705: (Solo) How Success Made Me Neglect the Thing That Built Everything

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0:35In just five days, you could actually be paying 35 % less without doing an absolute thing. OmniSend will move every flow across, list, and template. You just show up when it's done. And finally, because you're part of the founder community, you get 50 % off your first three months with the code FOUNDER50. Just head to OmniSend.com forward slash founder and that's founder without the E to get started. All right, now let's jump in the show. All right, I'm going to tell you about the dumbest thing I've done in 12 years of building founder. It's not a bad hire, not a failed launch. It's something way more dangerous than that because I didn't even realize I was doing it.

1:16Nathan Chan:Hear the stories, learn the proven methods and accelerate your growth and future through entrepreneurship. Welcome to the Founder Podcast with Nathan Chan.

1:29So for four years, from 2019 to about 2023, I took my eye off the thing that built this entire business. And by the time I'd noticed, I'd left years and years of growth on the table. So if you're running an e-commerce brand right now and things are going fine, and a key word, I want to say that word, fine, pay attention because fine can be the most dangerous word in business. And this is what happens when you stop focusing on your core products. So let me give you a backstory. Founders started as a digital magazine in 2013 and within a couple of years, we launched the podcast and the podcast became our engine.

2:07It's how we built relationships with incredible founders. It's how we built trough with our audience. It's how people found us. And over time, people started asking, hey, how can I learn more from these guests? And so we built an education platform. We took some of our most popular guests and we got them to teach. We created courses and coaching and now found a plus membership and the education business started doing really well, like really, really well. We're talking significant revenue and the machine was working. And here's where it gets dangerous. When your monetization engine is printing money, you start to tell yourself a story.

2:42The story goes, for me, it was the podcast is doing fine. It's running. We've got a team on it. Let me focus on the thing that's actually making money. So I shifted my attention and I was focused on the education platform and I was focused on building the team and I focused on product development, new initiatives, all these things that felt like they were moving the business forward. And the podcast pretty much went on autopilot, not intentionally. I didn't sit down and say, let's stop caring about the show. It was gradual and I stopped being as involved in the creative. I stopped obsessing over the guest strategy and I lost passion.

3:12for innovating and pushing the team on how to innovate, how we were distributing it, all that kind of stuff. And before I know it, for years, the show just kind of existed. Now, it came out every week. We still put out amazing episodes, but nobody's really pushing it to be exceptional. And one thing that really hurt me, and I'll be honest about this, is we lost our way for quite a few years and the show never grew as big as it could have because it wasn't the focus. And here's the part that'll mess with your head. the success of our education platform, the thing that was making us money, is actually what hurt the podcast growth.

3:47So the monetization was so good that it gave us permission to be complacent about the thing that was driving all of it. So I want you to think about that for a second. The better the downstream business performed, the less attention we gave to the upstream asset that was feeding it. And this is exactly what happens with many e-commerce brands. You launch a product, it finds product market fit, revenue starts growing, and what happens? You get excited. You start thinking about the next SKU. You've got a hero product. Now let's build a whole new product line, maybe a new channel. You hire more people.

4:25You start spreading your attention across all these initiatives and the core product, the one thing that built everything starts to drift and nobody notices it at first because sales are still coming in. The numbers look okay, but the growth flattens and you tell yourself, well, that's just the market changing or we've hit a ceiling. We need to diversify. No, what you need to do is look at the thing that got you here and ask, when's the last time I personally touched this? When's the last time I became obsessed over making it better? So then the question becomes, how do you know when your core product is drifting?

4:57How do you know when it's time to start creating other products? Because it's not always obvious. And here's what I've learned. And these apply whether you're running a media company, an e-com brand, or any kind of business. Number one is growth flattens. And you have a rationalization for it. You say the algorithm changed or the market saturated or we've captured our share or maybe you've stopped innovating. Number two, customer feedback gets more generic. When you're close to the product, you hear specific things like, I love this feature. This part doesn't work. Can you add this? When you're distant or you hear, it's great or it's fine.

5:33that's not engagement that's polite indifference. 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. It'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 cashflow. 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.

6:13Terms and conditions apply. Remember when you support our sponsors, you are supporting the show. All right, now let's jump back in. three you stop personally touching the product and for me i stopped being deeply involved in the show i wasn't reviewing the titles i wasn't pushing on guest strategy i trusted the process and the process without pressure became just maintenance and it was wild just thinking back how long i let it go that way and time flies when you're in other areas of the business and another thing you'll find is your best people get reassigned. And this is a killer. When a new initiative launches, where do you put all your A players on the new thing?

6:54Because it's exciting, because it needs attention and the core product gets the B team. Not because you decided to, but because it happened gradually and nobody questioned it. And the thing for me was, I didn't necessarily have an A team or a B team, but everybody wants to work on the new shiny, exciting thing. And I had a core group of people that's like, hey, let's just, I didn't even talk much about the pod. and I had other people managing it. It just become this thing. And I didn't really care about it, to be honest. It's really bad. It's really embarrassing to say that. And there's another angle this I want to share.

7:26Like I interviewed Gary Vaynerchuk a few years ago and I asked him when we were absolutely crushing it on Instagram at the time, growing like crazy. I said, we're winning on Instagram. We should just double down, right? And he said, no, you need to master all the channels. And my first reaction was resistance. I was like, but it's working. Why should I split my focus? And I think a lot of e-commerce founders feel this way. You find one channel that's printing money, maybe it's TikTok, maybe it's Meta, maybe it's Amazon, and you pour everything into it. But here's what Gary understood that I didn't at the time.

7:55You can never be complacent. You've always got to know that somebody's going to take it all away from you. And the channel that works today might not work tomorrow. The algorithm changes, the costs go up, a competitor figures it out. So there's this tension. On one hand, don't neglect your core product. On the other hand, don't become so dependent on one channel or one product that when it shifts, you've got nothing else. So the answer isn't one or the other. The answer is protect the core and build the moat. But you can't do the second one at the expense of the first. And I hope that makes sense.

8:26So what did I do about it? Well, in the past six to 12 months, guys, you will see we are on an aggressive refocus. First, tiles and thumbnails. We really start modeling what the best shows in the world are doing. We found something that blew my mind. We interviewed Alex Formozzi, one of the biggest names in the space. And that episode got, you know, maybe 20 ,000, 30 ,000 views on YouTube. And, you know, maybe another 20, 30 ,000 on audio. And then we interviewed the fans of Who Was Elijah, far less well-known. That episode got hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of views and listeners.

8:57Same show, same production quality, same view duration. The only difference was the title and the thumbnail. And that's when it hit me. Oftentimes, the content wasn't a problem. It never was. It was the packaging. And, you know, shout out to Scott, who's leading this. He's really reinvigorated everything and we're really pushing it. We're really pushing it on guests, really pushing everything we can do for the show. You know, we launched this solo show. We made a strategic pivot, right? About three years ago, we shifted from general entrepreneurship. We specifically focus on serving e-commerce founders, physical product brands.

9:27And the fourth is we started really focusing now on clips. We're going to really try and build out that short form arm of the business, right? So the point is we went from maintenance mode to innovation mode. We had clear targets. We're all trying to drive this. And it's a really big focus in the business. And the difference is immediate. So what I want you to take from this is if you're an e-commerce founder, your core product is your engine. Everything else, these new SKUs, these new channels, these new revenue lines, the team expansion, that's all fuel. And the fuel is important. But if the engine stalls because you've stopped paying attention to it, no amount of fuel matters.

10:02and the most successful founders I've interviewed, I've done over 700 of these now, they focus on one thing, maybe two, and they do it incredibly well. Airbnb, one product, one incredible product. The temptation to diversify is real. The shiny object is always there, but the founders who build something truly lasting are the ones who resist the urge to really chase the new thing before the core is truly great. And here's the test I use now. I run every initiative through three questions and I score each one, one to 10. How easy is it to execute? What's the financial impact? And what does it do for the customer?

10:37I talked about this on another solo episode. Make sure you check that one out. So if it doesn't score high on at least two or three, it's a distraction disguised as an opportunity. And I've learned this the hard way, losing years and years and years. So look, I'm not proud of this thing being on autopilot for years, but I'm grateful we caught it. I'm grateful for Scott reinvigorating the show and bringing back my passion. And we are on an absolute tear with this show now. So guys, ask yourself today, when's the last time you personally touch your core product? When's the last time you obsessed over making it 1 % better?

11:09If the answer isn't this week, you might already be in autopilot mode. Be careful. Creating new products does not always mean that it's going to help you grow your business. Oftentimes, it makes you regress, it makes things stall, and it makes you stagnate. Don't wait four years to figure out what I did. So guys, if you're an e-commerce founder, you want more frameworks, playbooks, the community keep the brand going not just fine check out founder plus you can try it for a dollar links in the description founder.com forward slash membership all right guys i hope you enjoyed this and i'll see you in the next one