tiebreakers and like a whole bunch of cool stuff. And I’m looking for that. But Joel says expect opposite opportunities to quit then glimmers of hope that can motivate you for an entire year. I think that’s fair. Look, it’s not all negative people like I tried to find the diamond amidst the shit sandwich.

Matt Watson 56:00
You know what? It kind of sounds like golf. You totally suck at it for 18 holes, but you had one good shot, it gives you a glimmer of hope.

Matt DeCoursey 56:10
You pretty much just described me as a golfer, like I’m looking at my scorecard shaking my head. You know, my dad’s almost 80 and has had like 100 heart surgeries and stuff like that. And he’s still beats me at golf. So I’ve kind of given up on that. Alright, so the next the next one, I’m going to take this because this is a one of my friends from college and life. Jeff Icelander who’s the CEO and founder of dynamic logistics, and they’re one of Kansas City’s fastest growing companies. He said, entre arch entrepreneurship. Matt, can you spell entrepreneurship?

Matt Watson 56:45
No, without looking?

Matt DeCoursey 56:46
No, no one can. It’s okay. No one can no one can say it either. Entrepreneurship is the hardest thing you can ever do in your life. And if you aren’t up if you aren’t up for that, keep working for the man. But if you are up for it, and you fight through it, it’s the greatest thing you could ever do in your career.

Matt Watson 57:03
I agree. I agree. Yes, absolutely.

Matt DeCoursey 57:07
Yeah. That’s from my buddy, Jeff. All right. Do you want the last one? Yeah. From one from one of our attorneys.

Matt Watson 57:14
Yeah. From Sheila sec. Remember, entrepreneurship is not a straight line. It’s a lumpy path. Fair? Yeah, absolutely. It’s,

Matt DeCoursey 57:24
Yeah, I talked about this in million dollar bedroom, because business school will teach you that aid. It’s A to B to C to D to E to F to G. And the reality is, is that along the way, C quit because it got in a fight with D and E didn’t deliver on time. So we had to jump forward to G and put it where C went and then C didn’t want to go to the back of the line. And then the real problem was somewhere along the way and your office, you didn’t know it F and B started fucking and then they broke up. And one of them quit because they didn’t want to work with them. And that’s that’s really how it goes. It’s never a linear path. It’s never really the way that it works. So Matt, we did save the good which is the shortest part in here. I think the look now, hey, if you make it through all these challenges and adversity, that’s why I do it, man. The challenges are part of the game but when you get it right Fuck yeah.

Matt Watson 58:24
It’s great to run your own company have that freedom to be in control, not have a boss, like all those things are great. But it’s not. You don’t do it for the money you do it because you enjoy being an entrepreneur, you enjoy solving problems you enjoy running a business. Money is the part that is about keeping is really the score. And you got to really focus more on the freedom and other benefits that come from being a business owner.

Matt DeCoursey 58:48
Yeah, yeah. And you know, then what you just laid out the on that self so that self fulfillment, yeah, it was. Many people are familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. And the fifth level is, is being self fulfilled. And the definition of self fulfillment is doing what you know or feel that you’re capable of doing. And, you know, it’s a hard it’s a hard category to arrive out. I’ve been in it. I’m on I’ve hovered back in and out of it. It does feel great. And it is a huge antidote for all the shit that the three C’s cause all the changes, challenges and chaos. And you know, when you are in that mode of self fulfillment, and you really feel like you’re getting it, it’s a beautiful feeling. And I think it’s worth all the crap that you go through along the way. I mean, another thing I think that is on the good side of expectation is, you know, for me, I take a lot of and I know you do too. Now I take a lot of pride and the jobs that we have created both locally and worldwide, as well as the opportunities like the you know, the folks that have been with us at Full Scale since day one. You know, we had one employee that was still that worked in our office, she just retired. Did you know that, you know, Miss test retired after 10 years? And my like, but Dude, she’s, she’s my age, what am I doing wrong? I want to. But you know, that’s someone that went from one business to another to the next one. And, you know, like, I take a lot of pride in the fact that she took a lot of pride in us and the changes and everything we did. So no man on the way out of this episode, once again, this is episode two of our 52 part series, you can tune in for a new installment every week, you can also go to Startup Hustle TV, find us on the YouTubes. And I love if you joined us on Facebook and the Startup Hustle chats really easy to find this, go to Facebook and type in search, go to the little search thing. And type in Startup Hustle. Matt, what’s your summary of this episode? What do you what do you want to say on the way out, buddy?

Matt Watson 1:01:05
Well, we’ve talked a lot about the negatives, and there are a lot of positives as well, it’s, you know, when you start a new company, it can be very exciting, and the trial and errors, the iteration of like, Oh, we found a new customer, and they want this and we can deliver it and they’re gonna pay us for it. And we’re trying to say we figured out we need to make some changes and like, oh, that can actually be a lot of fun and very exciting. And, but it can also be very stressful. And if you’ve got to raise money to do it, that’s really, really stressful. And it’s very frustrating because things don’t happen as fast as you want to and things you know, you have problems with business partners, or this or that or whatever. And the hardest part is you the hardest part is you said, Well, part of the funnest part can be the very beginning. But it also be the hardest, right? You get to a certain point or like you got through the hard part of the first two years or five years that things get a lot easier, which is kind of we’re stuck by that now. It’s a lot more fun once you get once you get started. But it’s it’s hard.

Matt DeCoursey 1:02:00
Yeah, I think overall. And like I said, we hit on a lot like our goal and our mission statement at Startup Hustle is to tell you the real truth. And I you know, I turned 46 this year, I’ve been an entrepreneur for a long time I’ve been in and around this life for a while. And I’m just I’m just laying it on your folks. Like I really want you to know what you’re getting into. Because if you don’t know, and you go down the rabbit hole? Well, I mean, I’ve seen a lot of people that lose their homes, they lose their credit, they go bankrupt, they do a lot of things because they jumped into something without having a realistic expectation about what to expect or what they were getting into. And the next episodes, we’re going to talk to you about some of the successful traits that Startup Hustle that startup Startup Hustle that startup founders have. We’re talking about some of the reasons that startups fail a whole lot of other stuff. And you know, as we progress through this mega series, and you know, I’m excited about this. I mean, that good. Good job, this good episode today, buddy. Yeah, good job, man. I’m proud of you. I just show up and talk Dude, I don’t do the hard work anymore. Which by the way, is it is an example of what happens when you get some things right. So big, big thanks. And shout out to our staff and the creative team for putting up with our shit for helping us get this out and deliver quality and for helping us create a TV show in which you can invariably see Matt Watson perform feats of athleticism, strength and mental acuity. The whole thing you do with the mind reading thing like how do you do that?

Matt Watson 1:03:40
It’s why they call me Master

Matt DeCoursey 1:03:43
is it? Is it I thought you won an award that said you were the master. True was that for mind reading it was. Okay. If you want to learn more and see Matt Watson actually read minds, head over to our YouTube channel. I’ll see you next time Matt.

Matt Watson 1:03:58
Thanks.