SNM038: Are You A Startup?

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is your new business a startup, and you even wanted to be on today's episode. Today's episode is brought to you by CEO Pro Lap, the company that I trust to keep serving a master at the top of Google to save 10%. Use the coupon code. Serve no master a checkout. Go to serve. No master dot com Backslash CEO today. Are you tired of dealing with your boss? Do you feel underpaid and underappreciated? If you want to make it online, fire your boss and start living your retirement dreams now then you've come to the right place. Welcome to serve no master podcast where you learn how to open new revenue streams and make money while you sleep. Presented live from a tropical island in the South Pacific by best selling author Jonathan Green. Now here's your host where I live on this tropical island. I always go inside my house and kick out my girlfriend, the kids and everyone so I can quietly record in my studio, have a big bay window. But you know it's not always enough. One of the things I dreamed about when I first decided I wanted to move to a tropical island. I decided that I wanted to live outside as much as possible. I wanted to have the experience, and when I first envisioned myself starting a podcast a year ago, one of my ideas one of my big ideas was, What if I could go around the island, be outside while record my episodes My initial recording setup. I had an external microphone, and it just wasn't possible because there's so much background noise and win. And everywhere you go around here, there's someone hammering or using a soft. But right now it's Sunday. It's perfect out. I'm totally by myself. I can't see another person. Now. You might be able to hear the ocean in the background about 500 meters in front of me. There are some waves breaking, so there's a light rumble. I wanted to give the people that had it. My podcast, a little bit of a challenge. Take him to the next level. So this is a special episode. It's really a test for me to see if I can record outside and get a good enough sound that it's still enjoyable experience for you. The lister. That's kind of my hope I'm standing in the water right now up to my ankles. I have my notebook in my hand with my notes, and I'm really excited to talk about today's episode and think about what it means to be a startup. Many people I meet, they don't really know the difference. And it's very confusing in our society because you are starting a business. So what exactly does it mean to be a startup? One of the temptations? We watch these amazing programs that I watch them all the time. But getting investments and growing your business and all of those really fun TV shows is the only shows I like right out. Financial TV shows. You see these people starting a business. They haven't sold anything. They just have an idea, and their company's valued it millions of dollars. Very recently, one of those companies that was valued at a $1,000,000,000 they call it a unicorn. It's a company that's worth a $1,000,000,000 hasn't made a dollar, hasn't sold anything, was just devalued, and now it's worth zero. It turns out their idea, their technology didn't work at all. There was this blood testing company called Farrah knows. It turned out they were buying other people's blood testing supplies and using other people's technology pretending it was their own. They said they had an amazing thing. You could plug it in your iPhone, put a drop of blood on it that would test for every disease you could think of. They faked all the results. The woman who owns the company is now banned from being anywhere near the health care industry. For two years, people thought it was worth a $1,000,000,000. That's the startup industry. When you go into the idea of a startup, when you begin that type of business, you know, going in through Day one that you're gonna have to raise funding. That's a start up. The majority of startups fail. People get loaned millions of dollars, given millions of dollars for large pieces of the company, and it goes nowhere. Every once in a while, though, there's a big payoff, and that's where these investing cos these angel investors make their money. They get one hit out of every 10. They're unbelievably wealthy, and that's what they're targeting. It's very tempting to want to go into that world, just like being a rock star. One day you have no money, and the next day you have millions of dollars. You have all this financial freedom, but you're selling a huge amount of your business, a huge amount of your time and a huge amount of your freedom. You know that I'm a big believer in starting your business and funding it through profit, not debt. One of my friends raised $18 million to start a company the company grew, and eventually the board of directors fired him from his own company. This happens a lot more often than you think. You start a company, you give up a little piece, a little piece of little piece and suddenly only control 40%. The other people can get together and vote you out. You don't have a job anymore. They can get rid of you. You give up control, and it's a very scary place to be in. It usually starts with a very expensive idea. These days, most startups are built around APS. I see so many APS to do the same thing, competing to do the exact same thing over and over and over again, and it's a really tough industry to get into. And if that's the path you want to go down, I'll be honest with you. You're listening to the wrong podcast. There are some great podcasts for that type of started for that type of business. But in my experience, most of these businesses are all built around the people living in Silicon Valley, and they live in their own little world, where everyone is super technological. People use their APS every day to do everything. They rarely interact with other humans, and they have this whole insulated culture that's very different from the rest of America and unbelievably different from the rest of the world. They're so caught up and their little bubble that they often come up with products and solutions to problems that no one else has. No one else has to deal with these problems and you get caught up in this entire trap. So when you're thinking about how to build your first business, when you're deciding whether or not you want to become a start of whether you want to go to that pat, think about what it means to play that investor game and to work somewhere and start a business where the business can fire you. Right now, I'm the only person that works for serve No master. I own 100% of the stock and everyone else who works for me does contract work, a part time work. I haven't given up any level of control now. The difference is high risk, high reward. You may notice I'm doing a little walking. That's because a boat just showed up. Of course, I'm trying to record. People never give you perfect opportunity. So hopefully you can still hear me nicely. Some birds in the background and again, this is just a test to see if I can record outside. And I'm learning that when I'm on a beach with thousands thousands of meters of emptiness, people still parked the boat right in front of me. Playing the investor game is hard. Could you give up more and more control? You have to keep performing for people. There are. Service is now that will teach you how to do a presentation to investors. Their service is now that provide legal service is specifically for people that are out there trying to raise money. You raise a $1,000,000 you spend $100,000 of it just paying for your lawyers for your special bank fees. For all of these other costs, you give up control for nothing 10% of the control you give away. It's for money. You don't get to keep her using the business. There are more and more businesses now that cater only to Silicon Valley startups, and they're caught up in this incestuous financial loop that, personally, I don't want to be part of. I don't like giving up control of my companies. I have gone down this path before. I have dealt with investor money before, and it didn't end well. I wish I had never gone down that route with one of my previous businesses. I learned a lot. You could make a lot of money, and you could grow really fast. Ever looked at a few those examples, like Instagram or some of those other companies that raised a couple $1,000,000 sold for $100 million a year later, one in a 1,000,000 chance with those businesses. Most important thing about this type of business about becoming a startup is you're completely and totally dependent upon having a really amazing coder on your team. Your software is everything, and if your software's not proprietary, someone else can copy it, replicated and put you out of business very, very quickly. You're trapped in this loop where you work 18 hours a day, 20 hours a day. Sleep under your desk trying to start a company trying to build something, and you really slave away. It's a path designed for a certain type of person, but it's not a good path for someone who has Children or wants to continue having a life, someone who wants to maintain control of their destiny. The system. I believe in the self starter system. This serve no master concept is about maintaining control of your business, building something slow that lasts for a very long time. The majority of these technological businesses come and go very fast. The idea when you start a business when you start a startup when you build this type of business is to start it quickly and sell within two years and get out basically the value the company goes up, people buy it. Then everyone realizes it's a piece of garbage, right now, Yeah, Who's going through a massive acquisition? Yahoo is actually worth negative money. The only reason yeah, whose value is not negative is because they own stock in Ali Baba. Without that stock, without owning a percentage of another company, Yahoo would be worth negative money. Every single person operating Yahoo is losing money for that company. Why? Because they invest massive amounts of money in purchasing stupid ideas. They spent something run a $1,000,000,000 to buy Tumbler, a blogger platform that's only used by people with no money and has no revenue structure. Nobody uses Tumblr. It doesn't make any money. And there's no built in ad structure. Most of the people who use Tumbler are teenagers. They don't have spendable cash. So they built a platform, a blogging platform, the targets people. They don't have any money to spend running ads. And Tumbler wouldn't make you any money. Anyways. They spend a $1,000,000,000 now it's valued at something Around 10% of that. All you do is pass on something worthless. Now, if your desire is to make really fast money, cell two years of your life and play high stakes game of poker the start of game might be for you, but that's not what I'm all about. That's not what I want to teach him. That's not what's important to me. I'm much more about lifestyle, of happiness and enjoying the journey as well. At the end, we want to develop a long term plan that would take care of you and your Children for years and years into the future. We don't want to build a business that depends upon your exit before it collapses before it falls apart before it becomes worthless. That's the key to finding your financial success. My methodology. My system is very simple. Go through my free material and make enough money to buy the first of my courses. Once you make your 1st $100 online from my free material, then and only then, do I want you to invest anything in a paid course. Unlike everyone else out there, making these massive promises and promising that you make millions. If you just invested $1000 before have any what you're doing. I'm not interested in that. I really like working with people that put in the effort that are trigger pullers that crossed the finish line by using my free material, writing a couple of block posts and making that 1st $100 You demonstrate to me and you to both of us that you're someone who takes action that you understand. My system works and you get a feel for what it's like to make money online. You get that first feel. It's so simple. It's so easy. That's how we build our relationship. And once you go to that $100 course, use the money you make from that course to make $1000 getting more advanced with what you're doing and then invest in a more expense. Of course, I want you to make money. I don't want to buy stuff from me. It's not necessary for me. My business structure is very strong, and it's getting very, very good. This is the smallest presence I have online. Serving a master is my passion project because they really want to get people to say my I have right now. I'm standing on the beach looking a paradise. Yes, that boat pulled up next to me, but I'm not. I walked about 50 meters down the beach, maybe heard my footsteps I don't know. Maybe you can hear the waves in the background or a little bit of wind. I'm doing my best to put my back to the wind, but it keeps shifting direction. This is the life for me. This is the life that allows amazing opportunity, and I want you to have the same type of life. This is something I believe in every time one of my interns quits, it starts her own business and becomes massively successful. One of time. One of my interns leaves behind their full time day job and begins to work for themselves. Has enough money to support their family and start having Children. It fills me with pride and joy. That's what I want to create in this universe. That's what I want to give to you. I love that experience, and that's why I moved beyond just having interns and bien, creating more and more free training, more more courses to help people, just like you take control of your destiny. When you go down the path of a startup, you're often trapped, betting on a single idea forever. It takes 12 14 16 hour days. For years you're gonna start up off the ground to raise the investor funds to go through all of those testing phases where you find out if people even like your idea after you put in years of effort, all of that work, all of that effort and you're trapped in a single idea. The great thing about my system and the great thing about building this type of business where you start small and build as you're ready is you can easily and quickly pivot. You can easily shift directions as needed. I pivoted my business seven or eight times over the last six years as markets shift. As certain things become too difficult or change the way they operate, I move in another direction. For a long time, my entire business, my main source of income, was structured around local consulting. And, as you know, I do teach about that. Still, I teach you howto build that type of business. That's how I made my first big money online. But when I wanted to move, I left behind. I don't want to answer the phone to clients anymore. I very rarely do private coaching anymore. Only every once in a while and usually because I'm trying to capture data and see what my clients are going through to expand the direction my business is going in to kind of make sure that I'm teaching the right material, that I'm connecting with people like you. But entering phone calls of clients wondering why their sights up a point or down a point playing those games? I don't want to do that anymore. I don't want to be in a client facing business, but if you're living somewhere local, it's an amazing business to be in. I pivoted because I wanted to move and change the direction of my business. There are many ways to make money online, and there are many ways beyond what I'll teach you. Throughout my courses and throughout my podcast episodes, I'm not expert in every single way. What I will teach you are the ways that have worked for me and show you exactly what I'm doing. Show exactly how developed a powerful and strong business. If you want to go down the startup hat, if you just want to raise a bunch of money and sell massive control of your company, if you want someone else to affect your destiny. If you want to go down that path and you're listening to the wrong podcast as much as I love having you here, I don't wanna waste your time. This isn't a podcast about startups. It's not something I believe in. What I believe in is generating passive revenue streams that allow you to travel the world full time. Take care of your kids, never go into the office. Live your dreams. Live in paradise just like Ideo. How many people get to stand on a tropical island feet in the water and record their podcast episode? Not very many. If you follow my path, you will discover your own path to freedom and thank you for listening today. Special episode Hopefully, the sound comes out really nice. I've got the micro in right next to my face. I tested settings for last two weeks to make sure everything was perfect, but I do appreciate you spending a little extra time with me while I test out a new piece of technology. I do love recording outside, and if this goes off well, I promise you I'll be doing a lot more outdoor recordings because it's really a slice of paradise out here. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of Serve No, Master. Make sure you subscribe, so you never miss another episode. We'll be back tomorrow with more tips and tactics on how to escape that rat race hit over to serve no master dot com forward slash podcasts Now for your chance to win a free coffee of Jonathan's bestseller Serve No, master. All you have to do is leave a five star review of this podcast. See you tomorrow. You've just listened to another amazing episode of the serve. No master podcast. Make sure to subscribe, and we're back tomorrow with another amazing episode.