Welcome back to the startup therapy podcast. This is Ryan Rutan from Startups.com joined as always by my friend, the founder and CEO of Startups.com. Will Schroeder. Well, we recently did an episode pure heresy where we talked about just building a business that makes money and that's okay. We got some feedback from that and I think that one of the things that people latched on to was, well, like, but how much? You know, I've got a little bit of revenue, but like, it's not really
making money. Is it? So why don't we break that down? Because everybody's thinking big numbers. And I think that what we're going to do today is point out that actually relatively small numbers matter in this game. They do. And you know, it's interesting about that. I think when I was first started like build my first business, I pictured like it has to be doing millions in revenue to be meaningful, not because like my expectations were there. I just, that's what I heard that businesses do.
I just didn't know any better. And then all of a sudden, when I got my own business, I started to realize like the first thousand dollars that I make matters. Like it didn't sound like a lot. You don't make the cover of Forbes back then for doing that kind of revenue. But what I started to learn as we've talked to you know, hundreds of thousands of startups since then, it's that first
few thousand dollars. And today we're going to talk about a number around $10,000 that is actually the most important point of the evolution of every business and the $10,000 a bit arbitrary. And we'll talk about that. But that first milestone that keeps the business alive before it keeps us alive. That just keeps the business going month over month over month. It's kind of the most important milestone you ever get to from a revenue standpoint. 100% right? It's that there's zero to
one moments. You're so important in in starter plan, right? We go from not having anything to having something whether that's revenue, product, team, whatever it is. They're huge moments. They don't seem like it. Like when you look back or like you're comparing it to something else, it doesn't seem that significant. And it's funny that you said that about thinking it had to be millions and millions
of dollars. I had a very similar feeling. I didn't really have a number in mind. I just knew it needed to be big and bigger. The irony of that was, and I've told the store in the podcast before, you know, my first agency started as a result of a chance encounter that led to me making $500. And I was like, well, that's a meaningful amount of money for us for what was relatively a little bit of work. Let's do more of that. And yet somehow I went from $500 to be $50 million.
When, you know, overnight, it's like, well, now it's a business. So now it has to be big, right? Yeah. And here's where, you know, I want folks to understand folks that have been building businesses for a long time, you know, serial entrepreneurs that listen to this podcast, they're going to be not only long because they've been there, right? We've got the benefit of having gone through this whole gauntlet and understood exactly how important that moment was.
But this is really for the folks that are going through this for the first time. That are like, yeah, this thing's only doing like $2,000 in revenue, like, and feeling like maybe they're failing at something. And this is that pause moment, like, no, you understand. That first few thousand dollars is the business. It's the most important money you'll ever make. And ideally, a little bit more than that, right? But that first, I'm going to call it zero to $10,000
is where 90% of startups never get to. That's it. That's exactly it. I think that's missing in a lot of places, right? It's so hard because people start to measure against that relative scale of the companies that are doing billions or now, you know, there's companies hitting the trillion dollar market cap and people are comparing it to that. And they're like, but I have so far to go what they don't understand is that this is what Greece is the rails to allow you to get that far.
Right? And you had to get here first, right? Nobody started with $10,000,000 in revenue, right? They started with $2,000 in revenue or whatever it was. And this first dollar is in their so important. And to your point, the vast majority of companies never get to that. They don't get customer one in the door, right? And it's counter-tutored because you only look around it like your competition, you look around the other businesses that are doing well. Sure. For every one of
those, there are several hundred that didn't get to that point. And so I don't think that we can overemphasize how important it is just to get to that milestone. A dollar in tells you so much about a business because when you don't have that, it's also a very specific answer about your business. If you haven't got to remit at all. I had this survival instinct when I first got started in the business. And all the business had to do was allow me to survive. Again, my expectations were
insanely low. This is before getting hype up podcasts and Gary Veed into like, you know, grind economy and everything like it was just, you know, it'd be cool. And then this is my number. My number at 19 years old was $550. If my business could just generate $550, was exactly how much money I needed to live. To put that in perspective, my rent, which was by far my biggest expense, because I didn't own a car, was $250. You know, $5.00 rent,
so between me and my roommate, right? And then after that, like my electrical was like $28. I mean, insanely cheap, you know, cost of living at time. And all I ate were like craft macaroni and cheese, right? Like box macaroni and cheese or whatever. So that was like 25 cents a box. I was going to say, man, I remember I remember finding those $4 for a dollar ramen noodles. The ramen diet was a real thing. And I was perfectly okay with it. By the way, I was like, oh my God,
I can't eat better. I'm like, yeah, this is kind of just makes sense. It's what you eat. The price is right. Super easy to make. Right, right. But what I didn't, you know, I get, I wasn't far enough along my career yet. What I didn't understand was how valuable understanding that milestone and just getting there. And what we'll talk about today is actually even before that moment. So let's first lay out two critical milestones that we'll talk about kind of the progression.
The first milestone is how much do we need to make so that the business can exist even if we can't. Right. So what does that mean? Well, maybe we have a hosting bill. Maybe we spend a little bit money, money and ad words. Maybe we spend, you know, maybe we have a physical product. So the cost to maybe store the physical product, right? Baseline costs, which just say, even if we can't operate the business on a regular basis and get paid for it, the business itself won't go out of business.
It's a part of the adventure and part of the growth that a lot of first time founders don't understand. They just assume the first milestone is when sure the business can pay its bills, but it can pay me. No. That is the second milestone, right? First milestone is a business just stays alive. The second milestone, ideally, we stay alive with it. Yeah, I can go back in time. I guess if we adjust for inflation, that probably lands pretty close to that 10K number in terms of,
well, actually, that would have provided some business survival and some needs. Well, of course, it depends on type of business that you're building at the time, you know, my expenses, right? But the time my expenses were quite minimal. I was also at university. I was employing a bunch of people who were in university and so they were very inexpensive resources. Mostly because we were just a little time here and there, right? You know, I wasn't
paying fully loaded salaries and benefits. It was just, you know, we were there's scrapping it together, making it work. I'm going to struggle to remember the exact number. I could probably dig up the document somewhere, but it was somewhere around like 6,500 and we had hit this number in revenue for four months in a row on average, right? If I averaged out the last four months, and it came out to that, and I remember at that point thinking, okay, this is now amazingly
stacking up a little bit of cash in the company accounts. So there's a bit of a buffer there. We're more than covering the expenses and I can now afford to start actually paying my self-regular salary as opposed to a distribution here or there again, just to keep my lights on. So it was extremely meaningful, right? Like I remember looking at that and thinking like at that point, I did celebrate, I celebrated the hell out of that. I finally got to a point where like,
now I can see doing this on an ongoing basis. It took away, you know, that little man running out in front of me building more runway month by month just ahead of us and allowed me to say, like, look, I don't have to think about that part now. I can think about what that next mile, certainly next mile, so I'm going to click on it. And everybody's number is going to be different. In this episode, we're talking about, you know, $10,000
per month is that, you know, first milestone. Now your number may be totally different, maybe higher, maybe lower. But what we are talking about is the number at which the business can survive, even if we can't be running it at the time, okay? So first, let's just talk about why that number fluctuates or kind of, you know, what we're trying to optimize for because the milestone really
matters and understanding the value of the milestone really matters. So what we're talking about at a high level, we're saying, what's the absolute minimum the business needs just to keep running? Okay? So again, I would lump in things like depending on the business, your web hosting bill, right? Like your basic ad words budget or your marketing budget, if you have one, just to keep enough customers coming into generate revenue.
Yeah, I would say think of anything, anything that if you took it out, it would cripple the machine. Right? Like you can take the leather seats out of your car, right? You can do a lot of things, but if you take off two of the tires, you're done, right? That stops moving. So these are the kind of costs that we're talking about. These are things that are, if you were to remove any one of them, it would critically injure the business and impede it from being able to function at any
level. You bet. And I'm going to call those existential costs, right? This is the absolute minimum. By the way, even if the business isn't like doing anything, even the business is entirely coasting, which it probably will for a while. That's it. We're going to get to that later. This is enough to say that it's just not turned off. Okay? Now, my number has varied over the years depending on where I was and what my costs were and what the businesses cost were. Again,
every business is a little bit different. But I think over time across nine companies, I started to understand this concept so well that I would build a plan, like I go to market, just for this milestone. Now, what's cool about that is like it's way more achievable. Stick on this for a second, right? This is important. Well, this is super important because I think this is one of the things where you and I talk to lots of founders and we look at the financial
plans and do they ever reference that point clearly? No, no, no, no. They don't. They aim way beyond that. And I think the thing that's really, they don't understand this important. They don't understand it's important to have a plan specifically to build to that because what we do to get to a million in revenue might be something very, it will be something very different than what we need to get to 10,000. And so when you build your plan around that,
you're less likely to get to it. If you can focus on this milestone that we're talking about, your existential cost covered, then you can begin to write that second level of the plan. But it has to look very different. Right? What we do to take the beach looks very different than what we do to conquer the land. Absolutely. Absolutely. And we talked about two thresholds. One is the existential cost of the business, meaning the business can just operate. And of course,
the second milestone is then what's the existential cost of ourselves? Sure. Now many episodes, we've said that businesses don't go out of business until the founder goes out of business. Meaning like we literally can't afford to operate. We're kind of flipping that on its head
a little bit here. I just want you to understand the folks listening to understand. What we're saying is how can we set the business up as a standalone existential unit where it can operate even if we maybe need to go take a break and do something else like get a job or do some consulting for a while so we can come back to it. Okay? Because what I've learned, and this is what you're just getting at a moment ago, is that there's often lots of stuff along the way in the early phases
that essentially fund the existence of the entity that don't scale whatsoever. Most obvious, I'm literally working another job so that this business can exist. Right? Happens all the time. I have 90% of the time. You know what I mean? For sure. No, again, I think that goes back to, you know, and a lot of those things don't occur to people because they didn't plan for that. Right? The word that you mentioned was the one that I had in mind during this entire segment,
which was scale. Right? One of the things that we hear is people are spending lots of time, money, efforts, planning around things that will scale. You know, we want to make sure we have a scalable, this and the scalable that. I'm like, you know, why don't we just, you know, clear the fence before we're about scaling anything higher than that? That goes lost most of the time. And unfortunately, a big part of that comes from the funding narrative because they have to sell that big scaled
story. They start to believe it and they forget that look, in order to be around long enough to achieve funding, or do anything meaningful with it, I have to make sure that this thing can survive. Right? I think you and I both said this on the podcast, but perhaps the most important currency in a startup is time, right? Absolutely. Absolutely. Persevere. You're around long enough. Don't die. Better than you, right? Just keep swimming. Our early plans that we put together are all about
this most basic milestone. And I would argue, I don't care what you have to do to get there so long as you can get there. For example, when I was starting my first business, I was trying to get like, you know, a web design company, we were trying to get web design business, but nobody knew what the internet was at the time. A little bit hard to do. Turns out, how did I actually pay my bills while I was doing that? I was a receptionist at one of the largest law firms called Jones Day
Revisant Pogue. For like a year and a half, I was a receptionist to 150 attorneys, right? Now, here's the funny story. While I was doing that, like while I was sitting at the front desk of Jones Day's major law firm, greeting clients and doing whatever I had to do, I had my laptop in front of me. Which back then was very unusual. Like laptops were brand new, it's like 94. And I was writing HTML like while I was checking people in and building my web pages. Incidentally, Jones Day did my
legal work to start my first company. It was treated being incredibly well over the years. But whatever I had to do, that was my existential plan. I'm literally answering phones for a law firm while I'm trying to build a tech company. You can't get more disconnected than that. No, it isn't. And look, we talked about this in a couple of podcasts, I think, but it's a conversation I have with founders all the time had this come up yesterday in our getting customers workshop where somebody was
like, well, I'm just nowhere near being able to get a customer. And I've got like six months of personal runway, but I can't see revenue for the next 12 months. And I was like, well, then let's move those sliders. Like we either have to move up your runway. We have to move down getting a revenue. I said, well, there's just no way we won't have the product or you won't have this ready. I was like, well, you already have the expertise. I have so we started talking about a
service based proxy. Like let's go sell something else that leads into and feeds the product development. We talked about this couple of podcasts ago. And it just again, it doesn't occur to people because they're aimed at whatever that scale point there, just like you and I were thinking, this has to be $50 million. This has to be $25 million. This can't be $10,000. Well, it can't be $50 million without $10,000. Let's not let that go unsaid, right? We have to get there first.
And whatever we have to do to get to that existential stability is worth doing. You know, something that's really funny about everything we talk about here is that none of it is new. Everything you're dealing with right now has been done a thousand times before you, which means the answer already exists. You may just not know it, but that's okay. That's kind of what we're here to do. We talk about this stuff on the show, but we actually solve these problems
all day long at groups.startups.com. So if any of this sounds familiar, stop guessing about what to do. Let us just give you the answers to the test and be done with it. I always think of a video game analogy here. You know how at the beginning of every video game, you have nothing. They always put you in some perilous situation. Right now, I'm thinking, you know, one of my favorite games of all time fall out where you always exit the vault and you have
nothing but your vault jumpsuit and maybe a pistol or something like that. I have an empty knapsack and a screwdriver. Yeah, exactly. I have an empty knapsack. And then you always have to start with a melee weapon or something like that and kind of work your way up. Right. And it kind of, it's not pretty how you get there. Right. Like you're beating up like mutant dogs or something. It's not pretty how you get there. But all that matters is you survive long enough. Whatever the
mechanism is to be able to kind of build a base to level up from. Frankly, honestly, that's actually my favorite part of those games is like there's the ingenuity that comes with getting started. But you start up quote for your wall. I wake up every morning and I eat a mutant dog. That's my god. We're in today. But the same applies where in the formative stages kind of doesn't matter what we do. So long as we get through that survival stage to give us an opportunity to build for later.
Now what I fear is that most founders don't actually understand the cadence or progression of a startup from the outside. It looks something like this. It's relatively linear. It's relatively okay. Yeah. We have good months, bad months, but it's always kind of moving up into the right. That is not how startups work at all whatsoever. Full stop. And that's right there is where people break their planning. By the way, why would you know this? Right. But having been around you know,
a few hundred thousand of them. It's becoming fairly clear. It's pretty clear. It looks something like this. Right. Let's use our video game analogy. Okay. I exit the vault. And for those of you that don't understand fallout. It doesn't matter. Go play it. It's an important start-up lesson. Yeah. Yeah. I exit the vault. I go out into the wasteland. Right. I have nothing. I'm thinking,
well, I get this. Then I just keep leveling up, etc. Imagine it goes like this. You get out there, you encounter your first monster or whatever you get in front of and you get killed and you get sent back to the vault. Then you go out and you make it a little bit longer. Then you get killed and sent back to the vault. It's a bunch of starts and stops like hard stops and resets. Not just a bouncy progression to success. Every single time you get stomped out, you get the video game version of
killed, you have to start over again. Okay. Meaning we made revenue, we made revenue, made revenue, and then we came to a hard stop. We didn't make any revenue or we made minimal revenue. We couldn't pay people. We had to stop restart and start again. That's what building a startup looks like. Which means you got to make sure your home base, which is the startup survivability, can survive all of those restarts. Yeah. I think again, a lot of those restarts are caused by
aiming a little too high to begin with. I think if you were actually aiming at existential stability, instead of $50 million and hoping to trip across the line of existential stability, when it happens accidentally, I think it happens a lot later and I think it's a lot harder to achieve. If you aim for that specifically, if you're like, look, I don't need the Gatling gun. I just need to eat a mutant dog. Because it's just get to that point and do whatever we have to do. I think I'm always
pleasantly surprised when I come across something that's doing this. I have a funny example here in Guatemala where I called an Uber. Uber said, I'll be there in seven minutes. Sorry, do you have any suitcases or anything with you? I said, no. Okay, cool. It comes and picks me up. I started talking to her to you and it's asking what I did and started explaining to her. She's like, oh, that's really cool. It's like, well, so the reason I asked you if you had any suitcases
was I drive this Uber, but it's too full. It's keeping the lights on while I build my agrochemicals distribution business. And the reason I picked Uber was because I just drive where I need to take stuff and then hope to pick up a fair or hope that there's a fair that's going near where I need to drop stuff off. So this guy had a trunk full of agrochemicals, which I was a little like, super comfy with that. They're organic at least. That's not crash. I'm going to be dissolved by
some sort of horrible solvent. But I loved that, right? I loved it. He was like, look, I'm doing this and it's going to support me through this period. And I found even a way that like something is divergent is driving Uber sounds. He found a way to tie it to the business and make it beneficial. Wait, I loved that. It's just amazing. That was me being a receptionist of the law firm. I was like, hey, you don't necessarily buy a bunch of attorneys. Maybe they understand how to do an incorporation,
which back then was impossible to do. That's got $30,000 project. Oh my God, impossible and expensive is all hell. Yeah. Yeah. And I was like, oh, maybe they can help me with my contracts and stuff, which they did. Again, it wound up being an amazing relationship. Those guys were awesome. But it's interesting to me because in those early stages, I don't think folks understand that there will be multiple hard resets. In order to be able to survive those resets,
the business itself has to be able to survive. So let me be a little bit more specific as to what that will likely look like. So I'll use my own example. So I'm running Blue Diesel. This is again, the web company from way back the 90s. And I'm working at the Jones Day at the law firm, getting paid like $5 an hour if that, if you know, whatever minimum wage was back then in the days
of your just enough to keep the lights on. But I'm actually getting our first clients. Now, our first clients are not paying us anything like hundreds of dollars because no one understands what the internet is yet. Okay. We're ribs. We're ribs. Yeah. Also got paid in ribs. Will and I both got paid in food at one point. Yeah. I was perfectly okay with that. So I probably paid more in food than I did in actual cash at the time. That's okay. At some point,
at some point, we ran out of money, just used slow contracts coming in. And it's a people intensive business. So I had to pay salaries, which were all college gets the time. So it was fairly fungible. But I specifically remember this moment in some of the characters in the story, you actually know Ryan Damon. I remember sitting in our office. This is in the very early days of Blue Diesel. And there's all of us in the office. We had all of our desks that we had just bought
a few months ago from staples that we'd all assembled ourselves. We were so proud of these desks. Right. And I have to try to explain to the folks all in the room that we don't need money. Like, you know, we thought the contracts were going to come in. They didn't come in. I'm like, guys, I kind of can't pay you. And they're like, well, we can't exactly work for free because we're all just graduating and we actually have to pay bills. And I'm never
forget this is a side. But I thought it was hilarious. One of our programmers Joel said, you know, we just had money like a month ago, right? Where did it all go? And Damon was like, you're sitting at it and he was pointing at his desk. He was dead straight. Right. And he wasn't wrong. That actually is where the money went. That $400 went to your to buy your desk. But I had this thought at the time. And I thought, what if we just didn't shut down? We have no money, right? And I've
just clearly had no savings. What if we just didn't shut down? Like, we're going to have to evacuate this office because we can't afford this, right? We're going to do something with these $400 desks that we just said, you know, all our money on. I was like, what if we just go back to my campus apartment and we just work out of my apartment? Like, at that point, there's kind of no where else to go, but we'll still exist. And I just thought it was being desperate, which it was
just to be clear, right? I mean, it's zeroes of dollars. And I'd know where to go. There was no backstop. There's no home to go to. There's nothing, right? This was it. When I realized, we kind of moved back in my apartment. It wasn't exactly a glory moment, by the way. But what I realized was like, hey, if we just always have some backstop that we can, you know, reset back to whenever it kind of shit hits the fan, then we can kind of just not die, right? Yeah. It's the
safe point, man. What happens in the future? But in fact, almost to the day, Ryan, a year later, we would sign a quarter billion dollar contract. And if you just think about how like, how different those two moments, I'm more unbelievable, you know, out of a story. And how important the one was to achieving the other, right? Because there were lots of other decisions in the decision tree, right? You could have, you said there was nowhere else to go, but you could have just said, look,
I'm going to up my hours, the law firm, I'm going to do whatever I'm just going to quit. I'm going to go get a job and do whatever. So, you know, it is, it's that time that buys you so much, just to be around and to be able to get to that next moment, right? I'll we've talked about. There are also times where like, you're pushing that too far and it is time to pack up the tents and go home. But at these early stages, where there's very little, where there's truly very
little costs, and I mean that in a lot of different ways, you know, we're young. The operation of just keeping the lights on wasn't significant because you were going to keep those lights on anyways, because those were the lights that you, you woke up to and went to bed to, right? So you were living in that place. We did the same thing, by the way. No, we were, I actually didn't ever have an office kind of, we rented a larger apartment. It started in the apartment and we outgrew the apartments.
We just rented a larger university apartment, which by the way, I had a stipend from OSU at the time, and that was how we afforded the larger apartment without any risk because I wasn't using up the entire rent portion stipend. So I was like, hey, we can get another 500 square feet without any costs. And it was like, all right, cool. Move from one side of Neil Avenue to the other. That was as far as we
went, 1248 to 1249. Yeah. And so I think that at those points, like when you started to consider that, you know, like the cost of sticking around is a lot less than the cost of not sticking around, right? In your case, it was billions of dollars in future buildings that would happen through that company and through what that company grew into and became that otherwise would have gone away over what? $550. That's my point. That nuts. That's just absolutely nuts. At that moment,
I clearly had no idea how that things were going to go in the future. But at that moment, I was kind of like, what if we just do enough that we don't die, right? It's not that we think things are going to get great. But what if maybe, and this is, nobody thinks about this at the time, what if maybe this just isn't our year? Everybody's so meopic that they think, okay, this has to be the
year. Everything's going to happen this year. Look back in your life. How many times that everything happened in that year, once, maybe twice, if you're lucky, if you've crushed it at life, you've got one or two huge moments that were like career defining, etc. Now think of how hilarious it is. You're super certain that this one year where you happen to start a company is when everything is going to take off. We've been on for 12 years at startups.com alone. And every year, we try to make
it the big year. But if you look back in our history, we have plenty of years where we just co-stit or things didn't go, particularly well, right? That happens all the time. It does. The form of years though, you're still in the only year. That's it. When you have no other years to compare it to, when a year still sounds like a long time, like when we've been around for a year, we'll have been around for twice as long as we've already
been around. It's hard to look at that and go. We don't have to make this work right now. And I think, unfortunately, for as much as the change in available information has helped a lot of startup founders, right? Because you and I, we talked about this, we used to have to go to a library and pick up a book if they had subject to availability, right? Now there's all this information,
your fingertips. But there's also a lot of narrative that is sort of counter to the principles that we're talking about today, like things that make you feel like you need to go faster, you need to be bigger. You have to make more money. 10K is not enough. It has to be 100K, right? Like, why is my MRR? You know, and it's so funny. Just giving somebody the permission to feel okay about that is so, so valuable. This would have happened about a year ago.
It was earlier on in the kind of like when, you know, AI really started to hit the full public zeitgeist, right? So maybe a little over a year ago. And a young female founder was building a really cool tool that did some really fun Twitter automations and had gotten to like 1200 in MRR and was just like kind of crying about it, right? Not literally crying about it was just like, you know, I just, it's only 12 million. I was like, you know what? How many people are out there pushing tools right
now that haven't gotten anybody to pay them a single dollar? Like, $1200 is a big deal. It's $1200 more than you had before you had a dollar. It's a huge thing. And it's an indication that you're on the right path and moving the right direction. And she said, you know, it's amazing to hear about that. And it was like everything because I said it. And she said, well, actually, it's like, that's how I felt, but because everybody around me had all these other better bigger numbers. And everybody
else sort of told me like, oh, you know, don't worry about it. It'll get better. Nobody told me that's good enough for right now. It's like, but that is actually how I felt. But then I was taught not to feel that way. And I find that this is one of those really, really sad things about the kind of the information environment that we have now is that it sets the wrong expectations and the wrong trajectory for so many businesses. Yeah, I agree. I like that. You'll give this at a
personal level. A friend of mine told me a long, long, long time ago. He said, the moment you get $20,000 in your personal bank account, you'll feel richer than you'll ever feel again. I got it because I was broke time, right? That $20,000, you know, as I said, $20 billion. But that's exactly the point, right? Because it's such a stretch from where you are in that moment. And it brings so much of that base level existential stability, but that is the best you're going to feel. Everything from
there is just a little more racing on the cake. And what he said is with $20,000 in the bank, you are not invincible. By the way, it's nothing to do with investing off it or living off it. He said, it's the first time in your life that you can absorb a problem, right? Your car breaks down or something like that, where you're going to be okay on the other side of it. Up until that point, like up until as maybe like 22, I couldn't absorb $100 problem. And I'm not even exaggerating. I
mean, I didn't have an extra $100 or any idea where I would get that kind of money. Should that problem arise? And of course, the problem is right. Like all the time, I mean, I just kept getting more broke, which is hard to get out of that cycle. But for startups, that first $5,000, $10,000 that allows the business to kind of absorb some of those hits while you're still figuring shit out. That's me going back to law firm. Like, hey, do you guys got any more of this receptionist
business? It's like this web design thing isn't working out so well right now, right? And I got to tell you, at the time, and this replies to a lot of folks now, I would have been ashamed about that. I would have said, oh man, I failed as a founder. Now I have to go back to this job that I don't really want, etc. I feel very differently about it now. Don't keep me wrong. It's not
awesome. It's not your plan A, okay? But what I will say is the founders that get it, either instinctually Ryan, instinctually where they're just like, I guess this just kind of makes sense, which is kind of where I was. Or intellectually or experientially they've been there. They're like, yeah, you know what? Sometimes you take steps back, right? It would be cool if that weren't the case. It'd be cool if we only took steps forward, right? I didn't have this
business work. Yeah, I don't think I've seen when it was built that way though. That'll be the exception that proves the rule for sure. That's the other funny thing. It's like this is the consistent thing. Like I always joke wherever founder thinks that they've got this unique story, right? Where they've come from nothing and built it up. And it's the most common. Yeah, so until they talk to literally three other founders and you're like, wow, three out of four
of us have exactly the same story. Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of commonalities in the past. Yeah, we're all still flakes too. We're all building something a little bit different in our own way. And yet, you know, the macro level of the story, you zoom out a little bit and bore the lens, they look a lot alike. They do. And I think the common thread with all of them, this is really what we want to drive home the most, right? We're going to drive home the most is this isn't a business
about just prosperity. It's about living long enough to have that prosperity. The live long and prosper concept means first live long. Step one, don't die, right? First live long, whatever you have to do, whatever you have to do to keep this thing alive, keep it alive. Even if you have to do a full 360, you come, you come out of it, you come back to it, etc. That's perfectly okay.
The key is keep it alive. And so that first $10,000, $5,000, whatever your minimum number is, just to keep this thing alive is the most important money you will ever make and ever keep consistent, because it allows you to get to that point some way down the road where you can prosper. So in addition to all the stuff related to founder groups, you've also got full access to everything on startups.com. That includes all of our education tracks, which will be funding,
customer acquisition, even how to manage your monthly finances. There's so much stuff in there. All of our software, including BizPlan, for putting together detailed business plans and financials, launch rock for attracting really customers, and of course, fundable for attracting investment capital. When you log into the startups.com site, you'll find all of these resources available.