Bryan is the CEO and Co-Founder of GreenPal, a self-funded app. Today, there are over 300,000 people using it to get their lawns mowed and it has $30M of revenue through the platform.
Bryan’s platform is a real success now, but it wasn’t always the case.
Looking back, around 10 years ago, things were looking a lot different.
Brian had a great idea and was determined to succeed.
But that was not enough.
He followed his initial plan and spent 50k on development, and 50k on door hangers.
Despite all this, around 100 people signed up and 10 transacted.
A year passed and that was what he had to show for it.
He didn’t have enough money left, or any data to go by.
He even asked for a close friend to help by using the app, but he didn’t.
Bryan was left feeling disappointed in the people close to him and not knowing what to do about his platform.
But he has always been intrinsically motivated, so his enthusiasm didn’t fade despite all of the challenges that came along the way.
In this episode, Bryan and I are going through the reality of building a business from scratch, how to take negative customer feedback and turn it into a positive outcome, and staying passionate about the vision you had when you first started.
In today’s episode, we also talk about:
Tune in and listen to Bryan as he walks us through the highs and lows of his journey and how he managed to keep going and enjoy every step of the way.
More from James:
Connect with James on LinkedIn or at peer-effect.com
Bryan is the CEO and Co-Founder of GreenPal, a self-funded app. Today, there are over 300,000 people using it to get their lawns mowed and it has $30M of revenue through the platform.
Bryan’s platform is a real success now, but it wasn’t always the case.
Looking back, around 10 years ago, things were looking a lot different.
Brian had a great idea and was determined to succeed.
But that was not enough.
He followed his initial plan and spent 50k on development, and 50k on door hangers.
Despite all this, around 100 people signed up and 10 transacted.
A year passed and that was what he had to show for it.
He didn’t have enough money left, or any data to go by.
He even asked for a close friend to help by using the app, but he didn’t.
Bryan was left feeling disappointed in the people close to him and not knowing what to do about his platform.
But he has always been intrinsically motivated, so his enthusiasm didn’t fade despite all of the challenges that came along the way.
In this episode, Bryan and I are going through the reality of building a business from scratch, how to take negative customer feedback and turn it into a positive outcome, and staying passionate about the vision you had when you first started.
In today’s episode, we also talk about:
Tune in and listen to Bryan as he walks us through the highs and lows of his journey and how he managed to keep going and enjoy every step of the way.
More from James:
Connect with James on LinkedIn or at peer-effect.com
So I'm delighted to welcome to the show today, brian. He's the founder of your Green Pal Today. There are over 300,000 people using it to get their lawnmode, with 30 million revenue through the platform. Welcome, brian.
Speaker 2:JJ, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me on your show.
Speaker 1:My pleasure. Well, things are going really well today, but we're going to go back to the moment when maybe they weren't. When are we going back to?
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, so today, 300,000 people using it. It still feels like day one, but Green Pal is a 10-year overnight success, so we can go all the way back to the beginning, when we were first getting the marketplace going, first building the app. I had just sold my first company, which was a landscaping company, and I decided I wanted to become a tech entrepreneur and recruited two co-founders and we built a really crappy version of an app that we thought would be the Uber for lawn care, and I remember it was like if you build it, they will not come. It was crickets.
Speaker 2:We spent a year building this thing with a development shop in Nashville, tennessee, where we live, and we released it into the wild and it was like pulling teeth to get anybody to use it, and any first-time founder or tech entrepreneur that is listening to this knows that it's hard to build an app, but it's twice as hard to get people to use it, and so we passed out a bunch of flyers all over Nashville Tennessee around 100,000 of these door hangers just to try to hustle up a handful of people to use the app.
Speaker 2:So we could figure out what we needed to work on, what we needed to fix and the lean startup methodology, getting feedback from live users and baking that into what we were doing. And so what I needed the most at that period of time was just really testers and live users, and after passing out 100,000 door hangers, we got a few hundred signups and we managed to hang on to maybe 10 or 20 of those people to use the thing and the real punch in the stomach was my good friend that I played soccer with in high school and I've been friends with him for like 10, 15 years.
Speaker 2:He had just bought a house and I said oh, that's congratulations.
Speaker 2:You just bought a house. You can use my app, greenpow, to get the lawn mower. He goes. Yeah, no problem, man, I got your back and I was like man, I really appreciate that because I need the feedback, I need for you to help me figure out what we need to work on.
Speaker 2:And a week goes by, maybe two weeks and I followed up with him. I'm like, hey, man, I saw you downloaded that, but I need for you to like, sign up and finish signing up and get quotes and hire a guy. He goes. You know what, dude? Actually there was this kid passing out flyers and I just hired him to do it and he's doing a great job. So I appreciate you, but I don't think I'm not going to need it right now. I'm like, dude, it's no big deal. We can get him on the platform and actually that would help me out even more because he can use it as a pro and you can use it as a consumer and this would be really helpful. So I appreciate that he goes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, man, I told him about it and he just like he didn't get it. He's not interested, and so I think I'm good man. But I think thanks for thanks for reaching out and I was like, oh man, I was like, dude, you don't get it. I just need, like, I need your, I need your love right now. I need you to help me and I need you to use this thing. And I'm not friends with a guy anymore, like that was like the end of our friendship. That was like I don't think he knows, I don't think he knows, but I don't talk to that dude anymore. It's like so, if you want to help an entrepreneur, use their product and tell them where it needs to be fixed, but that was painful.
Speaker 2:That was painful because I learned a hard lesson that the only thing that matters is the problems you're solving for actual live customers and nothing else matters. Your, your friends aren't going to care what you're doing. Your family isn't going to care. You're not going to get any support. You have to like stand on what problems you're solving in the world, how you're making people's lives better and simpler, and that's all that matters. And it was a painful lesson, but hey, it's all good it worked out.
Speaker 1:Because that's quite because you think in that case your friends would would help. I think a lot of fans are going to thinking they will. I mean, how did that feel that? Just that moment of like, oh it's coming, oh, so I can count on this one thing, Like, if I can count anyone, I can count on this happening.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, totally it. I think there was a couple of things. He wasn't an entrepreneur, so he had always worked a career job somewhere. So I don't in his defense, I don't think he really understood the gravity of how challenging it is to invent a new product from scratch that does not exist in the world, because there is no playbook there, there is no roadmap, it's just going from from one failure to the next and trying to figure out what works. And so maybe he didn't know and maybe he didn't know how important and crucial it was, even though I emphasize, it was. He just didn't understand it. He didn't have the context. So there's that. But it was.
Speaker 2:It was a rude awakening to like the harsh realities of what it's like to invent something new and what it's going to take. It's going to take like a determination of a fire inside of you that wants to see it exist and you're going to get punched in the stomach many, many times and that was one of dozens of things that that made it challenging. But but it was one that I caught me off guard. I was surprised by that because, you know, I would have thought, you know, here's a friend of 10, 15 years would have would have jumped in there with me and like helped me fill in the gaps of the product and and. But it was okay, like I had 10 or 20 other people doing the same thing. I just it wasn't like it was.
Speaker 2:My success was dependent on his use of the product, but it was just really surprising that that nobody's going to help you climb the mountain. You really got to. You really got to want to do it on your own and it really has to be something intrinsically motivated. You had to be intrinsically motivated to want to see this thing happen. If you're extrinsically motivated which means like I want the validation of friends and family that I'm doing the right thing that's gonna burn out real quick because you're not gonna get it.
Speaker 1:Mmm. And so what for you when you start? This was your intrinsic motivation.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think I had a chip on my shoulder that I just wanted to Prove to myself that I could, that I could make the transition from a blue collar entrepreneur To a technology entrepreneur. My first company was a landscaping business that I grew to over a hundred people and sold, and so after that I tried to like Live the good life, I think. I think I tried to like half halfway retire and that got really boring really quick, and so I learned something about myself that I was wired to want to be in the game I was wired to to want to be part of a mission, and so I made a decision Like, okay, from this day forward, I'm just gonna be working on my best idea, no matter what, and Green Powell was my best idea. It's the only good idea I've had in a decade. So that kind of helped me like stay the course and so so by default, I was gonna be working on this thing, no matter what kind of setbacks we faced and what let downs. So that that did help making that personal decision that I'm gonna I'm just gonna be enthusiastic about this for however long it takes to to get it working Helped a lot through getting through those first few years, which which were a slog and, and I think, selling a business and kind of Hitting a single or double.
Speaker 2:It wasn't like I was super wealthy after my first exit, but I had enough put back to live comfortably. I didn't have to work anymore. So going through that and and realizing that that wasn't the end, that that, that that was just really the beginning, kind of helped me manage my own psychology. That okay, this is the next kind of chapter, this is the next act of your, of your entrepreneurial journey. So you got to stick it out, you can't quit. So those things are what got me through the first three or four years.
Speaker 1:Because it feels like at this particular moment, when it's kicking off and what we're chatting before, like you had, you had used An agency to get to this stage, yeah, you arguably had built slightly the wrong thing, you'd gone big on marketing, you kind of you both, you'd all put your money in. But at that stage, when you kind of really needed that love and support from people, was quite a vulnerable moment as well, from a business perspective as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was a gut check it because you're right, we so. So, ideally, when you you're building a tech startup, you get a what Paul Graham calls a hacker and a hustler. You get. You get somebody that who's just business oriented, who's organized, who knows how to get teams together and just wants to see the thing come to life. And then you get a hacker. This person is just really good with the technical side and and these two forces come together and One plus one is three or five or ten and and I had two really good co-founders, but we were three hustlers none of us knew.
Speaker 2:None of us knew how to code. We had never, like we had never even attempted to build a website or anything like that. So I don't know what the hell we were thinking that we could do this. But we didn't let that stop us and so we we pulled our money together, like around a hundred fifty thousand dollars of our own money, and this was not like me plowing the proceeds from the first sale into the second Company. I didn't want to like go backwards, so I very much like made it to where Green Powell had to sing for its supper right off the bat.
Speaker 2:So this was like like liquidated savings, credit card checks, 401ks sold and things of that sort to pull together this money 23 of us and we we thought, okay, we'll just pay a development shop to build the app and then we'll market it and Because we know how to do that, and then we'll be off and going. And so we did that and we wasted all of our bank roll. But we got this terrible app that was hard to use and really clunky and barely worked and it took a year to build and we released that in the marketplace and it was just crickets. It was like pulling teeth to get anybody use it and then.
Speaker 2:So then here I am, I've we've just flushed our bankroll, don't really know what. I don't know, I don't know. I know that I know People want this because people were pissed off, it didn't work, and so I took that as like validation that it was a good idea. It because they would say you know, I downloaded the app and I, and I pushed a, push the button, I filled out all the stuff and nobody came and mowed the yard, and so they were pissed off, and so I was like, okay, well, what if it did work?
Speaker 2:I mean, people would actually use this thing, and so so I had enough validation from angry people that that it was worth like plowing forward, because if it was just, if it was just, meh then then you know, maybe, maybe I, maybe this wasn't worth pursuing, you know, but but I had enough validation from negative feedback that it was, and so what I really needed was to try to like Go through the iterative process of, okay, we've got a thousand things wrong with it, but these are the three most important things, and and we got to focus all of our limited bandwidth on these three things. And it's going through that over and over and over again, and the only way to know what that even is is through live users using it. You know every. You know no business model, no business, no product survives first touch with the customer, and so I needed like liquidity, really I needed suppliers and I needed buyers Doing business on the platform so I could figure out where the gaps were.
Speaker 1:Good thing was quite. I really really like it back. There was, I did actually Disappointed. Feedback in the early stages is actually validation of the idea. That's not something I've heard before but I really like it. But then how to move from that disappointed into engage comes from that. That's a build measure, learn loop sort of Eric Is, that's right is very well trod. I'm just curious how you then it's. In this moment You're kind of your bankrolls gone. Your friends and family are helping you how you expected. You, you, you, you. You've got the intrinsic motivation. You've got the unhappy customers saying why doesn't this thing work? But you don't, but you kind of don't have the development budgets to get, either get the users or to improve. How do you get from that quite low point? What's, what's your next, what's your next step in that? Because that feels like quite a powerful step of the journey.
Speaker 2:We were in a ditch, that's for sure, and there was a couple of things that stuck out. One was the lean startup by Eric Rees. I think that book came out in 2011 or 2012. So that was kind of a fresh new way of looking at things. And and we all read that book, and that book, you know, and 200 pages, teaches you like three things Get out of the building, get out from behind the laptop and talk to your customers, and so that was beat into our head. You know, we've got to go meet with our customers at their kitchen tables and Starbucks, wherever, and figure out, belly to belly, so to speak, where we're coming up short, and so that enabled us to, like I mentioned earlier, get the feedback that OK, there is, there is promise here, because these people it would be divine if it did work, they would love it, and so so that gave us the validation to keep going, and then also gave us the, the tacit, like actual feedback of OK, there's 100 things wrong. These are the first 10 you need to fix. Service providers are quoting but not showing up. Ok, why is that happening? They're quoting, showing up and then doing a half ass job. Ok, why is that happening, or or they they don't respond to the text messages that they get when they get hired. They just go to the person that just hired them. So, like these were like the first half dozen things we needed to fix, and so we we decided that we would just try to get it work on the smallest scale possible, like if we can just get to a dozen people using it buyers and sellers and not worry about the revenue, not worrying about anything else other than just getting like the buyers and sellers matched, and if we get it working on a really small scale, like 1220 people, then we could get to 100. And if I knew we get to 100, we get to a thousand and 10,000 and so on. So we made really, really small goals and is throwed all of our intensity into into hitting those goals. So the first 20, the first 100, the first 500, the first thousand, and we celebrated those milestones like it was 1999. I mean, we really we really celebrated them like they were millions of dollars and even though they were hundreds or thousands of dollars. So so that was how we kind of got unstuck.
Speaker 2:And one of my favorite books is the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Dr Stephen Covey, and one of the things he talks about in that book is your circle of influence and your circle of concern. So your circle of your circle of your circle of influence is your circle of concern. Is everything that's going on pissed off, customers, friends aren't using it, family doesn't get it, you don't have any developers. You know everything is going wrong. It's like it's your, your, your circle of concern and then inside of that is a much, much, much smaller circle, maybe it's even a dot at your circle of influence, and that is in that very, very small circle, is the circle in which you can act.
Speaker 2:And if you just focus on, ok, what's this, don't even care about the circle of of concern, only care about the circle of influence and and act in that, ok, so what can I do? Well, I got 20 customers and I can go talk to them, and I can. I can do usability tests with them on our crappy app and I can figure out what the things are. Ok, I don't know how to code, so that's a problem. I need to go to YouTube University and I need to learn every damn thing I can about becoming a terrible engineer, because this thing's got a million things wrong with it that I need to fix, and, and just literally like focusing on the little little circle of influence and acting in that, and then, as time goes on, you act in that circle of influence, how are tiny, it begins to grow, and then then you have a much bigger circle of influence, and so and so that's how we got unstuck.
Speaker 2:But it took a long time it took like three years to to actually have an app that we were proud of, that we built, that that worked and had buyers and sellers, had liquidity in Nashville, tennessee, just one city, and it might have been a couple of hundred people using it. And then from there, you know, we began just doing the same playbook over and over again. Ok, well, what now? Now we need to launch a second city. Ok, we got the second city going, now we need to do a third. Ok, we need to refine the playbook a little bit. And just kept doing that over and over again, and now we're in every city in the United States.
Speaker 1:I think what's amazing is the fact that you you, you had that to remember and that held together and that held together in those early stages. It's kind of like, even when it's like learning how to code, which feels feels like a really transition from blue color to white color in terms of how you approach things. It's kind of, I suppose, how was the relationship with the co-funds? How did you guys stay so, so tight during that stage? That must have been tough financially.
Speaker 2:It really was. You know, I got extremely lucky that that I had two other guys that were just as they had a chip on their shoulder, kind of like I did. You know, they wanted to prove to themselves and maybe to their family, and that they could build something that people would use and be a part of something bigger than themselves. And I think I saw that in them when, when, when I, when I asked them to be co-founders, and so I think if you can get that right, you can get somebody that has the fire in their belly, like you do, to see what, to see the project through and get it to be successful. No matter what, I think a lot of things can take care of themselves. You know you can learn whatever you got to learn. You can do whatever you got to do. You can. You can. You can jump in there and roll up your sleeves and get it done, whereas if you don't have that, you know, if somebody's kind of has the employee mindset, you know it's a very different mindset and and you're really looking for, you're looking for like what I heard has been described as pirates or romantics, and so pirates are people that are just like they wanna see the things succeed, they're driven against all odds to make it happen and willing to. They're scrappy and willing to do whatever it takes, and then romantics fall in love with the idea. They fall in love with the idea of what this product could look like if 100,000 people are using it and they're just romanticized by that.
Speaker 2:So if you can find people that you would characterize as a pirate or a romantic, that can be helpful, and it's not ordinary people. It's very strange, and so that's what we had going for us. And so then we learned the actual tactical skills we needed to learn. So I got very lucky. My advice on co-founders is to try to go it alone, because the odds of finding that business soulmate are really, really slim. And don't found a business with a co-founder unless you can't imagine not doing it with them. And like almost ask yourself if I had $10 million in the bank, would I strike this person a check for $9 million of it to start the business with me? And if you wouldn't, then don't.
Speaker 1:You say you're lucky with your co-founders and you're all in it together. Was there any outside pressure during that time?
Speaker 2:Yeah, a lot, because me personally. I mean I was running an eight figure business in the landscaping industry with 150 employees. It wasn't like I was king of the mountain or anything, but I had a pretty good business going and I sold it. And that doesn't happen very often in the landscaping business acquisitions of that sort and so I kind of like I was wondering, man, have I peaked? Because here I am now I've got this shitty app that I'm trying to like beg people to use for $27 lawn mowing. So it's like I feel like I've gone back 15 years.
Speaker 2:And so there was like a personal, like you know, it was a personal disconnect that I had, that I was wondering if I was cut out for this, and so that was kind of fueled some of my motivation to stick it out, because I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it. So that was kind of an internal piece of pressure that made it hard. My co-founders, you know, one of them was married and his wife was you know. They since have gotten divorced, but his wife at the time was like I thought you said this was gonna take a year. I thought I thought you said I thought you said within you know, like two years, that this thing would be like, you know, running, you know, like a well old machine and you wouldn't have to work these long hours because at the time they were still working full-time jobs, they were working nights and weekends on the project. It wasn't until a year, three or four that we could pay them a salary, and so it was bought in all the way with every like fiber of our being that we could to will this company into existence, and so that was a lot of pressure. And then also, you know, like you have this as a first time tech founder, you have this inclination to carry on the theater of success. You want your friends and family to you know, see what you're doing and you want it to. You want to feel like you're doing something worthwhile, and even though you only have 50 customers. So that sucked.
Speaker 2:But I knew that if we could just keep the numbers moving, that we would eventually get there, that success was inevitable, that it was just effort plus time and consistency would equal success, and it was just a matter of time. And so, even though the numbers were really small, I knew, if we kept doubling them, that eventually compounding would take hold. Compounding would do its thing eventually. And I still tell myself that, you know, even though you know we're doing well. Now I want to be at a million users. I want to be in the same conversation as an Instacart, doordash, postmates, uber, airbnb, green Palace still not a household name in the United States. So I want to change that. And so it still very much is day one, so I'm still managing these pieces of psychology to get to the next level of the game.
Speaker 1:What do you think it is, apart from compounding? Can we compound your two years away from being at that million mark? What is it? Do you think that helps you get to that million?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, you know the old saying, what got you here won't get you there, and so you know, we may find out that I'm not the guy. We may find out that you know there's three phases that every startup goes through, every company goes through. There's the startup, the grow up and the scale up, and I think we're through the first two and we're entering the third, and I've never really I mean I ran a big landscaping company, but you know that thing wasn't at super scale. I never ran a big scaled company before. So we may find out that you know I'm not cut out for it, in which case, you know, we'll figure out something else. We'll figure out a way to get a professional CEO in place or something, but we're at the early stages of that.
Speaker 2:You know, managers of managers and things of that sort. So I think what gets us there is figuring out ways to do what we're already doing, but do it better, and then also figure out ways to get some partnerships going in terms of like there's already, like an Uber for home cleaning, you know there's an Uber for home maintenance and things of that sort partnering some of these other platforms and cross selling that way. And then you know we still don't have a paid, we don't have any paid channels, everything that you know 50, 60% of the people that sign up for our platform or come through Google organic search, and so if we can figure out how to get the unit economics working on Google AdWords or Facebook, you know that may get us to a million users.
Speaker 2:So, these are things we were always experimenting with that you know, hopefully will get us to the next level, but we're still growing. You know we're growing 30, 40% on big numbers now, so and have been profitable for five or six years. So that's. It's a good place to be, especially when, like, the capital markets have started to tighten up and you know, we've been default alive for a long time, so it feels good. As it turns out, those were the right bets for our type of business.
Speaker 1:That's really interesting. There's this sense of am I the right leader? Cause I think that I think it's a really healthy approach to take into the next stage. I think it's the most founders are in that stage for the first time.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Because even if they're serial founders, to get to that stage most don't get more than once.
Speaker 2:It's true, and a lot of times, when you're reaching that scale-up phase, you know, more times than not, you do have external stakeholders that have the ability to replace you, and so that's what happens with a lot of founder CEOs they get replaced because they're not cut out for it, and so we may find out that I'm not.
Speaker 2:You know, as so long as I'm having fun and doing well at it, I'll continue to do it. That was another decision I made when I sold my first business that no matter what two things, I was gonna be working on my best idea, and then I was also going to be doing what I wanted to do, having fun doing it. And you know, while there's been some 100 hour weeks getting this company going, I haven't worked a day in over 10 years. It's always been the thing I wanted to work on that day. It's always intrigued me, it's always been interesting to me, and so if I don't feel that way, you know, and my passion isn't in it, then we'll get somebody else to run it. We're at a position where we could do that, and so I think it's important to realize every company reaches kind of the bottleneck of the founders' abilities, what their capabilities are, and you know, especially if you're a founder CEO, every company reaches kind of that choke point, and so I'm cognitive of that.
Speaker 1:I would say that my minority of founders to have the humility to acknowledge that, which probably means you're more likely to be the right person, because without humility comes the willingness to learn.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I don't know if it's humility or paranoia, but maybe it's a little bit of both. But I'll tell you this in 10 years of building this company, you know, if you're doing this type of thing with everything you got, you will evolve into a whole new person every year or two. Like it's crazy, like you'll read books and watch movies and you don't see them the same way. It's like because you're not the same person when you watched them or read the book two years ago.
Speaker 1:You're different.
Speaker 2:So you take the book in differently, and running a tech company that it's not like we've been growing at a blistering pace, but we've been growing pretty fast will cause you to rise to the occasion. It caused you to evolve into a whole new person. There's things you learn and books you read and mentors you seek out that you never in a million years would have done. So you evolve into a whole new person. That's one of the cool things about it, and so I think I've kind of surprised myself at moments where it's like, man, I never thought I could do that, and so the business required me to learn those things.
Speaker 2:I think one thing is to not believe your own BS, to not believe that you like oh, I'm not an engineer, therefore I can't learn to code. Or I'm not a finance guy, therefore, you know, I can't pour over the budget. Or I'm not a designer, so I can't weigh in on what this UX looks like, and you try to get a tech company going, you're gonna have to like, cast that aside and learn the 80, 20 of all of these things to be able to lead teams to do them, and so that's one thing that surprised me, whereas in my first 15 years building my first business. It was very linear. You know I learned a lot, but the tech company's been much more challenging.
Speaker 1:Looking back on these moments, what we say is the one thing that's kind of really stood out for you today.
Speaker 2:going through it again, yeah, you know one thing I've been guilty of in 10 years of doing this, you know because it's funny. It's like we self-funded it, we bootstrapped the whole thing, and I'm not like anti-VC, it was just the thing we needed to do. Cause if you had given me even though I was a second time founder, I was still kind of a first time founder If you'd give me five million bucks or a million bucks or whatever, I would have pissed it all away and then I would have had like a big crater that would have made it even harder to dig out and so and so there's like, on the one hand, it took 10 years to get where we are we're self-funded. But like if Doc from Back to the Future rolled up in the the Lorian and said, hey, let's jump back 10 years in time, you gotta do it all over again.
Speaker 2:The first thing I would do is raise money and it cause I could do it really fast. I have all the mistakes and knowledge of all the mistakes and all the scars, so I could do it all very much quicker, maybe in two years what took 10. So that's a weird thing to like to have in my head. So, as a piece of that is like all of the years where we were conflating activity with progress, and there was a lot of years where we would work seven days a week really hard on things that almost didn't matter.
Speaker 2:And that, looking back, that's tough, you know. It's just like man. We wasted half of 2014 not figuring out ways to get more traffic to the website. We were doing all this other BS that didn't matter, and it's like Godly, I wish I could have smacked myself in the face. So that's one key thing that stands out is like a cognitive dissonance that I have around time. I wasted doing things that didn't matter, and if I could do it all over again, or had to do it all over again, I would really focus on what are the one or two things that really matter. We need more customers. We need more traffic. We gotta figure out ways to build more traffic. The logo design doesn't matter. The UX on this one ancillary screen doesn't matter. You know, figuring out what our culture is gonna be doesn't matter right now, like this is what matters, and so that's one thing that hurts.
Speaker 1:looking back to the last decade, so that really echoes one of the things I work with my clients on in terms of there are actually there are kind of three default founder rules, which is kind of do more, go faster, self-sacrifice, and they feel like the right choice in the moment. But actually when you take a step back, actually if you do less you'll achieve more, if you go slow, go slow you'll get there faster. And actually if you prioritize yourself you'll have more impact.
Speaker 2:Slow is fast and fast is slow. Yeah, that's so true. And to the last point, man, there's been so many times I burnt myself out and gained a bunch of weight and felt like crap every day wasn't doing my best work, so I struggle with all those things too.
Speaker 1:Hey, you're a founder. Well, brian, thank you so much for today. This has been awesome and I really look forward to seeing how quick you can get to a million.
Speaker 2:Awesome, jj. Well, I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me on your show. This was fun.
Speaker 1:As you heard today, coaching opens up a whole range of insights and areas to explore. If you have a potential moment to revisit on the podcast or just want to learn more about coaching, book in for a 30 minute chat with me at peer-effectscom.