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Why you shouldn’t give up on an idea just because it’s being done – with Joshua Parkinson

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Master Class:
How to pick the RIGHT idea
(Because a great idea isn’t enough)
Taught by Sarah Thrift of Insight

Master Class: Picking the Right Idea


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Andrew: This session here today is for the person who has way too many ideas for businesses, products, whatever, and needs to find a way to narrow them. Is that you? If it is, this is going to be perfect for you. The session today is going to be led by Sarah Thrift. She is the CEO and founder of Insight, a consultancy and training company that helps organizations be better. They partner with them. They work with them. They help them improve.I’ll be here to help facilitate. My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy where proven founders like Sarah teach. Sarah, it’s good to have you here.Sarah: Great to be here. Thank you.Andrew: I want to show people the problem that we’re here to solve. The problem is that a great idea isn’t enough. In fact, you told me about a business that tried to work with this organization. What’s this organization?

Sarah: So this is the National Health Service in the UK. The National Health Service provide all public healthcare in the UK, and they’re actually the second largest employer in the world after the Chinese Army.

Andrew: Wow. All right. So then there were telling me about an entrepreneur that tried to do what with them

Sarah: So one of the big problems has been cleanliness in hospitals and a bug called MRSA. And this was causing hundreds of death a year that could be prevented. It was causing a lot of heartache and also a lot of political problems. And so this entrepreneur, her background was as a nurse, and she came up with a protocol. It was a very simple protocol for the way, a protocol to wash hands in a certain way with a certain product that significantly reduced the chances of the bug being passed on.

Andrew: Yep.

Sarah: She had tons of scientific evidence proven. It was proven. I think she had done it already in Dubai. It was proven evidence.

Andrew: And that means great idea proven, will save lives, going to sell to an organization that had lots of money and lots of people. How much money did this entrepreneur make? What kind of killing did she create?

Sarah: Nothing.

Andrew: Nothing. Okay.

Sarah: In fact, she lost money.

Andrew: And that’s exactly the kind of thing we’re trying to avoid that it is not just about picking an idea, it’s about picking it in the right way. And we’re going to help people do it. I want to give people a small taste of what it’s like when it’s done right.

And here’s another entrepreneur that you told me about earlier.

Sarah: Right.

Andrew: What are some of the ideas that he could have picked? In fact, what’s the business, and then what are some of the ideas that he had for products?

Sarah: So this business is the Chocolution. It’s a raw chocolate business. So this is Kieran and his other co-founder, Jake. They both lived in South America. They’d fallen in love with raw chocolate and also saw the big market sort of three, four years ago to come with natural raw products. And so they started to import the ingredients and create their own raw chocolate.

And they were very creative with flavors, very exotic lavender chocolate, all sorts of different types of chocolate. It ranges from these very pure three or four ingredients, no sugar, just some agave nectar.

Andrew: Yep, and I could see a business like that were starting to plateau or were looking for a way to get to the next level. I could see them saying, “You know what? Let’s pick another kind of flavor. What are people into right now? Are they into acai berries? Let’s do that.

Sarah: Exactly.

Andrew: Are they into pomegranate? That’s going to be our next answer. And so he had lots of different options. Which flavor ended up being the big winner for him?

Sarah: None really. Not only that they did flavors, but they also did different shapes. And they were like, “Maybe we need to make the shapes a bit different. So they invested in all sorts of molds.

Andrew: Yes.

Sarah: The individually created for their business to create different shapes of chocolates to make them innovative.

Andrew: Shape wasn’t the answer. Numbers didn’t end up being the answer.

Sarah: Shape wasn’t the answer.

Andrew: Today what did the answer become, and we’ll talk about later on the process. But it was the answer.

Sarah: Right. The answer was to sell a raw chocolate making kit.

Andrew: That allowed other people to make their own finished chocolate to eat and enjoy and share.

Sarah: Exactly.

Andrew: And as a result of that, do you know how well the business did?

Sarah: The business did much, much better. They’ve done tons, not only did they sell loads of these kits but I think they’ve done, I think, 4,000 workshops where they think people to make chocolate. And so you can buy different kits, some with just the ingredients but also some with molds.

Andrew: Yeah.

Sarah: And so you can create your own. It makes a beautiful gift for people.

Andrew: Perfect. And the reason I wanted to talk about that at the beginning was to show that when you have a lot of options sometimes those aren’t even enough. And what we’re going to talk here today is how to not just pick within your collection of ideas floating through your head, but how to pick the right one and understand that sometimes it comes from outside the pool of ideas that you’re currently thinking about. And I invited Sarah here to do it because that’s what she does. She goes into organizations. She helps them do it, and I asked her for what are the steps that you, and I when we’re wrestling with a collection of ideas, what are the steps we can go through, and here is what she said to me. The first one, I kind of rephrase this. I hope it’s okay. Is to talk to people, and do some research. You told me before we stared about this organization, and how they did it.

Sarah: Absolutely. This is Zippers. They are a fashion company based in here in the San Francisco Bay area.

Andrew: Okay.

Sarah: Their two founders, who have a great passion, and experience in fashion. They have an idea that they wanted to create something really striking, something innovative. They talked about transforming dress shirt using zippers, and putting magnets on the sleeves for the cuffs.

Andrew: Okay.

Sarah: They really, in the beginning we’re talking about it this big dreams. If I look, and I’m really blunt about this website I feel I’m looking at the front cover of a (inaudible) novel. I don’t really know what they’re selling me. I think if I read in the detail. There’s a shirt down at the bottom, but I have to really look. Great dream, but what are you selling to me?

Andrew: Yeah. I get that. In fact I’m looking at the site right now. I’ll leave it up for another moment. It says clothing for mankind. I can understand it makes clothing. Maybe through the name Zippers I might assume that what they’re doing is creating zippers for zipper companies that are clothing mankind. That’s not it at all.

Sarah: No.

Andrew: You talk to me about how the first thing that they did was they went out, and talked to people. You said, you would show it to individual people. How would they do it, and why is showing to individual people important?

Sarah: How they would do it is they did it first of all with friends. They said, try this shirt on. Watch me do it. They also went to a set of fashion shows, and did fashion stores. They went into stores, and actually demoed the product.

Andrew: Okay.

Sarah: Both wearing it themselves, and had products of different colors on display. People could try them on, and see how it felt.

Andrew: Okay.

Sarah: The reason this is really important is certainly in my experience is that people want to tell you what they think it is. It’s not always what people tell you. It’s what they do that you should watch for.

Andrew: Okay.

Sarah: That’s really important because people will say, oh, yeah, yeah. I really like your shirt. Watch them put it on. What’s their body language? What works? What doesn’t? Then ask your questions from there. Not necessarily from what they tell you.

Andrew: All right. You know what? I’ve actually heard that enough to know that that is the truth. That I need to do it, and at the same time I have to accept it, and actually do it because it is intimidating when you’re starting out. I imagine here’s my first interview, giving to somebody, and saying, hey, will you watch it? Is so scary. Frankly, just putting it out online, and letting strangers do it without me watching was scary. Can’t imagine.

All right, but you’re saying they took it out. I also pushed before we started, and I said, all right. You show it to a handful of people. You get to watch. Is that enough, and you said, all right. No. It’s not enough. What else do we do? What’s the other part?

Sarah: At the same time for nearly every business you need to look at the market size. What size is this market? You got anecdotal evidence that starts to build from people face to face where you might do Survey Monkey to get data. Then, you also want to look at the market size, the competitors. Understand is there really an opportunity? Is there growth in this market? Is there a way to take share in the market?

Andrew: Okay. Most of the people who are watching, in fact, I’m going to say all the people who are watching are not going to be in the zipper industry.

Sarah: Right.

Andrew: Maybe a handful of them are in the clothing industry. I want to go deeper in here just to learn how it could be done there, and then we’ll bring the ideas back to our tech companies. Where do you get research that shows you how many people want clothing that have zippers, but not regular zippers, and unique zippers. It’s so easy to say everybody is a potential customer. The market is infinite. Perfect. What kind of research are you talking about?

Sarah: You want to look at research for the clothing industry as a start. In this case the main thing is shirts. What’s the market? Is it growing? Is it not? What’s the needs?

Andrew: Okay.

Sarah: Get data on it. First of all, you ideally want to be in a growing market. You also want to look at trends. What’s been happening? That’s what you would want to look at because if you can get a growing market then your chances of success are already better.

Andrew: I see. Of course, growing market. It’s to see how much money is being spent, again, in this case, clothing in general, or is it more innovative clothing, or is it more clothing for runners, or clothing for athletes?

Sarah: In this instance it’s, actually, it’s clothing, and then it’s both innovative clothing, but also, business clothing. Because the big idea here is it’s a dress shirt with a twist, and it can be worn to work. You want to look at that, and say, well, what’s the trend? How much is that needed. Because something that crosses the line that’s, sort of, semi-formal, but also fun at that same time.

Andrew: Gotcha. Okay. All right. Where many that I’ve talked to will say, “Talk to customers.” Put it in their hands. You’re saying, “Yes, absolutely do it” but think beyond it and do some research to see how big this market is. Are there other people like your friends or like the people who you’ve shown it to? Great.

Sarah: Exactly.

Andrew: Let’s go back to . . .

Sarah: And also things like fashion bloggers. Look at what they’re saying and what they’re promoting, like something we also did was like talk to them. Would they promote this product? Because that’s a big line specific in the fashion industry. If someone will promote your product and they’ve got a million readers, then that’s going to do something big for you. So send them the product. Do they like it?

Andrew: You know, that’s an interesting idea. I think that when I started doing a course on how to do interviews, I did it because a lot of people were emailing me about interviews. And I said, “Would you want this? And they said, “Yes”. And I said, “All right. Fine. Will you pay for it?” and they said, “Yes”. So I felt I had my proof, but now I’m realizing that was my proof within a small pool of people. Maybe it’s the hundred people who I happen to know are the full market. Maybe there’s a bigger market. I didn’t even think to look beyond it. I just said, “There must be something here because people are coming to me.”

You’re saying, “That’s enough.” I mean, that’s not enough. That’s a good first half. The second half, Andrew, what you would have advised to do is look and see if this is going to appeal to bloggers. How many bloggers are out there? How big is that market? Is this going to appeal to software developers? How big is that market of software developers who need content for their site that the two matched together will give us a really big picture in understanding of how our potential is. All right.

Sarah: Exactly.

Andrew: I will move on then to the next big point which is to get them all out there and narrow them down by them. What we mean are the ideas. I think you’re actually doing this from your notes. I like this too much. I had to go back into Google and bring it back.

Sarah: Okay. Yeah.

Andrew: This is something we could relate to because it’s in our heads, but very few people put it up on a wall. What are we looking it here?

Sarah: We are looking at ideas, all ideas put on paper. So essentially the common thing I see . . . Often an organization has tons of ideas. It’s not a shortage of ideas that’s the problem.

Andrew: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: It’s like for which idea and someone was like, “Can’t we do all of them?” Well, no. Actually you can’t. I struggled to find examples where people can see multiple ideas that worked. But it’s really important to go through the phase of articulating all of the ideas first because people want to hear them.

Andrew: I’m sorry to interrupt. Why . . . By the way, I get so much feedback on the fact that I interrupt so much, both negative and positive. I apologize to people who are negative. I say, “Hey, hoorah” to the people who are positive about it, but. All right. Why is it important to put it up on a board like this instead of understanding, “Hey, you know what? I have a lot of great ideas that . . .”

The two that maybe stand out today are and then listing those or speaking them out loud. Why do we have to have them up here? Why is that such an important part of the process?

Sarah: Well, two reasons. One, it sort of makes them real, the fact that you have to write them down. It sort of crystallizes them and articulates them like, “This is specifically what I mean.” If there’s vagueness in the idea, it sort of forces them to come clean. So that’s the first thing.

And secondly often people assume that, Andrew, I think you’ve got this idea about this, but actually I don’t really understand your idea. I just assume I do. And I assume you like my ideas better.

Andrew: I see.

Sarah: And so it needs to be heard and like exposed and taken in. And so there’s something in the process of seeing it and verbalizing it that’s really important set for people to acknowledge and heard but also for others to really take on the idea. I was just facilitating a leadership meeting two days ago, and what was really clear that when we got into it, we had done a Survey Monkey of the leadership team in advance.

Two big ideas, one was geographical expansion, this is the education sector. And the other was expansion of services. We had 48% voting for one and 52 for the other. Sounds like a diametric split.

Andrew: Yes.

Sarah: What are we going to do? We can’t do either one. What happened is when I got people to explain what do you mean by expansion of services, everyone had a different view of what that meant. And actually they weren’t really that far apart when we got through it, but it took a few hours of articulating what this means. And actually mapping out, “Here’s the full spectrum of services we could offer.”

This is what we did today. Are we saying we’re going right to here? Actually no one is saying that. People were saying it. Let’s say we’re going from here to here, and then, in fact, we’re already beta testing this. So are we staying stop? Oh no, but I thought you meant we’re going over here because we just talked about that question should we expand our services. Well, that wasn’t specific enough for people to understand what it meant.

And also the other thing we often involve an idea in our head. So even for ourselves, even if you’re on your own, I still do this myself because I realize getting myself to write it down gets me to be clearer.

Andrew: What a great example of how even within an organization where it seems that half of the organization agrees on one idea. When we really dig in deep, we realize that they don’t. I had a similar situation here internally at Mixergy where I hired a developer who happens to be my brother. We are on the same wavelength. In fact our voices sound alike. I said “Michael, we need to be able to allow the audience to add media; to add an image to each of their messages on the message board” and he said “Great. I can do it”. He went out and he put it together and he came back in and what he did was attach the image as a file underneath. I meant no.

The image should be in line so the people can include the image and write underneath it. Small distinction but because we didn’t clarify it, it was confusing and I can understand that when you’re starting out in business or frankly when you have a team of people and you are trying to figure out what product to focus on, that kind of confusion, when there is nothing there becomes even bigger. Actually, I took that screen shot or the photo that you sent over and then the next step is in this photo that you sent.

Sarah: Right.

Andrew: It’s not enough to just put them all up on that board like we saw a moment ago. You want us to do this. What is this?

Sarah: This is prioritization and this happens in one of two ways. The first is either you take the ideas and as a group so in the example I was just giving the actual prioritization happened quite naturally as we talked more and we had quite a bit of information and data amongst the leadership team to prioritize. So in that way we picked out, in this case, three ideas to take forward but you certainly don’t want more than three ideas typically. Sometimes you just want one to really focus on.

Andrew: Okay.

Sarah: Other times you don’t necessarily know so you say “Okay. This is what I think of the likely three. Now let me go and do some work to test that”. So that comes back to some of the things we talked about earlier in terms of okay, go and talk to customers. Talk to suppliers. Go and do some further research and then come back and say “Is this the right thing” and be ready to be wrong. So go in like “I think these are our two best ideas but let’s go and see and maybe we’ll be wrong. The important thing is you don’t lose the other ideas we had on the other bit of paper. You keep those because you might want to come back to those but what you are trying to do is to choose where do you think you are most likely to when at this point and you take those.

Andrew: The company that you talked about earlier, what happened to them? No. It might be too early in their story because you were just working with them. Right?

Sarah: I was just working with them. But what was great is they commented they had been stuck for 3 years with this question and they hadn’t been able to resolve it and actually this meant ‘Oh, we thought we all disagreed but we don’t really’. What we managed to do is we said “Okay. We are back to the spectrum of services”. What we’re saying is what we’re going to do is we are going to limit the spend the X K and then from there we are going to do the other idea which is geographic expansion. So in this case it was actually all possible but the language had sort of made things almost acrimonious because it felt like there was a big slip.

Andrew: Okay. All right. I should say that we are intentionally not saying the names of some of the organizations that you worked with. Internally you are friends with them. [??] works and sits right here at the office.

Sarah: Right.

Andrew: So she knows you. She knows the companies that you work with and we also understand that you promised them that you wouldn’t talk about their business in public so these are stories that we checked out but that we can’t say specifically the company names. All right. On to the big board here. The next big thing that you want us to do is align or waste time. You did this mysterious thing that we’ll understand in a moment with an organization that was working in education.

Sarah: Yes.

Andrew: What did you do there? Again, another company that we won’t mention the name but what did you do there?

Sarah: So actually here was this plethora of ideas. Like a sea of ideas and what we did there was to actually go through and work out who was aligned to what. So I went and pulled that sheet first of all on the alignment point. Alignment is not the same as agreement.

Andrew: Okay.

Sarah: I think if you want to all get consensus [??] then get agreement then the risk is you dilute some of your ideas.

Andrew: Okay.

Sarah: That’s not what I mean by this. What I mean is that you can get the important stakeholders around the room or on the phone or whatever and get people behind an idea. Then you work through that to go okay. Maybe that wouldn’t be my 100% choice but I can align behind that. That’s what you need to get to because then you are moving in the same direction. What I see is really a waste of time and money and effort is where people are working on different things. Even if they sound fairly similar at one level you iterate that. When people are working on different things they are not focused on the same thing.

Andrew: I see.

Sarah: That no only gives mixed messages to [??] people but you’re not focusing all your effort where it could be and really we want this to work and we are going to focus on this and make it work.

Andrew: I see and so actually the education organization that I’m talking about it seems like is the company you mentioned earlier where they weren’t all aligned. Okay So. Even if . . .

Sarah: Exactly. Spin off for Example is [??]

Andrew: Got you. Oh, Sure . What else?

Sarah: Another example would be e-Commerce company , a very large e-Commerce company.

Andrew: Yes.

Sarah: And they were trying to grow their affiliate business, meaning the business they get through other sites online and they get business to them.

Andrew: I know this company. That’s a big part of their business. Yes.

Sarah: That’s a very big part of their business. And If you look at their market, the market is growing, they had not, they sort of recent time not really fulfilled their growth potential. There were lots of concerns internally about their business. What needs to happen? When I get involved the first, there was a sense of may be what to do, there is a lack of ideas. My first observation spending just a little bit of time with the team was they have tons of ideas. The promise that ideas have not been able to translate in to anything real. More than that no one understands these ideas, because they are too many. Like everyone is different things, there has been a switch-off. And because there has been no transaction to resolve it’s bit like Okay, senior leadership is focusing on something else.

Andrews: I see.

Sarah: And so the problem was they were stuck in these sea of ideas. And not able to translate in to results. The ideas don’t mean anything if it can’t translate in to financial impact or other results.

Andrew: Okay. When you try to get an organization to align, I have got a photo of you standing with an organization, I think I can show this. In fact No I can’t. If you put in the Google Docs, I am showing it. When you get in there, how do you get everybody tell lying right away? I mean, frankly, it is tough for two entrepreneurs to say we are going down this path together. I know this is not 100% what you wanted. It’s not 100% what I wanted. But this is the one this is the path that makes the most sense. Let’s do that. It’s hard to do that. It takes days if not weeks or months and sometimes it never happens. When you have a room for the people the way you have when you work with companies. How do you get them to all align so quickly?

Sarah: It’s a really good question. This and I am wondering how to put that in to words. Because it’s a sort of an alchemical question that happens. So essentially, First of all, it gets messy before it gets easier. So the main thing is that everyone feels they have been hurt. That’s why in this picture, this is an action shot , its actually from the education organized [??]. And you can see the flip chart on the wall like and our main discussion I think like everyone like thinking, what do we want? You know, Everyone has to get their ideas[??]. And so that’s the every first starting point. If we don’t have that and also a chance for other people to say, Oh, I don’t realize that was it, can I ask you a few questions? So the starting point is a common understanding and I think we are not trying to make a decision, we are just, let’s be clear what the options are.

Andrew: I see.

Sarah: Because, I would say in trying to give least of third of cases possible more. Once you get on the table, you realize you are not so far apart. You were a bit apart, but not where you thought you were.

Andrew: I see.

Sarah: And that’s extraordinarily common.

Andrew: So, what you are saying is that by agreeing right away to the ground rules and one of them being, we are not necessarily going to pick the right answer. What we are going to do is at least be clear about our options. That takes away people’s fire power and allows them to just come in and explore it as opposed to saying we are going to get in this room, we are going to pick what we are going to do the rest of our lives with our business and then one person inevitably is going to want to drive the conversation over to where he wants, because that’s the goal for the meeting and they have to be that driven.

Sarah: Exactly. Two comments on that. One is that’s why sometimes it helps to have someone external to be in the meeting. Often if there is someone who is leading it who has the idea whether fairly or not fairly he will think what you are trying to get your agenda. Right So that’s why it can be helpful to have someone could be someone in the organization, but he is not so involved or someone totally external. The very thing you described. The second thing is that you say you want to take the pressure of having to make a choice right now for saving some people’s head. For at least now we have the choices. I need to know what do you need to be convinced of these ideas or what do you need to make a decision. What would you have to believe for this to be true? So you focus on what they need to know.

Andrew: Okay.

Sarah: They to believe which somehow de-emotionalizes the decision. Because if it’s like, I have got an idea and you have got an idea and then it hits back your idea versus my idea. We are taking at a certain level that can be quite emotive. Especially if we are very in to that, whereas this is like Okay, well, what would I, Let me just say, Sometimes I get people who have to sell each other’s ideas like I split people into small groups. Okay, I need to take Andrew’s ideas. How would I persuade someone else that Andrew’s idea is right? What would I put in favor of Andrew’s ideas?

Andrew: It’s not going to be a theoretical decision out there so that we can see how it would work with it. Let’s suppose my co-founder and I have different phones. I am Android he is iPhone and we have to decide what we build for first. I say, “Obviously, Android because there are so many different people out there who are using it. That’s the majority. I mean, that’s what more people are using than the iPhone.”

The other person says, “Well we don’t want all these different models. We should go with the iPhone because everyone builds for it. I love the iPhone. People are willing to pay. There’s a good ecosystem.” They both have good arguments. They could butt heads all day. How would we use this, “What would you have to believe” approach to settle this agreement?

Sarah: So, I would ask you what would you have to believe to say that iPhone would make sense for the business? What would you have to know or believe?

Andrew: Okay, so then in that case if my goal is to get the product, the app, in as many people’s hands as possible, what I would have to believe is that more people are going to go into the App Store and download it if it’s free in there.

Sarah: Exactly, so then my question is can we get data on downloading of apps from the Apple Store versus Android.

Andrew: Gotcha.

Sarah: Can we fund that venture? That would be the data.

Andrew: Right, so we’re no longer talking about, mm-hmm?

Sarah: I always go, okay if we can’t get it, what else because sometimes you can get very specific data. Sometimes you have to have a weight of evidence. What would be a proxy for that, for example?

Andrew: That makes sense. Alright, so direct evidence might be we have some research tools internally that allow us to get a sense of how many downloads there are for an app. Nothing’s perfect and I haven’t found anything even that great, but that’ll work.

So we walk in there and say our app is similar to these apps let’s see how many downloads they each got and that helps us settle it. If that’s not enough the proxy might be advertising. If an ad company is willing to talk about how many views it has for apps within each ecosystem, then we use that as a proxy. Neither one is great, but at least now we’re talking about data, not opinion. At least now we’re talking about data that aligns with our goal.

Sarah: That’s exactly different. We’re talking about data, not opinion. That’s exactly what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to de-emotionalize these things and say, “Well, what would you have to believe?” That’s why it’s almost helpful to switch around and say so now prove, try and get evidence to show the counter-argument like for someone else. What would you need to show?

Sometimes you’re like, oh, now I have to do it. It’s not such a bad idea because I’ve found some data that supports this. Your job is like be the other person, role-play it. Persuade me. So, you make it fun and suddenly you’ve forgot it was someone else’s idea. You’re much more; okay what’s the best thing for the organization.

Andrew: You know, these kinds of issues actually cause friction within organizations and not just within organizations, within my scotch night. I have entrepreneurs coming here for scotch. They were having a great time and then I left because I had an appointment. I left them here to just continue the conversation that got very open. This open conversation about a rift between two people about work ended up causing this big argument here within the office that I unfortunately missed because I’m curious about why people argue and I believe I can solve it.

The important point is, not that I believe that I can solve anyone else’s arguments or that I’m very Butt-insky and need to understand what people are arguing about. The important point is, these little arguments about which direction a company can go in, Android, iPhone, build this app, or that app, end up causing rifts that cause a company to separate.

Sarah: Absolutely.

Andrew: Cause people to just lose time and lose friends.

Sarah: I couldn’t agree more. I could not agree more.

Andrew: Yes.

Sarah: Absolutely. They sort of escalate beyond the original point. At some point, often we’ve lost sight of what the original difference of opinion was and it’s gone way beyond that. [??] hard to come back to, well hang on, was this really so significant that we couldn’t work together anymore?

Andrew: Yeah. Frankly even for a one person operation starting out the wrestling match might even be worse because it goes on in our heads. It is should I do this, should I do that, I have this other idea, should I do this? Then we’re arguing with ourselves over and over, again, a big waste of time. Alright, back to the big board here and the next big point for us to talk about is KISS or diss. I know KISS, that’s keep it simple stupid. We’ll understand how that applies here, but what’s diss?

Sarah: Oh, that just means dismiss it basically because. . .

Andrew: Oh, like hip-hop diss. Don’t diss me, brother. I see.

Sarah: Yeah! Exactly because essentially here. . . Let’s suppose, now you have alignment, you have the idea of okay we’re going to align behind. We’re going with Android phones. We’ve done the research. We’ve done the data. We can align behind that decision because the data says that makes sense. Now, we need to have a simple way to articulate it. So, this is particularly important when we have a very technical product in the sense of, if we make it very complicated. . . So, the idea can be very complex. There needs to be a way to articulate it in a simple way.

Andrew: Let’s see how that plays out. I have a screenshot here. I keep calling it screenshot. I have a photo here of a binder. This is one of your clients who happens to be a doctor who is working with a team of other doctors and here’s the part that’s most relevant for us, they were working on a medical device that he wanted to sell. So what is in this thick binder that he’s got?

Sarah: He had all sorts of technical details about the product, information from working with patients, scientific tests. He had an incredible amount of information. Incredible.

Andrew: Mm-hmm. So it’s all this technical information and that’s the part that you are saying is not [kiss].

Sarah: Well what the challenge really was is, he needed investors and his investors typically weren’t a medical expert.

Andrew: Okay.

Sarah: They might have knowledge about the market but they don’t have the very intricate details that he was going into on the intricacy of why this product very technically makes sense. We needed to know the differentiators but they needed to be a way to translate that into language that made sense. Simply in one line or two, what is this product? Simply what need is this product meeting and why is it important. Like why is it different from other products already on the market? What do you need to be able to deliver it? What investment do you need very simply? Tell me that. You can give all the technical details but don’t lead with that because if you lead with that, unfortunately rightly or wrongly, often you’re going to lose people. They can’t see the wood for the trees and work out how to respond.

Andrew: I see. So you are saying it’s not enough to get our ideas out there, narrow down to the ones that we think make the most sense and research them if we can’t articulate them clearly enough then we can’t get the buy in that we need. In this case he was looking for investors. You helped him articulate his product and be clear about it the way you just described. So what happened?

Sarah: So then he was suddenly able to get investors [to say] “oh wow. Okay we get it. This could totally revolutionize the way… it was for testing purposes for cervical cancer in a way that’s much more accurate and also cost effective, less intrusive but we needed to bring out the sort of pain points and the need it was meeting, rather than the very technicalities of it, the system and the electronics of how it actually worked. That’s important but that was more to substantiate that it’s real not how you want to lead with the investors.

Andrew: I see. And so he got investors after that, after he clarified it?

Sarah: He did.

Andrew: Can I say the name of that company? Okay. I don’t want to get…

Sarah: Not sure. Sorry.

Andrew: Alright. Because I have a screen shot and I thought, wait she’s allowed to talk about it, I have the screen shot here. I have a screen shot that includes an award that he won. Fine. Fair enough. It’s the clarity that helped. I keep remembering my conversation with, my interview with Fred Wilson here for Mixergy where I asked him what his challenge was when he was raising money to build his venture capital firm. This is the guy who investing in Twitter, investing in Etsy, investing in tons of the most successful companies out there. What’s the other one I am thinking of? Four Square? So many others. He said, “You know, I was explaining it to my own investors, my theory, my thesis, what I was going to do, explaining it to them in too complicated a way.

These are smart investors and it was still too complicated for them.” Once he started explaining it simpler and simpler and simpler he was able to raise money from his LPs, from his limited partners and was able to then go and make these investments that I talked about. Frankly that’s a very good interview. If someone out there hasn’t seen that interview, or heard it, we didn’t do video, it’s worth going and hearing it. But the big point here is keep it simple or diss. Kiss or diss.

Sarah: Exactly. Something I sometimes say to people is could you explain this to a ten year old child, just really simply, and they go “oh I get it. It’s a device that does this in this case.” Can you explain it in one or two sentences? If you can do that then you are getting somewhere. If you can’t, it’s not that your idea is not good, but it’s that you need to find a way to express it that people listen and then get it straight away.

Andrew: You know the interesting thing is, I did that with you when we started. That’s how we ended up with that 1 sentence I mangled when I started. I said it’s led by Sarah Thrift, C.E.O. and founder of Insight, a consultancy and training company that helps organizations be better. That is 1 sentence and that last part came directly from you. I’ve noticed that experienced entrepreneurs do it better. I always ask that before an interview. I say what’s one sentence that describes what you do. The experienced entrepreneurs always do it better. Series like the first one hundred thousand in revenue that an entrepreneur did or when I talk to an entrepreneur about how the business failed often they can’t do that. Andrew it’s this complicated thing, we did lots of different things. Or Andrew we work on this but were also thinking that and it makes it really complicated. I have noticed that being able to summarize it seems somehow connected to success.

Andrew: All right, well it’s certainly does here and we are going to continue on to the next big point, which is… fail small or succeed big. Now this is where I’m going to bring back our old friend from the top of this conversation. There he is.

Sarah: [Aaron], yeah.

Andrew: So how did he fail small?

Sarah: Basically what they started out by doing, we talked about there, the Royal Chocolate Organization and they were creating all sorts of fantastic exotic flavors of chocolate and tastes, and different shapes.

Andrew: Yes.

Sarah: Effectively, they had a big problem. The shelf life of this chocolate is four weeks. So, what would happen is, they’d make a big batch for a show, and often they had, like, a weekend show, and all of it would be sold out by Saturday lunch time. And then, like, “We have a store, but we don’t have any more chocolates made up, we can make a few, but not the level we need.”

Or, we’d have loads left over, and like, “Now, what do we do?” They’ve got limited shelf life. They’d try and do things, but they couldn’t always. They had a lot of wastage.

Andrew: Yep.

Sarah: So they were sort of doing things, and they were sort of…It wasn’t really working. It was, I guess, the sort of failing small. They were spending a lot of money. They certainly weren’t making any money at all. They were making a loss. And so, they kept iterating, thinking, “Well, we’ll try different things. Maybe it’s this. Maybe we have something really unusual and catchy. That’s going to do it.”

Andrew: Yes.

Sarah: At the same time, what they started to do, is they started to make chocolate when they went to exhibit. They might do that at a show. They had certain stores where they’d go in for the afternoon. They’d make some, so they’d be doing it to get people to come and talk to them. Well, what happened is people became really interested in the actual making of the chocolate and how that worked. “Wow, so it’s just like three ingredients?”

Andrew: Uh-huh.

Sarah: “Is that what you do?” And has, “Oh.” Then, the kids, especially, like, “Wow! Look at this.” So their feature became much more the making of the chocolate, rather than the chocolate itself.

So, what was good was had they just spent everything on developing more and more flavors, at some point they would have totally run out of money, and that probably would have been it. What happened, almost by accident, but beautiful design, they , “Hang on, I think there’s a market in selling more chocolate making kits because people are interested. They said, “Oh, I’d love to be able to do that. What about if we teach people how to do this, but also sell the kits with the raw ingredients, and that takes away our biggest problem, which is shelf life because we put that into the customers’ hands, and then, thus, they can deal with it and they can make the chocolate when they need it. ”

Andrew: I see. And so, if they’re failing small, are you saying that their first test is just one workshop, something like this? Let me zoom in. No, that’s not the workshop. Here is the. . .

Sarah: [??] the other one. Yeah, that’s it. That’s it.

Andrew: There it is. This is the workshop, right there.

Sarah: Yeah, exactly.

Andrew: So, it started to fail small by saying, “All right. We have this idea, people seem to be liking it. Let’s try a small workshop and see what happens,” and then it becomes something as big as what I’m showing up on the screen.

Sarah: Exactly. So I went to all of their early workshops, and what they did is [Curum], one of the founders, was a former school teacher. So he had links with local schools, so we did some testing with school kids, and say, “Well, did they get engaged? Is it exciting? What’s the feedback?”

I just went and talked to the kids, like, and they’re like, “Oh, It’s so exciting! We made this.” And so, you could get to test it really cost-effectively with a local audience to see if it’s going to work.

Then, the second thing was to actually put together some demo kits and talk to parents, like, “When would you have this? Is this something you’d buy for yourselves, or your kids, as a gift?” and start to understand, well, what’s the market, and what would people pay for it? They were able to test it in a small way.

Andrew: I hate to cook. I would never cook, but I want this. I would do this. It seems like fun.

Sarah: Yeah.

Andrew: So actually, I don’t know anything about chocolate, the ingredients. This is the box that goes out.

Sarah: Yep.

Andrew: Right?

Sarah: Yep.

Andrew: The ingredients in chocolate, you said there are three of them, and they don’t go bad if I leave them around for a week?

Sarah: Not at all.

Andrew: I had no idea.

Sarah: Hmm-mmm, because basically, they’re just like cacao, the nibs, the cacao butter, and then you can put some agave in it, because it tends to be pretty bitter. It’s up to you if you want it, but it’s really that simple. Then, in the kits, you can also get flavors if you want. They also have a bunch of recipes you can do for orange, or lavender, or whatever, and also buy molds. But, they’re very simple, very, very simple, as you can take a tray, like for ice cubes. Just takes like 10 minutes. You melt the ingredients. You pop it in, pop it in the freezer.

Andrew: And then you’ve got your chocolate.

Sarah: You can eat it [??].

Andrew: Wow. All right. So, fail small, succeed big. Back to the big board here for the final point for us to talk about, which is to refine or decline…I like how some of these rhyme. For that, you’re telling me and Marie about this company.

Sarah: Yes.

Andrew: What is this company?

Sarah: This is Zhi Tea. It’s a tea company based in Austin, Texas.

Andrew: OK. And then. . .

Sarah: And they have beautiful tea, like they have. . . Actually, no, no, quite now, but something like 70, it might be more than this, but they have about 70 different types of tea. They personally blended all the flavors of tea, and the packaging, in particular, is beautiful. You get this tin. It’s got stickers embossed. It’s very beautiful and stylish.

Andrew: I see.

Sarah: And this tea tastes amazing.

Andrew: It does look really nice. All right. So then, they had an issue where this beautiful packaging was actually starting to cost them more and more money. Big problem, right. And they had to figure out what to do because they were starting to lose money this is ET. So what happened, how did they find their way to success there?

Sarah: So let me just if I may, give a little bit of context. So what was interesting here was they had success. This is more when you have a successful product. But they’ve already got that. So they’ve gone through these step, they’ve found the market, they’ve got alignment, they’ve tested it.

They test it and they were pretty successful. They have the store in Austin alongside their warehouse, they shipping products all across the U.S. But then what happened though is an external circumstance. So tea prices started to go up dramatically and also the dollar versus various Asian currencies was not in the favor of the dollar.

And so they started to the double whammy of these cost rising. But it starts to be not profitable to sell the same tea, in the same packaging. So there’s an example where they needed to evolve something about the idea or how they were marketing it or pricing it in order to respond. So this is quite a common things I see which is you have a successful idea, but you can’t necessarily leave it just as is, things need to evolve for it to continue to be successful and to grow.

Andrew: Okay, oh sorry. Is it kind of weird would I just put the camera on you and I’m completely invisible here like this? A little bit. Yeah, so then in order to evolve it, what do they do? Costs are rising their products is beautiful, so they can start to put this in a cheap cardboard box. Or can they?

Sarah: Well they can. But the first thing was it was incredibly [??] because the team was very attached to the packaging. And I understood why because it is beautiful. But I was there to be like, we are making a loss on every one of these we sell, we are making a loss. So and I don’t see that changing.

So we can continue. So there’s a couple of obvious options at this point. One is will we explore different options for packaging which are cheaper, or we cut the price out. So what we need to do is understand well which of these makes more sense. And we need to… back to something we talked about earlier. We sort of need to de-emotionalize the decision. I think we emotion was we can’t change the packaging.

And we can’t put the price up because we’ll lose all our customers. I’m like, then we need another idea because just continuing is not going to get any better. It’s going to get worse. And so what we did was we looked, well two things we looked at what different packaging would be. So for example going away from a tin to some sort of plastic or paper pouch. And secondly, we went and talked to customers in the store and asked them well, why do you buy this tea?

What’s an important part of the experience? What would you, like did you know that tea prices are rising? How would feel if the price of this went up to cover the cost? What would make more sense for you? Would you rather have the product at the same price, with different packaging? Or is this packaging an important part of the experience?

And so we went and tested and asked people. And also again back to something I did earlier we really watched for people’s body language. Because people don’t always want to sort of tell you, oh I wouldn’t buy it anymore. So you have to watch and say, how do I ask them in way that goes, okay so tell me like if this was your business for example what would you do. So turn it around so they feel they can tell you honestly the answer.

And in the case what we discovered was the customers are incredible loyal and really love the packaging. And so there was tolerance for some price rises. And we also looked to other competitors to see if it was in line.

And so what actually happened was there was a double digit price rise literally over night for all the products. And there was not any fall off at all in volume and I met Jeffery the founder was like, wow I was waiting, what’s going to happen. No change.

Andrew: I got my notes here from your conversation with Ann Marie Ward, who produced this. Said, Jeffery freaked, he saw that… can I say what the increase was? What percentage?

Sarah: Yeah, sure.

Andrew: Yeah, I can, right? I don’t think this should be a secret. Everyone who went and bought it should know. It’s roughly 25%. That’s 25% increase and people are still buying it. And that’s because of the resource that you did.

I think I as an entrepreneur would have thought, you know, 25% is a little too much it’s going to hurt our customers it’s not going to come in. But I understand now how the combination of both talking to people and hearing and getting their subjective feedback, and looking and doing resource to see that others were also increasing in their market. Increasing their prices, boom that means that both bit of information are helping me say, it’s time to raise mine.

I still would freak out, I would freak out before, and I did it. I would freak out during. And then I would freak out when you came back and said, Andrew, guess what we didn’t lose and volume, that would really be exciting.

Sarah: And I was still holding inside, because I want to do the right thing obviously with my, people I work with. So I was waiting for all the evidence suggested, and we said, okay we’re going to do it and we need to fee [?].” And the thing was we had to do a significant hike, because otherwise we’d be in a situation where we, we do a little bit and then, in– I said to him “It’s worse if in three months’ time we have to do it again. So given where this is going, let’s just do it.”

Andrew: Oh yeah.

Sarah: And be done. So that’s also how we looked– so it was, I would say we took a calculated risk in taking all the information, then said “now we need to do this.”

Andrew: All right. So, before we wrap it up I want to ask you a couple of questions. The first is we started out this conversation talking about a company that had an idea– an entrepreneur that had an idea that would have saved lives that was meant for an organization that had the money to pay for it, and it still didn’t work out. Now that we have a list of ideas that we know we can go through, and we need to pick the right product, or the right business out of many different options. Which of these do you think would have saved the entrepreneur that you talked about at the top of the interview?

Sarah: The most important one for them was the third one, it’s a line [?] always time.

Andrew: Okay.

Sarah: So in this case they had a good idea, they had a market need, and they had chosen the idea as quite specific. But what needed to happen, particularly with an organization of the size and the complexity of the National Health Service in the U.K. is that there need to be a lot of discussions to get enough supporters and alignment behind it.

Andrew: Okay.

Sarah: And you’re talking about a mixture in this case of, medical staff, managerial administrative staff, people that sort of trust overall government quality hospital. So you need it to be, getting buying at different levels, and also hearing concerns at different levels. And you need enough, typically I say in an organization, you, you need like an amount of support to make a big change in organization, you often need something like thirty percent of support behind it. And at that point you have a tipping point for momentum.

Andrew: I see.

Sarah: And then the idea sells itself. And so without that, in this case they had a fantastic idea, but they’re talking about a big organization to sell to where they really need buy in. So it’s not enough just to have a brilliant idea if you can’t get the people who are the decision makers and implementers to believe this is the right thing to do.

Andrew: And that’s such a painful thing to acknowledge and an important one too. The idea, the great idea isn’t enough, the alignment, the alignment and the research and everything else helps. Alright here’s the other thing. I’ve got here a map with where you do your training, right? In addition to consulting; I’m assuming that consulting is probably going to be very expensive. Do you talk about how much that costs before we get into the training?

Sarah: Sure. I mean it depends on the organization, but it’s often, you know, tens of thousands of dollars to do it.

Andrew: What size organizations do you do training with?

Sarah: Well with training it’s a real mixture–

Andrew: Oh sorry, you do consulting with.

Sarah: Sorry.

Andrew: Where, where, I know one of the companies that we weren’t allowed to mention.

Sarah: Yeah.

Andrew: It’s a publicly traded company, They’re a multi-billion dollar company, I think, right? But how small an organization do you do consulting for?

Sarah: Also do for small organizations, too. But we do it in a different fee structure in recognition that they don’t have the same resources of a large organization.

Andrew: Okay. Two person operation? Ten person company? Hundred?

Sarah: So it, yes it can be. Typically the type of work will be more tailored, so with a very big organization we might go in and do a sort of eight week project. So for the company you were just referring to we just did an eight week piece of work to prioritize a whole bunch of choices for them, that was to add one billion dollars of growth to their business. So we’re very big scale of magnitude.

Andrew: I see.

Sarah: So it makes sense for them to pay for that work to be done. If I’m talking about a two or ten person organization, sometimes it’s myself and my team facilitating couple of meetings and just giving some advice and pointers and helping people get to alignment can be the biggest impact. And that can be just a couple of days work.

Andrew: Alright and then the other thing that you offer is these “in-person courses.”

Sarah: Yeah.

Andrew: Right? This is some of the places . . .

Sarah: Yeah.

Andrew: . . . where you’ve done them?

Sarah: Exactly. So let me tell you about those. So they’re done in two ways. One is within organization, so the company we’re just talking about, the big e-Commerce company, they also bought the course. And I ran it in Termy [SP] for them, and we did that over a period of six weeks of workshop every two weeks with, they worked on the specific, you know, prioritizing of issues in between so we could get to an answer at the end. I also then do these for the general public, and anyone can come, I’m just about to fly tonight to Nebraska, starting workshops next week in Minneapolis, and Chicago, and New York.

Andrew: Okay.

Sarah: And I make those very accessible for entrepreneurs to come along and learn with other entrepreneurs.

Andrew: All right, and the place if anyone wants to go see, the website is Insight Consultancy Solutions.com, InsightConsultancySolutions.com, right? That’s the best way for them to connect with you?

Sarah: That’s the best way.

Andrew: All right. Sarah, thank you so much for being a part of this.

Sarah: Thank you.

Andrew: If anyone got any value out of this, I always say this and frankly you guys might be tired of it, but things that make sense are worth repeating. And the thing that makes the most sense is; if you get anything of value out of this session here, out of our course, or out of anything you read online, oh I’m telling you you should contact the person and let them know. Or if you go to an event live, let them know. I’ve seen entrepreneurs contact guests that I’ve talked to, and end up working for them, end up flying out and working at their office. Or, sorry, those aren’t entrepreneurs, those are students who’ve done it; students are so much better following up with this.

Andrew: But I’ve seen others get together for meals, I’ve seen others get do biz dev [??], in fact the founder of, what was that company? Olark, oh, Olark. Olark used to, the founder of Olark used to listen to my interviews to get to know entrepreneurs that he should go do biz dev with, he would shoot them an email, he would get to know them, and then afterwards he’d create these biz dev opportunities where his product, Olark, was integrated with the product the person was talking. Anyway. I’m not saying that that’s what you should be aiming for, I’m saying what you should do is start by saying “thank you, I’m going to do it right now.” And when you say thank it often is the beginning of a much bigger conversation and much bigger friendship and relationship later. So Sarah Thrift, thank you so much for being here and teaching my audience.

Sarah: My pleasure, thank you, Andrew.

Andrew: You bet. It’s been wonderful, thank you all for being a part of it. Bye everyone.

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How to validate your idea by finding your own pain – with Chris Keller

This is the story of how finding your own pain can lead to a profitable company.

Chris Keller is the founder of FollowUp.cc, a site he built to solve a problem he had.

You know how sometimes you send someone an email and you want to be reminded to follow up? Well followup.cc is an easy way to embed a reminder in your email.

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About Chris Keller

Chris Keller is the founder of FollowUp.cc which attaches follow-up reminders to emails.

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Master Class:
How to find your business idea
(Even if you’re afraid of starting something stupid)
Taught by Richie Norton of The Power of Starting Something Stupid

Master Class: Starting Something Stupid

 

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Transcript

Andrew: This session is about how to start a great business idea by using the power of starting with something stupid. The session is led by Richie Norton. He is the author of the “Power of Starting Something Stupid, How to Crush Fear, Make Dreams Happen, and Live without Regret.” I will help facilitate. My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy and it’s an honor to have you on here Richie.Richie: It’s an honor to be here. Thanks for having me, Andrew. I’m really excited. It’s going to be fun.

Andrew: So we pulled out a few ideas from your book, here they are that we’ll be talking about today. And walking people through the framework that you’ve outlined in your book. But it happened that a few years back something terrible happened to you that set you on a new path. What was that thing? What happened?

Richie: It was actually a couple of things.

Andrew: Mm-hmm.

Richie: We were living in Hawaii and my brother-in-law, he lived on and off with us for about five years. And, to make a long story short, one day he just didn’t wake up. He passed away in his sleep.

Andrew: Mm-hmm.

Richie: And it was totally unexpected. And this experience literally just crushed us and made us really rethink what is life? We say that life is short and that’s cliche, but even though that’s cliche doesn’t make it any less true, right? And we just started rethinking everything we were doing. Life really is short and we think we’re going to have all this time to do all the things we want to do, when reality for my brother-in-law, it just wasn’t that way.

Andrew: Yeah.

Richie: A few years later, you know, we had our fourth son and we named him Gavin after my brother-in-law, Gavin…

Andrew: Mm-hmm.

Richie: …who had passed away. And this Gavin, he brought so much joy into our lives and he kind of filled the hole that his uncle had left in his own little way. Well, Gavin, over time, he ended up getting cough and we didn’t know what it was. We took him to the doctor and they said he’d be fine. We took him to the doctor again and they said maybe it was something called RSV. It just kept coming and it persisted.

And we ended up one night going to the hospital real late and we thought we’d be in and out of there. That they’d say, oh, he just has this cough. It’s going go away. They ended up admitting us into the hospital and we were there for quite some time. And after a number of tests, it turned out that he had something called pertussis, which is also known as whooping cough.

Andrew: Ah.

Richie: And, you know, I heard of whooping cough before, but I thought it was something from the past. You know, he had his shots and everything, we thought, was fine. He was a healthy little boy, but now he has this disease. And you never expect this to happen. It’s your worst nightmare.

But, one night the nurse came in and let us know that he probably wouldn’t make it. And we did everything in our power, just loving him and praying and just everything we could. Just hoping and wishing that this wouldn’t be his fate. And I remember my wife and I literally just holding hands over our little baby and promising to each other that we wouldn’t let this experience destroy us. That somehow for him, for his sake, we would make it bring us together.

And, unfortunately, he did end up passing away. And you can’t imagine, like, coming into the world and coming into this hospital with this wonderful baby boy and then leaving empty handed. It was horrifying. And, again, this experience just crushed us to the core. And people sometimes ask, Richie, what did you learn from your brother-in-law passing away? From your son passing away? And I boil it down to this.

I call it Gavins’ law, in their honor, which is live to start, start to live. Because when you really live to start those ideas that are pressing on your mind, you really will start living. And again, we have a limited amount of time and so when these ideas do press on our mind, a lot of times we push them away thinking it’s something for later or it’s a stupid idea.

But, because of this experience, that life is short, I realized, you know what, we should embrace these ideas and do something with them now so we can live a life without regret.

Andrew: And at the time you were president at a financial services company and you decided I’m going to do something that maybe sounds stupid. What was that?

Richie: So I started really looking at my life and saying, “What am I doing and what do I really want to be doing?” And I was president of a financial services company and life wasn’t terrible, but I wanted to be in a situation where I could be writing and be an author and make an income and make a living doing that, that I could go speak to people all over the world and inspire others and to tell Gavin’s story.

It was just kind of what I wanted to do, so I ended up looking at my life and talking to my wife about it and I did, I quit. I quit being the president of this financial services company and we went on a three month long road trip. We traveled from Hawaii to Florida and we went all the way up, then we went over to the West Coast and we went up into Canada and I went on a surf trip into Costa Rica.

We were doing projects along the way that helped provide the income we needed to make this work, but we can get more into that as we go. In reality, I started living the life I wanted to live instead of waiting to live that life I wanted in the future, which I knew was an illusive future. We think that all these things are going to happen; when I finally do this, when I finally finish that. Because of the deaths of my brother-in-law and my son I realized, ‘No, I need to act on it now.’ and I moved forward and then created a business around that lifestyle.

Andrew: And I’ve seen so much of what you’ve done because you’ve taken that step. I have it here. . . I don’t how much of this I could even read in here. Let me get a few of it in. His book Resumes are Dead, which is a previous book and What to do About It, hit number one on the business and investment list, number one in careers, number one in job hunting, and broke the top 100 of all free Kindle books. His book, The “Power of Starting Stupid” also broke the top 100 books on Amazon and hit number one in multiple categories.

In 2013, San Francisco Book Festival named “The Power of Starting Something Stupid” the winner of the business category and the grand prize winner of all book categories in its annual competition. He’s a strategic adviser to businesses, organizations, and individuals, and an international speaker and CEO and Founder of Global Consulting Circle. Richie has been featured in Forbes, Business Week, Young Entrepreneur, Huffington Post, and other national publications both printed online.

There’s so much more. 2010, the Pacific Business News recognized Richie as one of the Top 40 Under 40 best and brightest young businessmen in Hawaii and so much more. And it’s because you wanted to do this for a long time and you finally said, “I’m going to.” This is what we’re going to be talking about here today. How to figure out what it is that we even want to do and then get ourselves to do it without feeling a sense of overwhelm.

This is where you are today, but you started out small and we’re going to talk about that. I’ve got a list of ideas, as I said, that we pulled from the book that we hope, that we know actually, will directly apply to our audience. And here’s the first one, you say, ‘Look through the stupid filter to find a smart business idea.’ One person who’s done that. . . I always like to see examples. Here’s. . . Who’s this woman who’s really happy?

Richie: That’s Sara Blakely and she’s the founder of a company called Spanx. And she. . . It’s a crazy story. She, to kind of boil it down, she had this idea to basically cut off the feet of pantyhose, hosiery, and turn it into a product for women that was different than what was traditionally out there. She started shopping this idea. She went to many factorers [??], she went to lawyers, and she went all around telling what she was trying to do.

I remember one instance in her autobiography or interview that she did where she says that. . . It’s so funny. That even the lawyer said to her, they asked, “Am I on Candid Camera?” They thought seriously like the stupidest thing they ever heard. It became something that she really wanted to do and so she kept pushing through it, pushing through it, pushing through it, until she finally talked to one guy who could help her make it happen.

I believe he was one of the owners of a manufacturing company that could help her make this happen. He actually went and asked the daughters if her idea. . . If it was something that they would use and his daughters said, “Yeah, that is something that we would use.” So, that totally changes paradigm and he said, “Okay, let’s try it out.” And Sara Blakely became the first self-made female billionaire in the world. And so. . .

Andrew: And here it is from this idea. There she is on the cover of Forbes.

Richie: There you go, from this idea. And it was a stupid idea and that’s the interesting thing, is that sometimes it’s the stupid ideas that are actually not necessarily inherently stupid. It’s just that they’re perceived as stupid because we’re afraid of them, they’re different, they’re unconventional. When in reality, it can be the smartest thing you could do. I actually call it the three T’s of stupidity. Everything from the telephone to the Model T to Twitter were at one time called stupid or crazy but they turned out to be these fantastic, you know, services and products and all that.

Andrew: All right and in order to get to that, one of the things you suggest we do is write down all of our ideas, turn off that part of us that says this is stupid, this makes sense, this is a billion dollar idea. Just write them all down. You did that early on. What was on your list?

Richie: Oh that’s a really good question. I actually, when I wrote it down, I actually broke it up into areas of my life. I literally sat down and said, okay, what I want to do with my family. You know, I’m married, I have kids. That’s not everyone’s situation so whatever your situation is think about that. But I started with that and then I went over about to my education and what I want to do with that.

What about giving back to the world? What about my finances? And I started going through this whole thing and I wrote down things with my family about how I wanted to be there for them. I got specific. I want to be able to drive them to school, pick them up from school, I want to be able to go on vacations when we need to. I got into education and I started writing down, I had a dream to go to a school called Thunderbird it’s the number one international business school in the world. All they do is international business and that was a dream of mine. I wanted to go back and get an MBA there.

So I wrote that down. I wrote about different charities I wanted to work with and sports programs I wanted to coach. And I wrote down how much money I wanted to make in a year so that I could support this lifestyle. I literally wrote it all down and by doing that it was really interesting because that’s what triggered us to go on this, that three month long trip.

Then I mentioned, it also triggered, and this is kind of a double-edged sword. I was living in Hawaii at the time but this school, Thunderbird, was based in Arizona. So because I wrote this down, we packed up and left Hawaii and moved to Arizona because that was the right thing to do for us at the time. My wife was on board, my kids were on board. And it was interesting, you can write down all the so-called stupid ideas that you want but it’s important to recognize that you’re not necessarily going to do them all.

You need to write them all down, just get it out. Download, so to speak, and then you can look at them and start evaluating which ones are most important, which ones you need to do first and then create a strategy of how you’re going to move forward and make them happen.

Andrew: Okay, just write them down, think about which ones are the most important, which have priority and then start doing them.

Richie: That’s right.

Andrew: All right, here’s another thing that we’ve pulled out of the book which is to work on an idea that excites you. I’m not sure if I can show this. Let me see if I can. I’m going to actually, oh here we go I can here and then mute it so that you and I can talk. I don’t know if you’ve seen this. Do you recognize this guy?

Richie: I know who that is but I haven’t seen this one. Oh my gosh.

Andrew: Look at what he’s doing. This is him in his company, just, who is this person?

Richie: That’s my friend Jace, Jace Bennet [SP] and he’s a crazy guy. Who would have thought you would skateboard on a skateboard ramp on one of those things? Whatever that things called.

Andrew: I don’t even know what that’s called.

Richie: Right.

Andrew: Usually you’re told by the guy who runs the company, “Do not touch it, we have insurance issues, you know, we can’t.” This is the same guy here. Let me show you a head on photo from his Facebook profile. Thankfully his Facebook profile is public so I was able to grab it. There he is.

Richie: You know what’s funny about that? That was actually a dare. We’ll talk about his company but part of his work is they have a road show in Costco and he was getting his hair cut and we dared him to actually shave his head in a Mohawk and go to Costco like that. Can you imagine the owner of the company walking into Costco like that? But he did it, man, this guy’s a crazy guy. It’s pretty cool.

Andrew: So what did he do? He at some point in his life, he ran over your son’s skateboard, right?

Richie: Yeah, he pulled into our driveway and ran over my son’s longboard skateboard and I was like, it’s okay, it’s not your fault, that kind of stuff happens, my son shouldn’t have had it in the driveway anyways. And he felt terrible. So he went home and over a number of weeks he started, he actually, created, cut out a new longboard skateboard for my son.

And I thought that’s really cool, that’s really nice, thanks so much, you know, we appreciated it. Then he took it one step further he said, “Do you think I could start a business out of this?” And I was like, “I don’t know, I don’t know.” And it was something that did get him excited and it was something that he could talk about. Before that on the skateboards, he was doing real estate at the time.

And it was interesting because as he was doing his real estate, he would talk to people, too, about what he did on skateboards. And he ended up meeting someone who knew about manufacturing overseas and locally, and as they talked and because he was so excited about what he was doing, he was able to transfer that passion from him to others and create this network of people who could help him trim this one-off skateboard into an actual company. So he did that.

They’re now in Costco. They’re selling, literally, thousands – I can’t disclose their numbers – but they’re selling skateboards all over the United States and then online they’re selling them all over the world. They have reps all over the world. What’s interesting is it was a saturated industry. There was a lot of people doing, obviously, skateboards, but he went for a market that was different. He said, “You know what? I don’t want to be grunge and skeletons and skulls,” and he knew that it was moms buying skateboards for their kids . . . Andrew: Mm, yeah.

Richie: . . . for the youth, so he went more for this bamboo feel, clean feel, and he went somewhere like Costco, where they weren’t selling skateboards and it was somewhere that other people weren’t going, and so he was able to turn that excitement into an affluent business.

Andrew: I see. So do follow your passion in this case. It worked for him and if you do do that, one of the suggestions you have is to aim for those small wins. And also, speaking of, this is another guy, see if I can pull this up, too. Got this off of his Twitter profile. I don’t know if you recognize that photo, but I think that’s Andy Price.

Richie: Andy Pearce, yes.

Andrew: Pearce, excuse me.

Richie: Yeah, yeah. So Andy Pearce, he is an amazing – as you can tell by the picture – an amazing surfer. And he was surfing at Sunset Beach on Oahu. Waves were about twenty feet and he’d surfed big waves before but this day was a little different and the wind was blowing really hard. And when the wind blows hard, the board kind of stays up higher on the wave sometimes and you kind of get caught before you can drop in.

Anyway, he got caught up on the lip of this wave and then kind of thrown down, almost like being thrown or jumping off a violent waterfall. And the board came up flying behind him and almost like an axe, just smashed his leg and actually broke his femur in half. And . . .

Andrew: Wow.

Richie: . . . he thought he was going to die. I mean, wave after wave after wave kept pounding on top of him and there was no one there to help him. And he literally thought, “What is going to happen to me? Is this the end?” Fortunately, somebody came and grabbed him and they kind of got on the same board and they would hold him really tight, so when the waves would hit them, they would kind of spin around together until they could get out of the impact zone and to an area where they could get in to the beach.

Now that’s a scary story, but what’s interesting is he, after getting a new shiny metal pole put in his leg, he ended up surfing again just a few weeks later. And he was surfing big waves again. Now he’s a fast healer, but what really got me thinking was why? Do you have a death wish? And what was interesting was he said, “You know,” and I said, “Are you scared?” And he said, “You know, everybody’s scared out there.” And I said, “Well, why do you do it?” And he explained that he did it because he loved it and he basically, in my words, his why was bigger than his fear.

And so sometimes, whatever we’re trying to do, if our why is bigger, if we’re more scared of not doing the thing we want to do than we are of actually doing it, we’ll end up making it happen. So as I looked at what his situation was, I realized that you don’t just start surfing if you don’t know how to swim, right?

So he started off learning how to swim, started on small waves, two-foot waves, four-foot waves, five-foot waves, eight-foot waves, ten-foot waves, he built his way up. And along the way, he would fall. He would catch a wave; he would fall. Small waves, but he learned how to handle these spills, so to speak, in a way that when he was at a twenty-foot wave, he could overcome that challenge and stand back up. You don’t just all of a sudden go from zero to twenty feet.

You start and you go incrementally. So when you’re starting a project, a lot of times we think, “I have this great idea,” and we go from zero to twenty feet. We go from zero to building our company. We go from zero to, in Jason’s experience, Costco. We can start thinking from zero to the biggest thing and we’d say, ‘Oh, that’s too big. I can’t do it.’ That’s not the way you go. You start small incrementally. First, learn how to swim, then you do the smaller waves and you work your way up.

So with whatever project you’re trying to do break it down into small, more manageable parts. Start with the first piece that you can do and then if you fall it’s a learning experience that helps you to be able to get back up. So, as you work your way up that ladder you’ll be able to handle yes, the big success, the big failures and move forward.

Andrew: A lot of times though, when we have those small steps that we need to take we feel like, “Well, that’s too small. That’s not where I want to be.” Speaking of swimming, I remember actually when I was learning to swim. The instructor taught me how to kick. I said, “I don’t want to learn how to kick in place, I look ridiculous. I want to learn how to actually swim. You know, like show me how to move around.” But, you know, you have to learn how to kick and you have to learn how to move, you have to learn how to breathe in order to put it all together and swim.

And then once you swim you’re saying, “That’s just one small step for him.” And then he takes it, right. The same things happens for business. How many times do we get a small win and we feel like, “Well, that’s too small. Sara is on the cover of Forbes magazine. Why am I here if she’s over there? Maybe I’m in the wrong place.” You got to start somewhere. You got to start by cutting, you’re saying.

Richie: That’s the problems we. . .

Andrew: Cutting the. . .

Richie: You know, these magazines are great, but when you read them you think, “I can never get to that spot.”

Andrew: Mm-hm.

Richie: You have to go back and look at everything they did. They started. . . Everyone started at somewhere and it started small. And the guys who are doing big deals over and over and over again, that’s because they went from small to the big deal and then they already learned how to ride those 20 foot waves. So they are able to jump from 20 foot wave to 20 foot wave and do big projects every once in a while, but it does, it starts with that first small baby step.

Andrew: All right, onto the next big idea which is to ask yourself, will I regret it when I’m 80? And one person who did that was this guy, Jeff Bezos. How did he do it?

Richie: So this story will kind of tie other things we were talking about together. Jeff Bezos was working on Wall Street and he had a great job and he had this idea to sell books online. And he did his research, saw that the internet was growing fast and he ended up talking to his boss about it and his boss took him on a walk around Central Park and his boss said, “Well, that’s a great idea, but it’s not for someone who already has a job.”

And so it became an idea, but it was a stupid time for him to do it. But he realized that if he didn’t do it he might be missing out on something. He asked himself this one question, he asked, “Will I regret it when I’m 80?” By asking himself that question he realized, “Yes, I would regret not trying to start this Internet business that’s selling books out of my garage.”

He figured it would be something that he would regret and he ended up quitting his job in the middle of the year, which is a crazy time to quit because then on Wall Street you don’t get your annual bonus, packed up his car and moved from New York to Washington and started Amazon.com from his garage.

And now, there you go another example of a billionaire and someone who is changing the world, but what’s interesting about it is, as we talked earlier about creating that list of all the things you want to do, that’s a good way to narrow down which one of them you want to do. Which one would you regret most not doing?

In fact, when Jase Bennett, Jase Boards, he talked to me about starting that company, I asked him that question. I said, “Well, will you regret it when you’re 80?” And because he narrowed down the process to that he said, “You know what, I would regret not doing it.” So he ended up trying it out. So, it’s just a great way to narrow down what you’re trying to do.

Andrew: All right, onto the next one which is to experiment then move forward or move on.

Richie: Okay so, this is really important because yeah, we talked about writing ideas down, we talked about it maybe if it’s stupid, it might be smart, we talked about narrowing it down to something you might regret, but here’s the thing, a lot of times what I found is people will wait to do something they really want to do for so long that when they finally go and do it sometimes it failed, but they built it up to be so big and they wasted their whole life on a dream that never pans out.

So it’s important, like we talked about earlier, to start early, but to experiment so that way you know if it works move forward, if it doesn’t move on. That’s what Darren Rouse did. Darren Rouse, he is the founder of Pro Blogger and also Digital Photography school, a number of other blogs and internet businesses.

What’s interesting about him is if you go back and read his story what you’ll find is that he started small. He started with a little website that was making maybe $5, $10 a day. He started working his way through it trying to see what worked, what didn’t work. He experimented, he told his family about it, and, he thought he was insane. Especially when he said he wanted to turn it into a real business. But, he didn’t just jump ship and neither did Jeff Bezos, and neither did Jase Bennett, and neither did I.

We first experimented on the idea and when it became something that we know could work, then we moved out of our old businesses and into our new businesses to make it work. So we started small and we turned it into a multi-million dollar franchise, and, it all started by experimenting.

Andrew: Was the original idea for Pro-Blogger, that was just a series of pokes that he did on his personal blog. Is that right?

Richie: I think he had a number of blogs, even before Pro-blogger and I don’t know the history of Pro-blogger specifically, but, I know that it was a number of Internet businesses that he started. And, then, I think he took those principles and moved over to Pro-blogger, what he was learning.

Andrew: Okay, and when you say, moved over, it means, obviously, continue building it, or move on. I mean, it’s okay, sometimes, to just say, this idea didn’t work out, I’m closing it down. Instead of continuing because you will not take the loss, because you don’t want to quit.

Richie: It’s important to call it quits when, I think Zack Gooden calls it a cul-de-sac, in his book, “The Dip.” If it’s a cul-de-sac, you need to quit, if it’s not going to pan out, maybe it was a really stupid idea. Or, at least, a stupid timing. But, at least, you can live your life knowing you gave it a chance, and it was a small scale, you know, we talked about ramping up. So, that it wasn’t waiting around you whole life to do this big thing and it’s a big fail. It was a small fall, and you learned from it, and now you know what to do moving forward.

Andrew: Alright, on to the next one. And, that is, to weed out non- essential tasks and work on your idea. For you, you set an alarm to ring every fifteen minutes, is that right?

Richie: Yeah, so, what I’ll do, it’s something that helps me get focused. If I wake up and I have my routine, but what happens is, that routine can get all changed up, depending on if a kid has a rough night sleeping, or if a number of things happen, I find myself opening up e-mail and getting trapped in e-mail, lan, and then I can spend my whole day doing these activities, and I felt like I was productive, but I didn’t actually produce anything.

And so, what I try to do is narrow down that. Will I regret it when I’m 80 project, we narrow that project down, and, then we say, I’m going to spend, because we have other jobs, other things we’re doing, and it may not be a full time thing. So what you do for yourself, is, I’m going to give myself a 15 minutes of undivided attention to this project. And, you turn a timer on, this is what I do, that helps me, and, I just crank on it until I’m done. And, in 15 minutes, it goes off, hey, wow, that’s amazing, I got it done.

And if I want to do more time, I give it 15 minutes again, and, I keep moving and moving and moving until I have to move on to other things. But, this also works for time you want to waste, of browsing the internet, or in e-mail. If you set yourself a time-limit, and say I’m only going to do it for this amount of time, you know that you’re able to manage your time well and balance so you can focus your priorities and do the things that actually produce and not just feel productive.

Andrew: It looks like you have a fly in the room or something there, huh?

Richie: My hands are going everywhere.

Andrew: Isn’t that distracting when that happens?

Richie: Maybe that’s a good analogy there, right, if the fly keeps bothering you, so you can’t get anything done that you want to get done. It’s true, and, everything’s always going to temp you to move away from the projects that you want to do. But, if you get serious about the project that you want to do, set yourself some dedicated time, and, actually work on it. You will make some real progress.

Andrew: I imagine that must have helped you when you were writing the book. Writing a book is really tough.

Richie: It’s a beast. And, if you think writing a book is going to be this great, awe inspiring, wonderful thing, you’re going to sit in this little man cave and get it done, when, in reality, it’s just hard, it’s just so much work when you get into it. But, it was so important to find ways to dedicate time to it. And, you know, I’d pull all nighters, and I’d do all those things to meet deadlines, but, in reality, I didn’t set aside time to get it done, it never would have gotten done.

Andrew: This is cool that you attended, and I see that they’ve got you, that you wrote up the book and your success with it. It must be great to actually see that, after all that hard work.

Richie: Yeah, now, looking back, after I did write down those things I wanted to do, and made the time to actually make them happen, it really is amazing to think that I’ve now accomplished that, I’ve done the executive MBA program from Thunderbird, I’ve written this book, I’ve gone around the world. I spoke to more than 20,000 people last year from Bali to the Dominican Republic, all over the United States. It’s amazing and it all started with my own stupid idea. So I really believe that embracing those ideas, you can make magic happen.

Andrew: Onto the next one which is START with what’s right in front of you. What does START stand for?

Richie: Okay, so START’s an acronym I created after researching what successful people did. I literally spent six years studying what it was that successful people did. And I came up with a number of principles and I tried to encapsulate it with this word START, which stands for Serve, Think, Ask, Receive and Trust. Start with service. When you have an idea, serve others in the capacity that you can in alignment with the project you want to do.

People always think they have to wait to get paid if there’s something they want to do. Successful people don’t wait to get paid. They start doing it anyway. Serving the people you want to serve – and you thank them, even if people should be thank you, you thank them. And by doing that you show you’re grateful and that gratitude creates this wonderful influence and people want to start working with you.

And you create this relationship of trust where you can finally ask people for help because asking can actually burn bridges in a lot of ways, but if you ask by first having served and thanked, you ask them in a way that I call mission matching. You align your mission with their mission and you ask for something that’s in line with what you want to do.

Then you can be open to receiving and you can receive what you’re trying to do graciously, gratefully, kind of like in football. There’s the receiver, the quarterback throws the football to him, he’s meant to receive it, not to just [??] it down. And so we need to be open to receiving. And lots . . .

Andrew: I have such a hard time with receiving. That’s why I’m smiling.

Richie: It’s so hard because people will offer things to you, and you might be, “Oh, no, no, I’m okay. I’m okay,”Because you don’t want to put someone out, you don’t want to be a mooch, whatever it is.

Andrew: Yeah.

Richie: But in reality, successful do. They receive all the time. But they’ve also been giving, right? They’ve been giving this whole time. So the idea of receiving, it’s different than giving. When you get, it’s like getting a present and not opening it. When you receive, you get the present, you open it, and you do something with it.

Going back to the football analogy, you catch the ball and you run and score a touchdown with it. So if I were to offer you something and you were to receive it gratefully and then do something with it, that’s a win for both of us. So that’s really important. Serve, Think, Ask, Receive and the last one is Trust. If you can trust this process, everything goes faster. Everything moves fluidly.

When there’s distrust, then there’s lawyers and contracts. Not that those are necessarily bad. Sometimes they are, sometimes they aren’t, but everything’s slowed down. But when you trust, everything moves forward in a more fluid manner.

Andrew: And that last part, which is Start with what’s in front of you . . .

Richie: Okay.

Andrew: . . . comes from a section of your book where you talk about Muhammad Yunus. There he is. A student said to him, “There’s so many things that concern me, so many problems that I need to work on. Where should I start?” And he said . . .

Richie: He said, “Start with what’s right in front of you.” He’s one of my heroes. I love Muhammad Yunus. He . . . you know his story . . . he was in Bangladesh and he was an economics professor and he saw all these people literally on his doorstep and they were kind of like . . . he described them as living skeletons, people that were so poor they couldn’t feed themselves.

And here he was, preaching these great economic theories. So he went out into the villages and he found that for only $27.00, he could help a number of villagers get out of the loan shark situation and work on their own businesses. Over time, that idea – they call him the Father of Microlending – turned into this massive, I guess, you can call it an industry, where they’re helping the unbankable be bankable.

Basically, he’s helping people work their way out of poverty, using their own skills. And he started with what was right in front of him. He could have been in the classroom, just talking about these great theories and what the governments can do, but instead he went out and he went, “$27.00,” and then it turned into this massive enterprise and that model has been used over and over and over again. He started with service.

So you do whatever it is you’re trying to do, look at what’s right in front of you and start with that. Don’t try and reach for all these things you don’t have. There’s a lot of stuff that’s right there you can do right now.

Andrew: Okay. I used to be overwhelmed, too, with I want to start somehow not just doing interviews on Mixergy but teaching something. How do I get it? Where do I get the software done?

Then, I had this software that I’m using right now to do things like put the camera on me, put the camera just on you, this and that and all this stuff. I just had it on my computer. I said you know what? This is just some free piece of software that’s available online. It’s called CamTwist. What if I just push myself and come up with some way of adding teaching sessions to Mixergy with whatever I have, without trying to think of how do I rent a studio, without trying to think of how do I fly someone in or fly someone out?

Or, just say whatever software I have, I could do it. So, much of what’s around here was actually originally created using Keynote, because that was available, and CamTwist because I had that. And, the recording was with Call Recorder because I had that.

I see what you mean. I get so overwhelmed sometimes with all the big ideas that I have. But, you’ve got to start with what’s there.

Richie: That’s a perfect example. If you hadn’t started with what you had right in front of you, you may have gone out and spent a lot of money on things you didn’t even need. You may not have even started at all.

Andrew: Right, right.

Richie: So it’s really important. Just start with what’s right in front of you and then work your way up. It ties back into that wave theory. Just start with the small ones and then progress incrementally.

Andrew: I do have one other point here that was actually kind of hiding underneath for no good reason. There it is. The final point that I wanted to bring up is to leverage existing resources. You give a great example of the woman behind this product. Let me see if I get… I can, of course, bring it up. There it is.

Richie: Yes.

Andrew: Do you recognize those moccasins?

Richie: I do, I do. This is…

Andrew: [??] by this woman who…

Richie: This is… So, her name’s Susan Peterson. This is a great story. She got married, started having kids, and their family was struggling financially. Her husband was in school. She wanted to figure out ways that she could help contribute and take care financially and also take care of the kids at the same time.

Her husband at the time was replacing windows for a job. She had this idea where she asked can I take the aluminum from the windows that are being taken out and recycle it for money. The owner of the company said sure.

So what was she going to do with this money and why does she do that? Well, someone told her you should start selling stuff online. So, she’s like okay I should sell stuff online. That’s like the 50,000 foot level. She started trying different things. Some things worked, some things didn’t.

Then, she had this idea. Oh my gosh, there’s… Sorry, this fly’s still here.

Andrew: I see it. It is haunting us, taunting us.

Richie: The fly doesn’t want me to tell this story.

Andrew: Right.

Richie: She looked at her baby’s feet basically and said there are no cute shoes for my baby. She got a pattern for shoes and said what if I did them out of leather, what if I made moccasins. So, she made moccasins for her baby and then she started selling them online I think on Etsy. People thought it was cool.

Andrew: …[??]…

Richie: So many people thought it was cool that she started making more and more and more. With the cash flow she got she was able to buy more products instead of having to recycle the aluminum. She was able to create more.

One day, I don’t know if you knew this part, she got a call. I think it was from Parent magazine, Parenting magazine, one of these magazines, that one of the Kardashians wanted to use her shoes in their photo shoot. She being naive was like I’m not going to give you shoes for free.

Andrew: So she charged them?

Richie: Well, she was going to, then they went back and said let me tell you how this works. She ended up giving the shoes. Now not only do the Kardashian babies almost every time you see their babies, go back and look if you want to, they’re always wearing these moccasins, but several celebrities are using them.

And, her business has started booming. She does a lot of her marketing on Instagram doing a lot of contests and things about baby moccasins. Recently she was on “Shark Tank” and…

Andrew: By the way, here, while I’m looking for the Kardashian photos I automatically will try to tee stuff up.

Richie: Yeah.

Andrew: I can kind of see it, but I don’t know what the Kardashians look like. This is Penelope wearing chambray one piece…

Richie: …[??]…

Andrew: …no gap. Oh,…

Richie: [??] might be wearing moccasins.

Andrew: Moccasins by Freshly Picked.

Richie: Yeah, that’s it, yeah.

Andrew: Where is it? More moccasins.

Richie: There you go.

Andrew: There we go. Kim Kardashian, Freshly Picked moccasins on Kim Kardashian’s blog. Yeah, wow.

Richie: Isn’t that crazy and again, it started with a stupid idea to sell things online. She didn’t know what it was going to be. She experimented. She started small. Everything that we’d be talking about she did, but bringing you back to the principal, leveraging existing resources. That’s what she did.

She didn’t have the money to buy leather to make the shoes, so she recycled aluminum from her husband’s company. That’s what we’re talking about. Starting with what’s right in front of you and leveraging those existing resources.

We always think that whatever we want to do is outside of us when in reality it might be right here, right in front of us. So, it’s very cool.

Andrew: Alright, well, these are . . . I think these are ideas that entrepreneurs need to hear that we do keep thinking that we’re one big thing away from getting started. One big idea, one big customer, one big funding round, one big something outside of us and always out of reach when in reality you’re saying, start smaller.

Don’t be afraid to jump on ideas that seem stupid and pursue a passion that you’re willing to stick with and it will give you a life that you want like, one that will allow you to do this. Sorry, you were about to say something.

Richie: No. Yeah, like you’re getting whatever you want right there. That’s so true. There’s one more thing I might add.

Andrew: Yeah.

Richie: Is when you’re doing it, whatever you’re trying to do, call it a project, name it a project. So instead of saying I have this idea for X, Y, Z, call it the X, Y, Z Project because a project can fail, a project has a beginning and an end. A project is an experiment.

So whatever you narrow your idea down to, call it the whatever project. Set yourself some time to get it done in a deadline to hit different milestones and then you’ll start getting on track because a year from now when you look back you’ll either have done something with your idea or nothing and it’ll be way better to have done something to know it’s not going to work out and [??] held onto it for that whole time or to have started, to get to a point where you can leave whatever you’re doing now to do exactly what you want to be doing. So, start small and call it a project and just make it happen.

Andrew: Great advice. The book is called The Power of Starting Something Stupid. If you click over on the home page and go to Amazon you’ll see Richie’s got a bunch of really positive reviews. They’re like this 115 customer reviews. Almost five stars. No one’s going to give you even if you wrote the new . . . even if you wrote the Bible, you aren’t going to get five stars.

People have to come in and rag on you a bit, but frankly this is really positive reviews from a book that’s full of great examples some of which we’ve covered here in this program but there are many more, much more depth to even the ones that we did talk about. The book is available everywhere. Go out, get it, grab it, read it and start something stupid, right?

Richie: That’s right.

Andrew: Alright.

Richie: Absolutely right. Make it happen.

Andrew: And the website if people want to follow-up with you. This is the site that I’ve been going to. It’s just RichieNorton.com. He’s one of the few lucky people out there who has his . . . Did you have to change your name to Richie Norton? Was it like Richard Norton? Someone else had RichardNorton.com so you went for Richie Norton?

Richie: I didn’t even look for Richard Norton. I just stuck with Richie.

Andrew: Alright. Well, congratulations on getting your name. Makes it so much easier to send people over to your site and right on the site we can see that there’s these 37 page action guide to make your stupid idea your smart reality and the 76 day challenge right at the very top of the page. Thank you so much for doing this.

Richie: Oh, it was my honor. Thanks so much for having me on. I really do appreciate it. It’s been great.

Andrew: Thank you all for being a part of it. Go do something stupid.

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Help Scout: How Does A Founder Find A Startup Idea That Can Get Some Traction? – with Nick Francis

How does a founder find a startup a idea that can get some traction?

After trying several ideas, which you’ll hear about in this interview, Nick Francis hit on Help Scout, software that offers a simple, straightforward way to provide customer support and now is getting a lot of traction with it.

I invited him here to talk about it.

Watch the FULL program


 

About Nick Francis

Nick Francis is the co-founder of Help Scout which is a simple, straightforward way to provide excellent customer support.

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The Foundation: How Entrepreneurs Come Up With Profitable Ideas (Out Of Thin Air) – with Dane Maxwell

How do you come up with an abundant, endless supply of profitable ideas — more than you could ever pursue?

Dane Maxwell is back on Mixergy and he has the answer.

Last time he was here Dane talked about Paperless Pipeline, the profitable transaction management software he bootstrapped for real estate brokers.

Since then, he created TheFoundation.com a program through which he taught entrepreneurs how to create web-based companies out of thin air, even if they failed in the past.

I invited him here to talk about his system.

Watch the FULL program


About Dane Maxwell

Dane Maxwell is the founder of Zannee, which makes real estate tools for recruiting and retaining brokers.

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Ideas Man: “Funny, Sexy, Naughty, Rebellious” – with Sheridan Simove

How do you stand out by doing something different?

I invited Sheridan “Shed” Simove here to get an understanding of his creative process and the system he uses to come up with new ideas. But by the end of this interview, as much as I hate to use the word, I was inspired by Shed.

All I can say is watch this interview. Don’t listen to the MP3; don’t read the transcript; watch it. You’ll be glad you did.

Watch the FULL program

Audio Version Prefer audio? Great! “Right click” here for the MP3 format. (Seriously, watch the video instead!)

I use my sponsor Wistia‘s video hosting because of Wistia’s stats.
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About Sheridan Simove

Sheridan “Shed” Simove is a British performer, author, and novelty product entrepreneur. He’s known for several widely-reported publicity stunts and controversies, but mostly he’s known for being brilliant when it comes to being inventive.

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Who should we feature on Mixergy? Let us know who you think would make a great interviewee.