688: (Solo) I Lost Years Of My Life To This One Mistake (And You're Probably Making It Right Now)

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1:03Okay, so I'm going to say something today in the Founder to Founder solo podcast that I don't think I've ever directly shared on the show before. So I've lost years of my life, like years because I didn't just focus. Not months, years. This is time I'm never getting back. And the worst part is I didn't even realize I was doing it. And I see this a lot, even for mature founders, especially the ones that are like ADD, like love creating, love building, love doing 101 things. It's exciting. It's fun to build. It's fun to create. But it was, you know, I didn't realize that this was stealing my time and it didn't feel like a mistake.

1:46It felt like being smart because I kept seeing opportunities everywhere, but it wasn't boldness. It was the dreaded shiny object syndrome. And if you're being honest with yourself right now, there's a decent chance you're doing the exact same thing.

2:01Nathan Chan:Hear the stories, learn the proven methods and accelerate your growth and future through entrepreneurship. Welcome to the Founder Podcast with Nathan Chan.

2:14after building founder for 12 plus years there was like early days where we had so many products it was absolutely insane like i never forget apple steve jobs left when he came back they had like 150 different products or something and he cut them all and he slashed them down to like i think eight or seven or something like that like i'm butchering this quote but effectively what he did was he made them focus on just doing a couple of things, one or two things. And that's where I find some of my best years in business are, where you just focus on one or two things and just do them extremely well.

2:50And that's the whole secret. It sounds so boring that most people that hear it immediately go looking for something more interesting, which is exactly the problem. So I'll tell you how this showed up in my business. Like founder early days were getting traction. Magazine was growing. Instagram was blowing up. We're getting incredible guests on the podcast. I started seeing opportunities everywhere. So I'm like, yeah, let's just launch something new. And then sometimes I think we launch new products out of desperation or sales or not where we want them to be. And I was just like chasing stupid ideas, new revenue stream, new initiative, and I was chasing good ideas.

3:25And that's what made it so dangerous. And I think it was really interesting. A mentor once said to me once, the most dangerous thing in founder I find is there's so many opportunities. There's so many things you could do with this business. And so we'd launch something new all the time. And the problem with shiny object syndrome isn't that the objects are shiny. Don't get me wrong, they are. The problem is that every new thing you chase takes focus away from the thing that's already working. And this is something that I look back on now. And if I had have just focused on a couple of things, the business would be so much bigger.

3:59It fundamentally just really robbed me of where I wanted to be. And I look back now and I kid you not, guys, I see entire years where I was spread across five or six initiatives and the founder team was spread across five or six initiatives instead of going deep on one or two. And this is expensive, not just in money, but time. So I want to give you a framework. It's a decision making matrix. So it's dead simple. And I didn't invent this, but effectively you need to ask yourself three questions and you want to score them each one from one to 10. The first one is ease of execution. How easy is this to actually execute and do?

4:40Not in theory, but in practice. Do you have a team? Do you have skills? How much can you use AI? All these different things. If this is something you can execute on in the next 30 days to 90 days, or you're building something from scratch, or it's going to take a year before you see any results, score it one to 10. Question number two, financial impact. What's the potential revenue? not in a best case fantasy land scenario, but realistically based on what you know about your market and your audience. Is this a high margin play, a low margin grind? Is it recurring revenue? One time hit, score at one to 10.

5:12So for us at Founder, we will not do any new big initiative in the business unless it's a multi-million dollar per year opportunity, right? Otherwise, it's just not worth it. Question number three, customer impact. What does this do for the customer? Does it align with our values and who we are as a brand? Does it make the customer's life meaningfully better? Does it solve a real problem they're telling you they have? Or is it something you think it is cool the customer didn't ask for? Score it from one to 10. And that's it. Three questions. Ease of execution, financial impact, customer impact.

5:46And here's the key. You're not looking for like a perfect 30 out of 30. You're looking for at least, you know, 23 and above, right? Something that goes, you know what? These are all my ideas. What scores the highest? What do I actually have capacity for? So I'll give you an example. So a few years ago, we were looking at adding sponsorship to founder. This is a few years ago. So believe it or not, a few years ago, founder didn't have a sponsorship arm of the business. And I tested it out early days founder. And I walked away going, you know what? I'd rather just promote our own products. But I knew there was something there.

6:23So ease of execution, I gave it an eight. We already have a community. We already are putting out this content. I believe I can turn that cost center into a profit center. We had relationships with brands. So the infrastructure was largely there. Financial impact, high. Sponsorship revenue at scale is significant. It's high margin. It's relatively predictable. If you can lock in long-term contracts, customer impact is minimal. All of our sponsors are products that we use, know. Real quick, before we jump in, I want to shout out one of our sponsors, Xero. I've used Xero from day one of Founder, 13 years now, and it's still how we run the business today.

7:02It's cloud accounting software built for founders exactly like us, and it automates all the admin that I used to do when I first started Founder. Invoicing, chasing payments, expenses, all the accounting. It really helps me get paid faster and keep an eye on cash flow. So Founder listeners, get a crazy 95 % off for the first six months. Just sign up through our form at founder.com forward slash zero. Terms and conditions apply. Remember, when you support our sponsors, you are supporting the show. All right, now let's jump back in.

7:36Promote like that we love. So there you've got it, right? Like high ease of execution, I score it an eight. High financial impact, I'd probably give it a nine if we could pull it off. And we did. And then customer impact was, you know, very minimal. So if I were to score all those, we're pretty much close to like 20, 25 plus. It was green light, clear yes. And it worked. It became a meaningful revenue stream for our business without taking away a big focus of the core business. It's integrated into our content team and we've got one person that manages it. So it's like a really, really, really, really solid arm, right?

8:13So now let me give you an example of what happens when you don't run the matrix. When you chase the shiny object syndrome because it feels exciting. So in the early days founder, we did like a coffee table book. I always wanted to do a Kickstarter campaign. I thought it would be so fun. And I just came up with this idea of taking the best interviews of the podcast and the magazine and putting into a coffee table book. Now it was cool. It was fun. It was creatively really fulfilling. And we raised$200 ,000, which sounds amazing, right? But here's what happened. When you price the book at$40 and then we stupidly price shipping at$40, the customer's paying at$80 in total.

8:50And if you think of it from a customer's perspective, so silly. I didn't know what I was doing. It was e-com failure 101. This is in 2016. I should have priced the book at$60 and the shipping at$20. And psychologically, we probably would have raised like half a million bucks. It was so silly. Anyway, that pricing mistake, it wasn't because I was bad at math. It was, I was so excited, shiny object syndrome, crowdfunding campaign,$200 ,000 raised. It was just so silly. Like I had no idea. If I ran that through the matrix, ease of execution, I would have given it probably a three or four because I've got to print a book.

9:26I never done that before. I've got to design a book. That wasn't so much the hard part, but I'd probably give it a three or four. Managing fulfillment, international shipping, that kind of stuff, right? Financial impact, moderate, you know, probably give it like a four, like it's a$40 book maybe and I wasn't even thinking making a lead gen customer impact like it was cool don't get wrong it's great and like it's a staple piece for the brand and like some very famous people bought that book and like you know it was cool but like nobody was asking for it and that's a project that should have been a no like I literally lost like eight months of focusing like small team but still like shouldn't have done it right felt exciting it was fun and that's the thing.

10:04That's really what changed my thinking about this is Alex Hormozzi talks about this idea that when you're trying to solve a constraint or a problem in your business, you usually have this like crazy ambition and it's really exciting. Then you hit some roadblocks, you hit this depth of despair. And it's only when you push through that, that you come out the other side and you solve that problem. And that's where focus comes into play. It's far more rewarding, obviously, to get to the other side but if you could there are founders and i've been there where you can just have a problem in your business you try and fix it you don't get the result and you say it doesn't work and it's not for me and then you try something else and you just move from shiny object to shiny object to shiny object where he talks about just moving through it you embrace the suck and then you work it out and you win the the tough way and you move through it and then you get the outcome it's not glamorous it's not exciting but this is what i've found so the founders who win They don't leave when it gets hard.

11:03They don't jump to the next thing, to the next thing, to the next thing, because it stops being fun. And so that's what I want to leave you guys with today. Long-term thinking. How can you win deep, not shallow? Because it beats short-term pivoting. Gary Dooley, one of my leadership mentors, he talks about winning deep, not shallow. And I love that concept. So I know it's a boring answer, but I know you're probably coming here for some hack or shortcut. And I've got a ton of those. I share them a lot, but there's a real lesson for me. So pick fewer things and go deeper. That's it. That's the game.

11:37The best founders I've ever interviewed, the ones that are running billion dollar companies, they do one or two things really, really well. They don't do 101 things. And I've been guilty of that for a very, very long time in my career. So guys, I hope this episode hit home for you. Send it to a founder you know spread the hidden right now. Share this podcast with any founder that would appreciate this. We work so hard to put out and find the craziest guests. If you have a D2C brand, we'd love to support you with Founder Operators. Just go to founder.com forward slash operators. It's our D2C community.

12:07It's crazy what we're doing there. We're doubling, tripling companies in like two, three months. We only launched it not that long ago. It is crazy, our system there. You got to check it out. Anyways, that's it from me, guys. I'll see you in the next episode.