Lessons - He Built an Eight-Figure Business Without Raising a Dollar | Chris Smith - Curaytor Co-Founder & Author of The Conversion Code

In this lessons episode, explore how entrepreneurs can choose the right business by aligning opportunity with long-term goals. Discover how different growth stages demand different strategies and leadership, understand why building for longevity often requires resisting short-term pressure, and uncover how the best founders embrace hard problems as the path to lasting success. Okay, so a lot of corporate experience all makes sense. Now I heard something that is interesting to me that's a great entrepreneurial lesson. You mentioned some businesses are not the right kind of businesses. And we'd argue like if you can build a business to a hundred million dollars, that's a great business, but it wasn't the one to go to a billion. But let's let's shelve that for now. I have a different question. When you're starting something new, what is the right business? So if you're an entrepreneur and you're getting into it for the first time, how do you decide where to spend your time? For the person starting it, it's the business that accomplishes their goals at the time. Austin's goal is to run a billion dollar company. So he started Picasso and accomplished that goal. But that was a realistic goal. So to sort of have this hybrid between realism and surrealism, it's like, yeah, I know I could build a million dollar company. And even now it's funny you mentioned Austin because with that, I'm sort of at a similar point with Curator, my own company, because we basically sprinted to a certain size where private, so the numbers are not out there, the way venture capital backed are, but we're private, we're profitable, we got cash, we do a million a month in, in MRR, like we're a great business. But the way that it is built today, it does not lead to a billion. Because commission zinc and tiger leads in Boomtown, we've seen the comps for what we've built. And the comps are at about 350, 250, maybe 500 million. That is the highest. Then we looked and we said, okay, who are these brokerages that no one's heard of, that everyone makes fun of, that kind of suck and they're kind of new and they're not even really doing things that well. How are there like six of them worth a billion? And there's not one SaaS platform worth a billion. So I'm swimming in the wrong stream. But I can't become a brokerage because all of my clients are with all the brokerages, you know, I'm Switzerland, it's important to me by the way. So it's hard and so to pick the thing up off the tracks and go build the business of tomorrow, while you're working on the business of today, it's a lot harder than it sounds. And the key is just having great people around you. We were never able to look too far into the future when we were caught up in the weeds. Okay, so now let's sort of walk through the entrepreneurial journey. And when you started, when you started a curator, when Austin started Picasso, there's playbooks you deploy. There's playbooks for your product market fit. First 50 customers, first 100 customers from zero to one million from one million to 10 million, from 10 million to 100 million. So walk me through the playbook for getting a company off the ground. I want everybody to get the best advice possible. I've built a company like that. I have great opinions on it, but there's a guy named Jason Limkin. He is the, I believe, the smartest person when it comes to growing a SaaS business from zero to 10 million in ARR. Because the reason I say that is as I'm on this journey with Jimmy and as I'm working with Austin and going through all these ups and downs, I feel like he's speaking directly to me and he's never met me. He's talking about my problems. He's talking about my issues. He's basically like reading my diary on Twitter. I'm like, dude, how do you have my PNL? What are you doing? And he showed me that he knew me. And so I then really latched on to him because he could get me where I knew I could get next. See how I'm saying? But what I love about him too is he's like, I ain't the one that gets you from 10 to 100. And the person that gets you from 10 to 100 is probably not the one that gets you from 100 to a billion. So don't get romantic about the who or the how. And so for Jimmy and I, we are not driven by financial gain, which ironically allows us to play this sort of Simon Sinek infinite game. And so as opposed to some of the other founders I've seen sort of sell, move on, you know, leverage to level up. We've chosen to pivot. We're like Ross on friends. We're pivoting. Pivot, pivot, pivot. Because we know that we are talented enough. We know that our team is good enough. We know that our ideas are smart enough that we can be bigger and better way bigger than we are today. When we see companies that are bigger than us and founders that aren't as good as us, we don't stop. We just keep going. You know, but that's how we're driven. I can promise you 98% of the people that started Curator would assault it already. And they probably be like building an island somewhere, you know, like, but that's not how we think of success. We love the work. I heard a story. Let me tell you a quick sports story. Yeah, go for it. There's been one flagrant foul in the history of the NBA All-Star game. And it was Dwayne Wade accidentally fouling Kobe Bryant across the face. He broke his nose or broke his cheekbone blood was gushing out. And you know, it's the All-Star games. You guys are half of these guys are friends. Well, two nights later, the heat played the lakers. And so Dwayne's a little nervous because he never really got to tell properly that he was sorry. And Kobe comes out and he's got this mask on, you know, the sort of mamba mask. And Dwayne goes up to him, you know, before the tip off as the games about the start, he said, Hey, man, I'm so freaking sorry. You know, you know, it's an accident. But I felt like I just needed to say it again. And he said, Kobe looked at him dead in the eye. And he said, I like it. He likes it. He liked the twist that he had to play injured. Because that's different. And it's unique. And it's experience now that he can go through that other people haven't that he can learn from that he can go show his highlight films, just like LeBron were in the mask on the heat. We've got some Kobe mask games. People that reach the ultimate scale. They are fascinated by solving problems. So if you're building your situation where you're problem free, it's tough to get all the way to the top because you have to be willing to tackle problems. People won't or that they aren't. And so for Kobe, he's just like, this is cool. Time I am behind my back. You know, I'll close my eyes on a free throw, right? That's a new challenge because the regular game is easy now. And so I'm trying to level up from there. Leveling up from where Kobe was was shit like playing with a broken face. You know, now you made an interesting point. You said when you're building out curator, a lot of people would have sold it before now. There's a lot of people that would have built it to sell. So when you're building a company and you want to build something that has some longevity and lifetime and legacy to it, it seems like that's what you're doing right now. And you want to test out different things. There's a lot of pressure from external stakeholders because a lot of entrepreneurs they bring in VCs, venture capitalists, investors. And there's a timeline is a ticking clock before they have to have an exit event. So you want to build something long term, doesn't investor have that same shared opinion? And I guess the question would be for a founder, if they want to take that pressure off, they want to build something that could be more of a lifestyle, have some longevity to it. Should they work with venture capital investor outside money that's going to put all of that pressure to expedite everything? No, you know, I wore this sort of anti-silicon valley anti-venture capital hat for a while similar to the guys from base camp where it's like, hey, there's another way you don't have to do it this crazy way that Silicon Valley does it like be proud of, you know, being profitable as an example like things like that. And simple stuff. I actually, as I've gotten a little bit older, I just it's kind of back to that example we just gave. There's a lot of ways to do things and I don't know how to do it the Silicon Valley way and that actually now bothers me Scott. I'm now basically saying the thing I made fun of for 10 years, that's actually the thing that I need to understand better if I'm going to continue to be the best marketing sales professor in the world because it's incredibly difficult to keep up with this stuff. I got to push alert yesterday. Google optimize going away in 2023. I'm like, dude, that's in my book. I can't unprint my book, but I know that going in. So anyway, I hope that makes sense. I wanted to follow one point about who to onboard though, you know, how do you onboard? Who do you off board? Is a really interesting question too because there's these people that like push you up the mountain top and they they follow you like a disciple. They really do. When you have a great culture and you have a great mission and you have, you know, founders that are passionate like it's sort of a good cult, right? It's awesome. There's words, there's colors like they're like it's a real thing. It's amazing. It's hard to replicate, but that startup phase has to change to continue to scale. So all of a sudden, you've got these people that pushed you up to this huge mountain that you're grateful to have ever seen the top of and you're starting to realize that they're the wrong people to help you go up the next mountain. And so that change management is tricky. You know, because you've got all these people that got you there, but you know, they won't get you here, but you're not going to just lay off all your rest people. It's hard. And so to me, you need to have some sort of unemotional line in the sand where we are going to be, you know, founder led, service led, passionate. When we hit these numbers, we are going to then go find experts like this to help us do this. If that was clearly defined on day one, people would know which exit ramp they wanted to take, but who knows what's going to happen with a company, we could have gone bankrupt several times. So like, they don't even, like, they're buckling up, but they don't know for how long. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.