Lessons - Becoming a Successful Entrepreneur | Jared Yellen, Founder of Project 10k

Welcome to Lessons episodes of Success Story, part of the HubSpot podcast network. These lessons episodes will be shorter conversations with past guests, valued members of the success story community, and myself. They'll be focused on teaching you actionable, insightful takeaways that you can use to upscale your personal and professional life. So I think that this is a smart way to do it. Now I want to unpack because you said you had four things, so right person or a dear right market or business model, I want to dive into those for somebody who wants to start something. They're going to be like, well, how do I become the right person? So how do we can also do a right idea, right market, right business model? So how do you make a great entrepreneur? What's the mindset you should be? So we actually have had a number of situations where when people are going through the process with us, their idea is like mediocre, but they're so right, and we still move forward. Because we know that we can make like with an extraordinary person, we can make a mediocre idea extraordinary. We've also had the opposite Scott where we've had these like freaking home run ideas, but like kind of mediocre people and we're like, ah, I don't know how to make a mediocre person great. Like that, I don't know how to do. So they need to get there and then we can start having a conversation. What we look forward to this, and we've now done this now for enough time to know exactly what we need in our idea co-founder. We need a voice for the company. We need someone that can handle the spotlight. Grant Cardone is an extraordinary promoter. Like what he's able to do from a promotional perspective is like on day, on day, on year seven, like from just like exposure and relationship capital, like it's really, it's just magical to see. So the combination of us means that we're going to shine like the mood on you and you're going to have this like spotlight and you have to just handle it. Like you have to handle the fact that you're going to get tons of press, you're going to get invited to be on podcast that would never have reached out to you. You need to handle the meetings are going to be set up with your ideal candidates to structure joint ventures. You need to handle going to one of the events that we host and there's a thousand people or 10,000 people there and we've decided last minute to call you up and you're pitching like you need to handle the spotlight. If that makes you queasy, we might still work with you as long as you're willing to learn because that's a very important skill or we have to find somebody else to partner with you to be in that seat because what we can't do is follow ourselves. Like we can't shine the mood on ourselves. We have to shine on somebody else and this is everything like what we go and we fundraise. Like we're shining this spotlight on you. Like any of the investors they know where I'm involved. They know I'm involved, but they want to know who's like who's the voice. We want to make sure that we're putting in this effort to shine the spotlight, get meetings that most likely would never happen for you on your own. And if it would happen, you have to have a lot more track record to make it happen. Immediately, you just need to show up. Like you need to show up as someone that they feel that they can trust with their investment because they know they can trust us. Like they know that's not their issue. They just want to know that you can. That's the key. You have to handle the spotlight. You have to want it. You have to be willing to learn. The other thing too is like we have only of the 70 plus companies. I want to say maybe three of them. The idea they came with is actually what we built. And those were three like industry technologies. So we really didn't know any better. Like these are things that like we've never experienced. Like we're building a software for the public adjusting industry. I didn't even know what that was like and now we're building a software for it. So I can't say that like the workflows right or wrong, like but the person that we're building it with has been in the industry for 20 plus years and he's really successful in the industry. Besides those like three business tech products that we just would not have enough knowledge to the influence besides like the user experience where we had a lot of say, everything else has been an ideation process. And some of them what they came with is what we're building is so radically different that you wouldn't even notice it anymore. So outside handling the spotlight, it's opening your mind to the fact that you might be right with your idea and you might not be the same way that we might not be right. Or we might be like it's the same concept we have to idea it. And we will not write one line of code until we are crystal clear on what is the minimum bot and what is the economic model. And if we're not clear on these, we will not progress because that's where you start burning through capital software development firms. They're going to start the moment you write them a check because they don't care. Like they don't care. They don't care about the lack of clarity makes them more money. Like they they like people that aren't clear because as a result, like they're going to keep on building and then over time like you're not clear. So you're going to get clear one day and they're not clear the next. And they're just coding and coding and coding and all of a sudden, what you thought was going to be $750,000 and it being two years and two million dollars and then you have to scrap the whole part, which was my story, right? So like that's the difference we're partners. And one of the thing too, we have people that come to us and they try to compare like what we're doing to incubators because there's a lot of incubators out there. And the other day I was talking to this young entrepreneur and he was like, yeah, I'm just deciding between what you're doing at 10X and there's this FinTech incubator that is interested in me. They didn't give it off for you. But interesting, I'm like, cool, like what are they going to offer you? And so they're going to offer me a little bit of money, tell me validate the idea and a few connections and some mentorship over the six-month experience working with them. I'm like, that's cool, Mike. I just have a question. On year six, when you decide to sell your FinTech product to QuickBooks, are they going to sit in the meeting to negotiate the deal? And they're like, no, no, it's just this six-month experience. I'm like, okay, cool, Mike. And in year three, when you realize like, you have to kind of re-engineer some of the software to scale. Like, are they going to be sitting in those meetings with you and deploying resources to like re-engineer that software? He goes, no, Jared, I told you, it's just this six-month thing. I'm like, here's a difference. The word incubator is the wrong word for us. Like, we're not an incubator. It should be called 10X co-foundership. Because we're co-founders. And we go from the day zero when we start until we sell that company. Like, we are on that journey. So like, when we need to like re-engineer something because we, we guess wrong collectively, or we just need to in order to scale further, or we got a great recommendation for like a new feature. Like, that's us with you, right? When we're going to sell the company in 18 months or 24 months, or in five years, and we're going to negotiate the optimal outcome, we're in it. Because like, someone's going to see it. Like, it's just going to happen. Like, we're in it. Like, we're in it. And that's a distinction to build a tech company on an island by yourself and think that a software development firm is going to be there to help you with all these major guarantee milestones, or that the incubator who's going to help you validate a concept is going to be there on the journey with you, they're just not the only thing that will be on the journey with you is co-foundership. So either you need to go out and build your own team, which is very time consuming, very expensive. And I'm going to say very risky. Because you don't know what you don't know. So you hire this wonderful CTO who's a really good engineer, but the dude can't or do that can't lead. So you have just a really good engineer that can't build a team around them. And there's no way you're going to reach your optimal potential. So that's the difference. It is co-foundership. And that's the non-negotiable.