Welcome back to the episode of the Startup Therapy Podcast. This is Ryan Rutan, joined as always by my friend, the founder and CEO of Startups.com. Will Schroeder? Will one of those age-old questions that founders ask themselves over and over, often too late, is am I building the right product? How do I know am I building the right product? Is this is this thing going to work at any level? You know, I think what's funny about that is,
we all assume we know. It's like having a kid and like, did I build the right kid? Maybe. He'll know at some point. Yeah, yeah, maybe. Probably not. And so, when we think about how to build product, it was what we'll talk about here is like, how do I understand them from me even on the right path? We tend to be asking the wrong questions. We'd love to know if we're on the right path, but we're assuming that we can know. And I think that's where the
breakdown starts. Nearly every startup we work with is in some form of like this iterative stage. Right? They're in the early, early stages from I just had the idea nine seconds ago to, you know, I'm trying to get my series A series B funding and I'm trying to scale the product. Either way, they're still wondering my builds in the right product. And the truth is,
you probably won't know for like what three to five years, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Lots of feedback, lots of iterations, lots of questions and lots of lots of variables turning it into something a little bit more like constants, but it is a laborious process to be sure. I don't think we understand that. In other words, I think, I think when we think about, you know, how to start up some work, et cetera, I think we think I have genius idea right out of the gates, right? I have
genius idea. I then take said genius idea. I start a company and I just build that product, you know, whatever that was. Yeah. And that sounds awesome. That sounds fantastic, except it sort of doesn't work that way. Does not work at all. Yeah. No, no, it never tells you this. That's all it's going to say, right? Like no one ever tells you that that's not how it works. Oh, why?
Well, think otherwise. Yeah, because that's what that's what seems obvious, right? So what you end up doing, you have this idea in your mind, and then you set out to begin building it, and you try to build the best version of that idea based on what you know about that idea, which is what you know is pretty close to jack shit at that point, right? Early stage, but you're still you're going to keep pushing and trying to iterate and make the best version of
that product, which is often absolutely the wrong product. And we have to be okay with that. I think that's the other thing that we should recognize is that that first idea that you had came out of nowhere, and it has about that much detail to it, right? Which is very, very little. And we have to be okay with the idea that this is just the roughest version of this thing.
And maybe maybe not even a version of this thing, right? How often if you and I come with product ideas that by the time it actually hits the market, look nothing like the original idea, often like maybe not even the same form factor, right? So it's fine to be flexible. It's not only fine, it's how it has to go, right? Because if we just continue to force whatever that early idea was, and it's not what the market wants, hello, the reason that 90-something
percent of startups fail right there, right? It's just persistence down the wrong path. Well, let's talk about it initially out of the gates. We've got an idea. We've been working on an idea for a while. And we want to be able to get that idea out there and we want to share it with people and find out if they think it's a good idea. Exactly. Here's where we messed that up. First thing we do, I've got a cool idea. I talk to my friends, hey, would you guys think this is
a cool idea? They're my friends, right? Who else would you talk to? And your friends say yes, sounds like a really cool idea, right? Next, I go to a potential investors and I say, hey, would you guys fund something like this? Hey, that's a really good idea. Now so far, everyone's told it's a good idea. We talked to a couple of advisors and they think it's a cool idea. It's a good idea. We nailed it. The one person we forgot to ask is the customer.
So, new actually is going to buy this. And because of that, we end up down this path where we think that we have a good idea. And again, often, particularly for startups or founders, new ideas and novel ideas, we associate with good ideas. Hey, no one's thought of this. And there's a reason. Yeah, no one's thought of this. So I think the first place we should triangulate is maybe white customers or the people we should be asking to begin with, you know? Yeah, 100%.
We have to be careful because even when we get to that step, right? And a lot of founders will have talked to customers. But then they'll ask them questions that don't help at all. Like, would you use this product, right? Instead of digging in understanding what problems do you have that are in the space of this product? Right? And so because here's the reality, your friends are going to lie to you because they like you. They want you to hear, you know, they want to support
you, right? Investors are going to look at it. Yeah, it's a good enough idea. They're also not putting money down right then at that point because it's just an idea. So yeah, okay, that's some legs. Maybe customers still will lie to you, not because they intend to. Because how could they possibly know? You're asking them to predict the future. How good are you at
predicting the future? I'm awful at predicting the future, right? I'm not even that good at reminding myself what I had for lunch yesterday, let alone figuring out what's going to happen in the future. So anytime we're asking these forward-looking questions, and would you use this or my favorite, like, would you pay for this? Like, who's going to say no? Right? Or maybe they'll say no. But no matter what they say, the chances of them actually being right are so low at that point
because there's no information. So don't ask questions like that. This is one of these things that keep finding myself seeing over and over and over again to founders. And I'm sure I've said in the podcast, but I'm going to say it again, which is don't fall in love with your product idea. Don't fall in love with the product. Don't fall in love with any of that. Fall in love with the people you want to help fall in love with the population. You stole that from Tony Robbins.
If did I fall in love with your product, fall in love with your customer? Really? You know it's funny. I've listened to so little Tony Robbins. I just find him to be like an intimidating character. He's too large for me. He's just a massive human. I'm just like, I just feel insignificant small and want to run away. I don't want to learn from him. I had from him. So well, I'm glad he said it. That means a lot of people have heard this. So here's me saying it again. Fall in love with
the people you want to help, right? Yeah. No, no. All good, man. I agree. Super nerdy. Super nerdy about their problems. And this is where our product needs to flow from. Let's stick with that. When founders come to us and they say, Hey, is this a good idea? Our retort is going to be our people paying for it. If the answer is no, then it's not a good idea. Now, will it become a good idea? Sure, maybe, right? But really, the validation that we're looking for is paying customers. I've never
seen a person say, I have so many paying customers. Is this a good product idea? Right? Right. You guys think this is a good idea? I'm getting so confused by all of the dollars flowing into my bank account. I can't tell this is a good idea or not. Yeah. I don't think I've heard that one yet. That has happened never. Now, don't get me wrong. You can ask all the right questions. You can survey customers. You can do all things. And just like you're saying, everyone can give you green
lights. Here's what I would say it. Pawsing there. If I had the choice between a product where I've done no validation and some validation, I'll take the one with some validation. Now they can both fail validation, you know, early feedback doesn't guarantee that it's going to work. No, no, not at all. But no feedback. Right. Serling increases our odds there. I guess it's a good idea. Yeah. That's that's that's a recipe for disaster. But I think what we kind of map back to is the
customer, the paying customer. And maybe your model doesn't require payment. Maybe it's usage, ads, things like that. Whatever your version of how you monetize is, the paying customer is the opinion that matters. Even if we build a product that we think is awesome, right? And we'll go through Google Glass, New Coke, Segway, all of the famous ideas that in test groups tested incredibly well, inventors created these amazing things. But when they brought them to the people who actually
are supposed to use them, they were like, this doesn't make any sense. I would add all of crypto. It's everywhere all the time where we don't ask the people at the end of the chain, the people that matter, whether they would pay for it. That's how we know we're building a good product. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And again, like you want to start with the problems and work outward from there. Right? If you're not solving a problem, guess what? I can predict how many people are going
to pay you from right now. And I'll be very accurate with this. If you're not solving a problem, no one's going to pay you. Right? So this is this is we have to like you know, digging in, asking the right questions, getting the right feedback and ensuring that there is some validation.
Again, like the problem exists, right? That people actually want to solve it. The worst thing in the world that I come across in our environment is a founder who has gone so far down a path with a product hiding in their basement on their engineering bench, just building away. And then they then they're like, okay, it's done. Now I have to show someone else. Come on, right? And then now they're running around. And the rhetoric is always about the same.
You know, once people understand what it does, like people just don't understand yet or I haven't found the right population yet. I'm like, well, this is why we start with the population. This is what we start with the people who actually need it and then build from there, not build and then go find out who actually wants this thing. But it's it happens so frequently. And it comes from a lot of places, right? Some of it comes from I had this idea, but I don't know if it's good. So I
want to keep iterating on it working on it until I believe that it's really good. And then I'll show it to strangers, right? I don't want to I don't want to find out that my baby's ugly. The best time to find out your baby's ugly is the minute it's born. You want to know then that way you can work on it because unlike babies, you can make them as beautiful as they need to be to suit the market as long as you're talking to the market, right? I agree. Well, okay, let's let's play this out,
though. You and I lived this firsthand. So for folks listening at home, Ryan and I when we launched fundable in 2012, it was one of the first crowdfunding equity crowdfunding marketplaces. Okay? Awesome. At the time crowdfunding was all the rage Kickstarter was like every headline that year, right? Like everything was a Kickstarter. It was crazy. Everything was a Kickstarter. And we're like, oh my God, well, if Kickstarter is going to work, then equity crowdfunding will be 10x bigger than
that because these are bigger checks, etc. Okay. So we immediately made all the cardinal mistakes right out of the gates. The stake number one, we fell in love with the product. We said equity crowdfunding sounds cool. Therefore, everyone's going to want it. Couple things we forgot to ask as did the entire crowdfunding industry. Okay? Question number one, hey, investors, are you looking for more things to invest in? Really highly suspect products that probably no one will get involved with.
Oh, you're not. Well, here's a largely unwashed deal flow. Would you like some really unfiltered deal flow with very little objective evidence around the products or traction or anything? Was that what you were looking for? No, right. Right. Right. Surprise. And so just think of how big of a man, it's hilarious to even repeat this now. But at the time, it actually didn't occur to us in a
meaningful way. The second one was, hey, startups, you have a really good idea. When you look for investors, is it the case that these really good ideas can't find any investors turns out not really? Yes, there's tons of startups that need money. So that part made sense. Oh my God, so many more startups will get checks. But then we kind of forgot to ask some other questions. Hey, why aren't those guys already getting checks? Us creating this vehicle called equity crowdfunding didn't magically
create more fundable companies, nor did it create more investors, nor more checks. No, both were pretty important assumptions that we forgot to ask. It redirected some of the investment a little bit, right? That part of that tiny part of the thesis, which wasn't really useful to very many people, did prove out to be true, right? People who otherwise might not have gotten checks got to check because they were visible in that case, but they were really strong companies. They would have
otherwise gotten a check. But again, didn't create net new checks. It was a zero sum game that meant someone else didn't get that check. Yeah. I mean, the expectation was, right? Again, the expectation without actually going and talking to any of them was that everybody's well healed on to their dentist, their lawyer, all of these people who had previously been unable to invest in startup companies have been locked out of this market that they desperately wanted into. Now here we were
opening the gates for them. Well, we opened the gates and exactly nobody walked through the gates. I'm really glad that we went through that journey. That's actually what got us to be what startups.com is today, which we're going to talk about next. But I really want to point out that for as obvious as it might have been a time, if it was 2012 and you were in this era and you were building an equity crowdfunding marketplace, which by the way, like 30 other companies did the exact same,
we did it on the same day. We were not alone. We weren't alone in this thought. By the way, remember what that did for us? There was idea validation. We're not the only ones building something. This must be a good idea. Right? Again, who did we ask competitors, people who were chasing the same thing we were chasing customers, not so much. That's what I'm saying before. The top of the episode, I said, Hey, you're talking to your friends, you're talking to investors, you're talking
to all the people that aren't the people that are going to write the check. Right? So we kind of gloss over all of these really important assumptions. And if we were to zoom back and say, Hey, guys, you're building up the right products, you just said, absolutely, yes. All the market signals tell us, we're building exactly the right product. Cool. Then why aren't there multi-billion dollar crowdfunding
companies? Because no one gave a shit. And again, we're saying this as the guys who own this company, right? Fundable still around, right? We're trying to explain that even in the right context, where it all seems to make sense and you know what you're doing, not asking the right questions, the right people. Is it a disaster? Asking the right questions of the wrong people, also a disaster, asking the wrong questions, the wrong people clearly a disaster, but we got false
positive feedback on this market and ran with it. We learned a valuable lesson, and I think we're better off for it. Here's what I would say. When we realized pretty quickly on it, probably not even 18 months in that the crowdfunding business that we saw probably wasn't going to be the crowdfunding business that we wanted it to be. We were also, we did a good job listening. And we said, wait a minute,
when people come to us, these founders, a lot of them can't fundraise. Why? Why are they unprepared? And we started to ask those questions and all of this always starts like good product discovery, product validation comes with questions. And I think what we did a good job of Ryan, whether we intended to or not was we started to ask some of these questions. We drilled down. We didn't get so worked up was like, why can't everything be solved with this one tool?
We started to say, why do these problems exist to begin with? Why don't founders know how to put together a pitch deck or business planner or anything else like that? And once we started digging further and we got way less attached to fundable or to equity crowdfunding. And we said, let's just go find the problem. And the problem wound up becoming millions of founders start every year and none of them know what they're doing. It's not their fault. There are many of you are listening, saying the
same thing or all doing it for the first time. Why would you understand any of this? And that became a problem we're solving because we just listened more to the problem, not so much to our solution. Yeah. Again, fell in love with the population. I mean, that was that was obvious for us from the beginning. We knew we wanted to help founders. We believed that what we wanted to help them with was fundraising. And we do and we do help people with fundraising. But it was not
the it wasn't the solution to the biggest part of the problem, right? To your point, as we started to dig in and spend time with them and really communicate with and understand where these problems came from, a whole bunch of stuff surfaced, right? And that's that's what's become startups.com that we see today. The other thing that was really interesting was in finding out, you know, we were
trying to solve a problem that to some degree was was a bit of a phantom, right? In the sense that yes, there were all of these founders that said, I need funding, I need funding, I need funding. But when we would do a deep dive on these these folks with their with them and their businesses, we'd find out that like there were fundamental reasons that one, they didn't need funding, two, they weren't going to get funding at least yet. And that three funding wouldn't have been
the right approach for them to build and grow the business at that point anyways, right? So, but to your point, it's millions of founders starting every year who don't know what to go and do. And that was the actual problem. So in absence of something better to do, they looked at the headlines and were like, guess I go raise funds. I guess that's what happens next. I guess this is the logical progression, right? The incas dried up my cocktail napkin idea time to go raise money. Probably not.
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 think this did give us a very different outlook on how we build products. And I think this will be useful to a lot of the folks listening. We started to think about all of our product ideas, not even just in building the product, but Ryan, when you and I talk about marketing, right? When we talk about strategy as a whole, really every aspect of our business,
we start with what I call just raw clay. And the way I use this this this metaphor is, I want you to think in terms of, yes, this raw clay will become something beautiful. Some object of art. But right now at its formative stages, it's just raw clay, right? I think we try to start not with raw clay, but we try to start with the final product. And the reality is we will never be in a more disadvantaged position than when we first start
to build the final product. It's only with time. Do we understand what the product should even be? So I think what we've done well for ourselves, and certainly helping other founders, is to start off with just saying, let's ask questions. Let's ask lots and lots of questions. Let's run lots and lots of tests. Let's not get mired in it, right? Let's also eventually, you know, put our feet to the ground and go run. But let's make sure to be before we head in a
direction that we're we've got some semblance that we should have. And Ryan, you know, I've talked about this on earlier episodes. Part of what's prevented us from getting ahead of ourselves is we're bootstrapped. We can't. We don't just have tons and tons of money that we don't know what to do with that we can just throw out a problem and see if it maybe works, right? That's the venture funded mentality. We actually have to test a little bit, test a little bit, test a little bit,
and have it back out. You know what I mean? Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think that we approach everything with an MVP mentality. Like you said, it's not just the business. It's not just, you know, that macro level. Sure, we did that. But down to the micro level, right? Where we're thinking about, like, okay, do we need another, do we need another member on the engineering team? Do we
not remember on the sales team? Do we need to launch a new marketing initiative? Every one of those things comes with some version of testing and validation around whether that's the thing we need to go do now, right? And I think that this is a really healthy mentality to adopt. Whether you're venture funded or bootstrapped, right? If you're bootstrapped, you don't really have a choice. This is your mentality because there isn't dry powder to just go see, hey, let's throw a billion dollars of
the product and find out if it works, right? Most companies don't have that luxury. Not even sure I would call it a luxury, at least a lot of bad decision making. So yeah, the MVP mentality is super, super important. And I think that really, you know, your raw clay analogy is great. And I think that one of the things we have to be really careful of here is that the MVP isn't just an early product, right? This is where I see a lot of folks get this. Good point. Yeah.
And I'm in it on this. The MVP is a process whereby we ask questions and get answers. Now, sometimes those, those questions come in the form of a prototype, right? And we want to see reactions to it. Sometimes those questions are literally just questions. How are you solving this problem now? Right? What are you doing? Where are you struggling in this in this process that we want to somehow impact to the point where like, you know, it needs to just be a series of tests.
And right, it may never cobble together into anything that even resembles your product. But answers all of the questions that we would need to understand what a product like this even be worth building. But typically what I see is that people will will claim an MVP, but what they've really done is they just kind of build a beta version of the product. And that isn't really an MVP process in place. They're like, well, this is the sort of the least we could do and have
it look kind of like our product. And now we're going to see what happens. That's better than building the full version, but it's still not really an MVP to the point where I've started calling it the mm VP, the mm mm MVP, the much more minimum, minimum viable product because this is what we really need to go and do, right? So that we can start to answer these questions one at a time in isolation and figure out, is this worth constructing in its entirety? Because so many people just jump in
to our point at the very top of the episode. Here's my idea. Now I'm just going to keep building some version of this until it's the best version of this that can exist with anybody wants it or not. Right? It sounds like a terrible idea, doesn't it? Well, it happens, right? Like all the time. I think with what we've adopted as more of a let's test it and see mentality, everything I only got to you guys take leaps, right?
A few years back, we launched our founder group product, which is a eight person cohort that was designed to get founders, people talked to each other and share stuff. And we launched that a lot of people don't remember this or know this. We launched that as an in person product that was going to be in every major city in March of 2020. I think like the day they announced COVID and no one can never leave their house. We announced it in person meeting product. So our timing
was awesome. But we basically shelved it, you know, because it wasn't our main part of our business. It was an experiment. We shelved it. Now here's what here's where it got interesting. A bunch of the early founders that we had signed up, you know, to beta the product when COVID hit after a month or so, they reached out and they're like, hey, can we still do those meetings? Like, because I'm kind of bored and I'm at home, like I'd love to talk to other founders.
And I was like, well, no, because you know, we kind of shelved it. Like, well, what if we did it over Zoom? Now here's what's interesting. I didn't think it would work over Zoom. My fallacy, okay, to be fair, I just didn't think it would work. But we tried it. Okay, let's give it a shot. See what happens. And all of a sudden, people started to really connect. Something else interesting happened when it was an in-person product, you could only connect people that were physically close
to you. Right? So we were severely limited by who could be in your group or et cetera. All we can do is conduct better parochial networks. We can't change the parochial nature of it. And then because COVID forced us to test the different model, it turned out that model was 10 times more effective and we scaled way faster. Then we got into it. We're building these groups and the groups were meeting. And we started to notice that when people went to the meetings, about half
of them wanted to sit and talk and like shoot the shit with their other founders. But the other were coming there with a very specific problem that the people in the room couldn't necessarily help with. Right? Say for funding, for example, if I was trying to raise money, I was trying to do like my my seed round. And the other founders maybe a few of them raised some money, et cetera. But they weren't like funding experts. They were just people who had done some of it. I was in a
bind. I came there to get help. And nobody in that room could help. And so we were listening. We sat in those meetings. We said, you know, wouldn't it make sense if we just gave you like one of our advisors that you could just go to for stuff like this? And they could explain to you how fundraising works and how pitch decks work and things like that. And now that wound up being wildly successful without sitting in the same room. Well, actually, okay, let's take it a step
further. Then as we're doing that as we're doing helping people funding and pitch decks and things like that, you and I are on office hours with countless founders and all of a sudden, we're like, you know, we keep saying the same thing over and over and over and over. Wouldn't it be a cool idea to turn everything we keep saying into video series and courses and things like that. So we launched
that in that lines up being wildly successful. Point is we started off even just a few other few years ago doing in-person business where founders were going to bullshit with each other. Now we have a massive course library, right? That came from that was never part of the initial idea. But because we just sat back and said, tell us what you need. We'll go build it. This is what the population of interest needs and wants. But let's go back to the MVP process here.
What we didn't do was hear them say, we need help with all these things. We're like, okay, let's go off into a black hole. We're going to lock ourselves in the lab and we are going to build a massive course library. We did not do that. We launched one. We had pitch deck perfection and that was it, right? And we and that was just as that was a series of just a couple of videos with no visuals, nothing backing up, super basic. Let's get that in front of a couple hundred people and see
what happens. Okay, cool. They liked that. Here's how we can iterate. Here's how we can make this better. But it wasn't something where we just sat down and we're like, let's invest tons of time, tons of money, tons of resources at the distraction of anything else we could possibly doing and see if anybody wants this, right? We did not take that approach. Actually, that is not true, Ryan. I took exactly that approach when I wrote by hand a hundred
thousand words for all of those same courses as blog posts. There was that. Yeah, that may or may not have been ill-advised. That was also five, six years ago, right? That was that was, yeah. So what ended up happening was I ended up basically thinking, this is five years ago, long before Founder Groups, that we needed lots of content on our site on the startups.com site to cover funding, pitch decks, business plans, equity, everything, right? So I basically
chugged endless five-hour energy for like, what, like 18 months? It was a long time. It wrote the equivalent words wise of three full-size business books in that time, right? Right. Volumes of content that no one ever read. Why? Gee, well, why? Because maybe no one was looking to answer their question of how do I get funding
by reading a 40,000 page or 40,000 word blog post that you read about it. In the irony was, I took all that same content, repurposed it for what became our video lessons, etc. But some valuable things. Number one, did we have an active audience that we were going to hand it to when I was done? Not really. Number two, did they want a 40,000 word blog post? Whoa, what a shock, no! Right? I mean, I basically just instinctively overlooked all the things that I should have been
asking, right? Simply because I didn't ask the questions. I didn't ask the customer. I said, how would you like this? They would have said, sure videos. Cool. 40,000 word blog posts got it. You got it. I'm on it. I'll see you in 18 months. Oh, geez. Yeah, but it's so hard. I mean, we get caught up in this, I think as founders, one of our core traits is that we're problem solvers and we're builders and we're doers.
And so we forget sometimes the should I question and we get caught up in the can I, like, could I write 40,000 words on startup finance? I think I could. Let's find out. I'm going to go and do it, right? Whether asking, should I write 40,000 words on startup finance? According to what my audience wants, if you're looking to kill time, it was a great exercise. Look, we've managed to repurpose it. But yeah, it's one of those mistakes. It's easily
enough made. And in our case, look, we had enough other stuff going on. It didn't hurt us. But when you see stuff like this happen at the early stage of a product where this isn't a mature company, where this isn't a large team where that type of distraction could have meant the difference between survival and not survival, it's a really, really important distinction. Right. It taught me a lesson, man. I mean, I'm so gun shy now whenever I go down into these
rabbit holes, right? Like I'm just finishing up a course now on building an MVP, which is appropriate for what we're doing right now. Yes. And every time I finish another part of the course, I'm like, man, I don't want to record one more lesson unless I'm sure someone's going to read this or watch this, whatever, because I realized like what a giant colossal mistake it was to run down a path without asking anybody whether I should have. Now, let me say this, though.
Sometimes you do all the right things. You ask all the right questions. You follow everything we just said to the letter and your product still sucks. Or at least you perceive it. Like my company's not working. What do I do then? Well, a few things that I think are really important for us to cover.
Number one, sometimes it actually is a good product that no one's ever seen. I would argue that the startups.com product is a phenomenal product that only 10% of the world has seen versus, and I'm sure being our CMO, you'd feel the same way. But that's a big part, right? You're assuming that because we built it, we also had the distribution to support it. And I don't think it's always true. No, no, no, it's not. That's the thing. The best product in the world when it's kept a secret,
still secret. And so these are one of those things that we have to be mindful of. Is the product not working simply because lack of distribution or something else? There's all kinds of market forces that come into play that even if we have done everything right, that it still may not work, or it still may be struggling to catch it's stride or whatever. But very few products that were not well conceived didn't come from asking the right questions. And we're just thrown together.
You saw their day in the sun and then somehow magically worked as just a crap product, right? That that part never happens. Well, you know, it's funny. Our viewers and listeners right now are consuming a product right now, our startup therapy podcast that reminded me of hilariously mocked for as a wonderful product that not nearly enough people know about. More consistently than any other like compliment that we get is your podcast is awesome. I can't believe no one knows about it.
Yes, we're trying to keep it a secret. This is unintentional exclusivity folks basking it, right? Yeah, yeah, you are among a very few who get to hear all that we do here. Revol in that. It's hilarious to me because it's on the one hand is the greatest compliment on the other thing. It's like our greatest fear, right? Is that we build something that no one knows about?
So if we were to stop doing the podcast having forbid in both of our listeners would get turned away, I think we'd be in a position where like we're all of a sudden we'd be like, okay, damn, like did the podcast not work because we did something wrong with the podcast because we have a lot of really passionate listeners or was it because we just didn't reach enough people and I would argue it would be the latter. You know, if we ever came to that decision, I'd say not the products
felt right. Like we said what we wanted to say we definitely aligned with what was going on in our in our audience's head, but yeah, not enough people knew about it. So I think that's a very real outcome of right product wrong audience or no audience. No audience. Yeah, we're just, we're, you know, right products, right audience, but lack of distribution into that audience, right? So we've clearly hit our audience audience, knows who they are and we know who they are. It's how you
reach more and more of those. Yeah, one of these funny, those backhanded compliments. Like I love your podcast so much. I've binge listened to all 230 episodes in three weeks of which I'm like, is there even enough to like what speeder you listen to us on because I cannot imagine listening to us on anything more than like maybe 1.25 because we both already talk kind of fast. So that's a lot of time.
But then the follow up to that will be I binge listened to every one of your episodes and I'm talking about it nonstop and none of my friends have heard of you. I was like there it was. There it is. There's the second part of that. I knew it was coming. Yeah, perfect. So, so okay, let me give you another scenario. I actually have a great idea, but it's at the wrong time. Now it's somehow at the time, it's always hard to tell that it's at the wrong time. But I'll give you an example of that.
Years ago and I mentioned this on the pod before that I built a Ford it.com with Ellie. And we're doing by now pay later, right? Also known as a firm in today's language. A firm. Clarna, you know, like you name it, right? Multi-billion dollar companies doing exactly what we were doing. And we were doing it exactly at the wrong time. Right? Now look, it happens at the time you can't tell the difference. The world wasn't ready for what we were doing just yet. And frankly,
we weren't a good enough player to last long enough to make it. Right? So again, I'm not just blaming bad timing. That's our fault for not making the products to stay in. The timing definitely didn't help. At a point where people were literally defaulting on their mortgages left in, right? The idea of selling them consumer products. It's like maybe not. Yeah, right. We're launching a high-interest consumer-facing product at the height of the mortgage crisis in 2007. Not an awesome time.
Not seeing that product, right? No different than we were just saying about founders launching it at the onset of COVID. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? Like sometimes you hit the market timing just right. And sometimes you do not. Now that said, sometimes that just means we've got to shelve it for a minute. However we can. And we bring it back at the right time. That's okay too. But let's talk about the third one, which is, no, this was just the wrong product. This was the wrong product at the wrong
time for the wrong audience. Okay? And I wouldn't say fundable was that. It was just the best thing I, you know, I can use as an example. You use that experience to find out what else you could be building. Right? Now sometimes what you should be building has nothing to do with what you're building. Oh, it's a pivot, right? Yeah, because sometimes you make the wrong bet. When I think back to, I mentioned, you know, my old business partner, Jamie, who started Ring,
prior to that, he started something called the Power Pot, right? And it was just this giant battery essentially that you could take around with you. He ran it on Kickstarter. He did a bunch of things. He made a little bit of cash out of it. But at the end of the day, he was like, dude, that's just, it's not the right product, right? And then he did a bunch of pivots that eventually became Ring. Now that said, when we look at what we're doing and we find that we just got a stinker.
Like we just picked the wrong product, the wrong market, whatever. Yeah, then we drop it and we move on to the next thing. But I think there's a lot of, a lot of cases where founders assume they've gotten to that point when they haven't exploited the entire market. I mean, a positive way, like find out, found all their customers, right? Where they haven't shaped the product enough. They were so stuck on one version of the product, Brian, that they weren't willing to say,
well, maybe we should be building something else for this customer. What do you think? Like, I think not asking those questions is more dangerous than anything. 100% it is. This is why I'm going to go back to falling in love with that population. Because then you don't feel stuck. You don't feel like, oh, this is the end. You just start to understand what they actually need. So my, my process is typically, if I'm, I'm talking to a founder, or I'm thinking
of my own ideas, it's who benefits from, who benefits from this most? Who am I talking about helping? Here it is. It's a product for founders. It's a product for parents. It's a product for, you know, front end developers for B2B SaaS companies. Who is it for? How much do I care about helping them? How much do you care about helping them if I'm talking to another founder? And then it's, you know, well, you know, I don't know. I just think this is a good idea. I'm just, okay,
let's, there's red flag number one. If you don't really care about who you're helping, then you are putting yourself into the do or die category with this particular product, right? Because you're not going to care enough to want to help them with anything else. It's just like, I had this idea. Let's see if it works. So for me, I just go from the idea and I say, who really benefits from this? And then, okay, cool. Now let's dig in and see, do they actually
have the precursor or tangential problems that would indicate they need what I want to do? And this is where, you know, we just start talking to them and we just start getting that feedback. The thing that I've really loved about we've been able to do over the last, you know, 12 years is, we fell in love with founders. We knew this was a population we wanted to help. And so we never felt like we were at this like, okay, well, crowdfunding for equity is not going to work. I guess
we'll go do something entirely different. I guess we can't help founders, right? That's it. No shortage of challenges, no shortage of problems. And because we love helping founders, we just get to keep reinventing and rethinking and reimagining how it is that we do that over time. Right? Like it took us, you know, almost 10 years to conceive the founder group piece. And now I
can't imagine not having it. Right? But this is how it goes. This is that iterative process where unless you intentionally pick something where it's like so myopic and so product focused that if it works, it works, if it doesn't, it doesn't, you have infinite flexibility, right? We can help founders in any way that we want to. You can help whoever your population of interest is in any way that they
actually need. And that's kind of the point, right? I agree. I agree. I think look, for most of us, we're builders, we want to build stuff. So when we have an idea, we want to go out for it and build. And that's the fun part. I get it. But we've said this a few times in this episode. It's not so much a matter of can we build something? Yeah, you can probably build it. It's should we build something.
And I think when we look back at all, all the shots on gold that we've had, whether it's at startups.com or in our previous careers, et cetera, are probably most common problem or challenge that that we've run into is we got so caught up in wanting to build something. We didn't stop ourselves and say, what's the right questions we should be asking? And I think for any of the folks listening for founders and builders like ourselves, we shouldn't be in the business of building. We should be
the business of asking questions because the questions will inform what we built. But if we get in the habit of just asking questions and thinking in that mentality, we don't lose because no matter how many times the market changes our customer changes, et cetera, we're always using the same script, which is what should I be doing? What should I be doing? And that allows us to build a perfect product every time. 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.