Lessons - Why Your Biggest Failure Might Be the Best Thing That Happens to You | Darren Lee - Founder of Voics

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In this lessons episode, discover how early failures can become the foundation for entrepreneurial success.

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Understand why cash flow, authority, and influence can make or break a business.

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Explore how repeated experiments reveal what works and uncover how patience and experience can turn past mistakes into an unfair advantage.

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So building an agency is not easy, but I've had conversations about it before.

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I mean, I've spoken to Eric about it a lot because he does it at scale.

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Yes.

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But if you ever talk to Eric, like his first versions of I think it's single grain.

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Single grain.

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They were just shit like they were horrible.

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And he thought he knew what he was doing.

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He did not.

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And it was very tough.

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I mean, Eric's another really smart guy to listen to and learn from.

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But like just to show the evolution of a person, because I actually want to learn about the mistakes you've made.

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I want to learn about how you grow as a human, as an individual, but to show you like how

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how far somebody can come.

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And this is more just a comment on people that have been in homeostasis in maybe a nine to five for the past 10 years, and they're scared of entrepreneurship.

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So Eric started off, I think he acquired it.

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Single Green, yeah.

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And then it flopped basically, because he thought he was like God's gift to marketing, and it was not happening.

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He eventually figured it out.

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Now Eric is so good at what he does that he arbitrages marketing agencies

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buying them in Europe at a certain multiple and then selling them in the US for a better multiple.

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So he literally arbitrages private equity through marketing agencies.

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That's how good he's gotten at the marketing agency game.

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In like the past, it has to be under 15 years.

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16 years.

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So, or 16 years.

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Been a while since I had that interview with him.

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But yeah, it's just wild how you can evolve to think that at the beginning he couldn't even manage one.

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Yeah.

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And now he makes money off buying and selling.

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I actually asked him about that too, about the buying and selling process.

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Because it's such a difficult game, right?

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He knows all too well about it.

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It's very difficult.

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Just to give you a bit of insight, like so, like people kind of look at Vox as a whole and think like, okay, just like got lucky, you know, because...

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There's probably a lot of other... Why do people say that though?

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Because I don't think that.

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So a lot of the guys that run these production houses are a lot older.

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They've been in film.

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They've been in the video game.

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They've been in the audio game specifically.

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They're audio engineers.

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They've run big companies in the US.

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They've worked...

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In Hollywood, they worked in New York on video production and so on.

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I didn't do any of that, right?

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So a lot of these guys have like... Is that where that tweet came from where you said you're like the biggest fraud?

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Yeah, effectively, right?

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Because a lot of the bigger agencies, it goes with 40, 50 employees, who, by the way, I guarantee you are probably doing more revenue than them because a lot of them are dwindling down, right?

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Because these agencies are not nimble.

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They can't move pretty well.

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A lot of these guys have a lot of background, pedigree, and they've worked on shoots, motion shoots, and so on and so forth.

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Whereas I just realized that that was super unscalable to do in-person stuff.

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The focus on post-production was a lot faster and easier, right?

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So that's what people kind of look at that concept.

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However, I've been in the game for a lot longer than just a couple of years, right?

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So I started out when I was like 16, 17, dude, and I was running parodies.

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Back then.

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So I was running...

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This was the old days of attention, marketing, and getting in the door.

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So...

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Same as Chris Williams.

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Young Irish people, right?

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Whatever they do, they party all the time.

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I was running mystery tours.

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Have you ever heard of this?

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No.

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All I mean is like a ghost tour?

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No.

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Oh, no.

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I love this.

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So basically, it's where you book a double-decker bus and you sell tickets for the bus and then you drive people around until you end up in like a bar or a nightclub and basically everyone just gets pissed on the bus effectively, right?

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So you sell tickets for the bus.

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I was like 17 years old doing that and I was running this all around Ireland.

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So I was once a drinking age in Ireland.

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18.

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18.

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all right for that for that for that for that for that for that for that for that for that for that for that for that so I did that initially and I was like right what's the concept people need something they want something it's how desirable it's like fun it's entertainment we'd run things on like Facebook and software just like post on Facebook that work then I started running bigger events so I started running proper club events at that point then that was really good but it was like it wasn't a reliable way to build a business and to maintain a business and it was kind of shady and you're like oh do I really want to be doing this but I was doing that like 18, 19

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And then I was really into the scene of music.

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I started really into like house and techno music always for the past 10 years.

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However, what I noticed was when I was living in London, fashion in London around clubbing is huge, huge, huge, huge.

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So I was really at the early stages.

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This is 2016, 2017 of 90s clothing being brought, being like resurgence.

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So I saw Urban Outfitters.

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I saw a few other vintage brands.

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And I thought, huh, I used to go to all these raves and people used to spend so much money on their clothes, like $200 or $300 on their outfits.

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Why not just be the person that sells rave clothes to rave kits?

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So I would buy all these boxes from the south of Italy, like the highest quality vintage clothing you can imagine.

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Like all the Stone Island, Nike, Adidas from the 80s, 70s.

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And I'd house them all in my...

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bedroom.

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So I had these huge boxes in my bedroom.

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I'd sell everything to Shopify direct to consumer from the website.

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That's awesome.

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And it was flying out the door.

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I was going to say that seems like a really... Outside being like a...

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like a business that could have cash flow issues.

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Oh.

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Because that seems like a super expensive business to start.

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Wait for this.

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Wait.

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So I'd buy the boxes.

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You'll find it's interesting.

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So the way vintage clothing works is that you get different grades.

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A, B, C, depending on quality.

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So you get a box not knowing what's in it.

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It's like a lucky dip box, right?

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And then you get the stuff on a Friday and you just sell it for the next rave, for the next party and so on.

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So I had a lot of like stock, okay?

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And this would cost me a couple of thousand dollars a box.

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And I was buying them every week.

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At that point, we were making a lot of revenue, but we're spending it all on stock management, right?

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And getting the stock in, running ads and so on and so forth.

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Bear in mind, I was modeling all the clothes myself.

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Oh my God.

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Everything myself was modeled from my balcony, dude.

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Oh my God.

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From my balcony.

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So this was running quite well.

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I was working in investment banking at the time.

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And during this, I was making more money in a week than I'd make in a month working as an intern, as an investment bank.

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So I was obviously detaching from reality with what was possible and so on.

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Until... Revenue or profit?

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Revenue.

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Revenue.

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Yeah, wait for this.

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Until we hit, of course, cash flow problems.

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Basically just couldn't acquire customers as fast as how much we were spending, how much money we were having.

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So that was my first real internal explosion of running a business.

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And that was all done in person, in stock and everything.

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Because I realized that when you're shipping a four pound or five pound Stone Island jacket, winter jacket, it's going to cost a lot of money, right?

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Yeah.

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Massive failure, but a huge idea in terms of, again, attention, what do people want, solving painful problems.

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And what I was effectively selling was status.

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Everything that I've been doing has been selling status.

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It's been, it's a parody.

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It's another thread that I put down.

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Everything has to do with status, right?

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So whether it's a parody, whether it's a rave, whether it's clothes, everything went back to status.

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So I've been doing this for quite some time at this point and realized that I had no authority.

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I had no influence.

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I was paying for attention, paying for businesses, but I still didn't learn my lesson.

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So then when I moved to, when I was in Accenture, I was trying to like get my money back together, trying to sort out different things.

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I was living in Dublin and I just came back from traveling and I'd spent so long, again, in Asia that I realized that.

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If you lose your passport, you're screwed.

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Okay?

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So I was trying to build a digital passport app, super VC-backed.

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I was standing inside Dublin Airport interviewing people going through the terminals.

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I looked like an airport risk affected you.

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You raised for this?

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This was the plan.

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So I'd walked around asking people whether you use a passport app, and it was really well validated.

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People really wanted to use it.

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Huge legal issues, huge regulation issues.

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I was going to say, that seems like a lot of burden to overcome, but...

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Did all the wireframing, did all the prototyping myself, bear in mind, in my kitchen.

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I did everything myself, everything myself.

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Went to get funding because I was nobody.

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I didn't have authority and influence.

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I couldn't get funding.

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So this is when I realized, okay, I'd done all this stuff for many years.

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Made money, lost money, made no money, lost more money and so on and so forth.

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And that was a time that I shouldn't be...

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trying to build, I should be trying to listen and learn.

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And that's when I fell into the podcast space, which was much more like patience game, playing the long game, getting the insights.

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Everything that I do now has come from the 250 lessons.

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Every single thing that I've learned has come from the 250 episodes I've recorded.

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Because...

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They were the things that I needed at that point in time.

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Whether it's mindset, practical, business, logic, fitness, health, whatever.

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That was what I needed at the point in time.

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And that's what I'm utilizing now.

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And that's what I'm even doing now.

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Interviews I have now are often solving my own problems.

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Because the problems for me are not unique.

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They're for everybody else.

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But I just think it's an interesting observation.

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Because...

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when I had made all those massive mess ups, yeah, I wasn't journaling the mistakes and all this kind of stuff, but it's at a subconscious level I was learning what was wrong.

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So that if you think about it, with kickoff sessions, which became Vogue's a company, when people come to interact, they have the social proof, they know what's happening.

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There's the trust, there's the authority, there's the influence.

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Everything that I had lacked was there.

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It was primed.

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So all I had to do was just had conversations with people and said, this is what we do.

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This is how we do it.

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And it was just like,

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it was just so natural so natural so easy even to this day when we get on calls to people like any case study you need is just to start with me that's always the best case study right so all the gaps that i had in my youth trying to figure it out have all kind of compounded to this point in time which is when things come much more organically and naturally

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Thanks for tuning in.

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If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode.

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And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode.

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See you in the next one.