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The "No BS" version of how startups are really built, taught by actual startup Founders who have lived through all of it. Hosts Wil Schroter and Ryan Rutan talk candidly about the intense struggles Founders face both personally and professionally as they try to turn their idea into something that will change the world.
Ryan Rutan: [00:00:00] Welcome back to the episode of the Startup Therapy Podcast. This is Ryan Rutan, joined as always by Will Schroeder, the founder and CEO of startups. com. Will, I was coming up with this cool plan to make startups. com a lot bigger by saying no to anything we've never done before. Just saying yes to doing exactly what we've always done.
Does that feel right to you?
Wil Schroter: Yeah, because that's how startups grow. Startups grow by just only doing the things that they've done before. Yeah, not stretching at all. Yes, we're not pushing any buttons. Yeah, it's amazing to me to watch Um because most people most reasonable people who by the way are founders, right?
That's how they come into this game.
Ryan Rutan: Yeah, I was gonna say you lost me a reasonable people will Yeah,
Wil Schroter: exactly, right? They come into this game, and they're like, um, Hey, I'm being asked to like, say and commit to a lot of things I can't commit to. Like, how can I possibly do that? Customers are asking me.
Should I, you know, can we do this next thing? We've never done that. How can I possibly say yes? Investors are asking me how are we going to [00:01:00] get to 50 million dollars in four years? I don't know, how could I possibly tell them yes? This doesn't make any sense. Funny thing is, you're right. Yeah. Absolutely doesn't make sense.
Ryan Rutan: Doesn't make any sense. And
Wil Schroter: you have to do it. Yeah. So I think that's it. That's what we unpacked today. How do I say yes to everything? And then go and figure out how to make it happen. Right.
Ryan Rutan: I think it's an important concept to get to, right? We're not, we're not asking you to say, to say yes to something.
No, you can't do. We're saying, we're asking you to say yes to things you haven't tried yet, or haven't done yet, or haven't thought through yet, right? There's a difference between committing to something and guaranteeing it, right? We can commit to, Making the effort. We can't guarantee that it will get the results.
There's startups in a, in a nutshell, right? I think that is what we're here to do.
Wil Schroter: I think most of us, you know, if you haven't started in the startup game, kind of like you and I have, it's kind of all we've known, but for most people, uh, you know, again, they're reasonable people. They come from companies or jobs where there is certainty.
They come from a, like their last job, they ran a restaurant. When you ordered food, they [00:02:00] had food. If they didn't have the food, they didn't deliver the food. Like it was pretty straightforward. They worked at big co and they could say, we either have this in inventory or we do not. And you could make great binary decisions based on certainties.
Now you have none of that. Yeah.
Ryan Rutan: Certainties. That's it. Right. Nothing was a variable in any of those cases, right? It was just like, do we have, or we not have, those were both constants either had, or you didn't. Um, this is something we do or something that we don't do. So you're, you're living in a world of constants.
And I talk about this a lot on the podcast, startups are the opposite, right? We are a world of variables that we are slowly chipping away at trying to turn into some
Wil Schroter: level of constancy, right? That's it. Yeah, exactly. Early on, I didn't know this. Again, most people don't know this because it makes no sense, right?
We're supposed to, we're supposed to say yes we can to things that haven't been done yet. And that's terrifying. And again, I get that. It's terrifying. Right. So there's. No version here where we're going to say you should feel comfortable about it. But I think before we get into how this affects, how we talk to customers, how we talk to investors, even our own [00:03:00] staff, I think the first thing we should do is just kind of caveat and you touched on this.
We're not talking about lying to people. That's not, that's not what we're saying. So here's the distinction we'll keep coming back to. The distinction is this we're talking about things you potentially could do and have not done yet. We're not talking about things that clearly cannot be done. That's fine.
That's a totally different.
Ryan Rutan: Yeah. Right. Look, if you ask me, Ryan, can you shoot a three pointer? I can say yes to that. Right. Have I? No. Could I reasonably do it? Yes. Probably. Um, if you ask me, can you dunk? I have to say no to that one. Right. Time has passed. Not going to happen. Right. So there, there's some things we can commit to.
There's some things that we just can't, right? We know it's outright impossible. Right. Right. Or not practical, or something that's just so far out of the current scope that it doesn't even make sense to try. Sure, it's a no. But to your point, how the hell are we going to grow if we just keep doing exactly the same things, right?
Doesn't [00:04:00] make any sense. Can't. By nature of what a startup is, it has to do everything different all the time because it didn't do anything until now. Now it's doing very little. Now we want it to do
Wil Schroter: a lot more. Exactly. Exactly. You know, and services companies run into this all the time, right? You and I have run services companies, so we've been through this.
And the bane of their existence, especially early on when they're trying to grow, is how do I commit to client work if I don't have the people to fulfill that client work? And the answer is always, how are you going to have more people if you don't commit to work you don't have yet?
Ryan Rutan: There's a catch 22, but it's only a catch 22 if you keep saying no, right?
You're stuck in that cycle. If you keep saying no, you'll stay there. There's zero, zero chance you escape that. There's no other way. It's like, well, how will we make that up? Nope. You never, I mean, just never get there, right? Nothing happens. You have to start to say yes. Does it always go to plan? Does it always work out perfectly?
Do you have to push team or people or hire or maybe even go upside down in a job? I did this more than once. I'm sure you did the same thing, Will, where I [00:05:00] paid more to get something done than I charged for just so I could say yes to it so I could learn the capability, start to deliver that service to clients, see how it went and decide, I want to do that again ever or not, right?
It's not, it's not binary. It's not just yes or no. We can explore along the way.
Wil Schroter: It is. And you know, it's a couple things like early on again, let's talk about, you know, we're building, let's say a services business and this applies to every business. So I'm just using services because folks that are listening that run a services business or have been involved in a service business, this is so obvious.
And I'll give you an example right now. I'm running around because as you know, Ryan, we're the early process of building our home and I'm running around talking to all of these contractors, right? Trying to give them my money, lots of inflexible service business. It's the most unbelievable thing I've ever seen.
And I've never talked to so many people in my life that are so unwilling to grow their own companies, right? I'm like, Hey, here's a project that would be phenomenal for you. Ah, I don't have the guys to do it right now.
Ryan Rutan: I'm handing you the opportunity. And the [00:06:00] money to go hire the people so that the next time this question comes up you can say yes.
Wil Schroter: Oh my gosh, right? Now look, in some cases you don't want to grow, right? And you're fighting with the people you have. That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about people who do want to grow. I'll give you another example. Early in my career, when I was just starting to learn this, when I was just starting to learn that the answer is yes, and then you figure it out.
I'm in a pitch meeting with a friend of ours, who used to be on the team here at Startups. com. Great guy. We're in a pitch, and we were both in college at the time, this was very early, right? We're, we're, I, I, I, talked to some campus organization, some organization, Ryan, when you were on the same campus, you probably, uh, saw them, anyway.
We're sitting there giving the pitch, and this is like, 95 ish. So really early in the internet, right? The internet still came on on 3. 5 floppy. This is almost like out of a movie. She asked us, she's like, can you put e commerce into our site? Cause she had just read e commerce and time magazine like yesterday.
She didn't even know what the context was that made no sense for what her request was, right? The simultaneous opposite answer
Ryan Rutan: outcome.
Wil Schroter: Exactly. As [00:07:00] I'm, as I'm melting, yes. He says no, and I'm like, wait, what? And I look over at him, and he knows the look, right? So he, at least he was aware enough to know, like, okay, let's, like, we'll do talkie.
And so we get out of the meeting, and I talked through it, but like, we get out of the meeting, and I'm like, Dude, what are you doing? He's like, we don't have any developers that can do that. Right? And to be fair, like, they didn't exist yet. We're still figuring out what e commerce was, right? I'm like, how do you think we're ever going to find them?
And so, you know, we said, we said yes to that project. We built e commerce, right? Uh, and we hired our first developer. We wound up being phenomenal in what led to what would become a team of 50 developers from that one kind of initial hired and kind of like building that practice. And I thought to myself.
What if we had said no? Like, what if that, like, what if we were to say, like, Hey, we just don't hire, we don't hire developers, we don't have developers, so we say no? That would have been a completely different business! It would [00:08:00] have, like, literally never existed.
Ryan Rutan: Unbelievable. Again, like, you have to say yes to things outside your capability.
When you have almost no capabilities, what's the other alternative, right? You wouldn't have said yes to your first client. Same thing, I think I've told this story on the podcast before, but The, the way my agency started was running into a high school classmate who was like, Oh, Hey, you're good with computers, right?
Yeah, that was absolutely true. Um, could you build us a website? Yeah, sure. Right? A website. Absolutely. I never built a website before. I literally, you were there last week, I think. Well, uh, micro center, I walked into the book section, which they probably don't even have anymore. Uh, walked into the book section, grabbed the HTML guide that existed at the time, about 9, 000 pages.
And by the next Thursday I had built my first site. So I had to say yes, if I hadn't said yes, if I just waited for somebody to ask me to only do the things I already know how to do, boring dude, right? All of them really bad startups. It's
Wil Schroter: unbelievable. And you know, again, fast forward through other startups that, that, that we've done, right?
In all of the different like, [00:09:00] like trials and tribulations with all of them. Here's a good example. We buy Zirtual on a Sunday night. Monday morning we're running a 450 person virtual assistant business that we've never run before, right? Have we done that? No. Could we do that? Yeah, it went phenomenally well.
Right? Like, like, so, so if all we're looking at basing our future is our past, we're screwed. Like, startups just don't work like that. But it's hard to get comfortable. It is hard to get comfortable.
Ryan Rutan: I think it's, you know, and like, there's plenty of stories and I think there's plenty of ways in this manifest.
What are the top three for you? Like, where do we see this most? We think about like, where do we need to say yes, where we might more likely say no based on just the history of being a reasonable person before we started our startup company.
Wil Schroter: I'm going to start because it's universal. Which is yes to customers.
And again, let's go back to our premise. Not yes to things that can't be done. If it literally can't be done, it can't be done, right? Do not lie to people, right? Yes. To things we are [00:10:00] capable. We may fail, but we are capable of making happen. Okay. Uh, you know, let's talk about investors. We were investors. It, everyone stresses about the same thing.
We do our whole workshops throughout the week on this, you know, and talk to people and walk them through their pitch decks and financial projections and all that good stuff. They all say the same thing. Which is, Will, you're telling me to project, uh, year four, 50 million in revenue. I have 50 in revenue right now.
How could I possibly stand up reasonably in front of anyone and tell them that I'm going to be at 50 million in four years? And I say, you don't. You say you might be at 50 million in 4 years, right? Like, you're not guaranteeing a damn thing. And I think that because we take these things in a different context.
Let me give you an example. At a public company, Ryan, if you and I were a public company, you're the CEO, I'm the CFO. We're on an investor call and we're talking about what earnings per share are going to be in the next [00:11:00] quarter. We better be pretty damn accurate, but yeah, yeah, those are regulated statements at that point.
A hundred percent. And to be fair, unless we're Elon Musk somehow, like it all goes out that week, say whatever you want, right? Well,
Ryan Rutan: yeah. I mean, you don't, you don't tweet it, right? It's different.
Wil Schroter: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, um, yeah. But, in that case, that is not a projection, it's a forecast, and I'll just put a slightly different spin on how people think it.
A projection takes things you know and tries to project them. A forecast is based on things that have a history, right? Like the weather. When I see clouds going this direction, I can forecast that it's likely going to rain, right? I have a voluminous amount of data.
Ryan Rutan: You're using previous data points to draw a line into the future.
At a start up phase. We're throwing darts. There is no, there are no data points to draw the line. Yep, that's it.
Wil Schroter: You bet, you bet. And I think on that one specifically, when folks are, uh, looking at their projections, um, you know, [00:12:00] in their pitch decks, et cetera, they get angsty because they're like, well, aren't I telling investors this is how much money you're going to make?
No, you're, and if the investors actually believe that, You're saying it's going to be 50 million in four years and that's magically going to happen? They're out of their minds.
Ryan Rutan: Well, yeah, they just joined the friends, family and fools round as the third category there.
Wil Schroter: Yeah, unfortunately. And again, by no means are we advocating deceiving anyone.
What we are saying is a lot of our job is to create the future, which by definition is uncertain. By definition, it's uncertain.
Ryan Rutan: Yeah, it
Wil Schroter: has to be. It has to be. But we have to get comfortable with that. Staff! Picture this one! I've got this theory, I've got this, I've got it called the Good Will Hunting Theory, okay, which is kind of a dated reference, if you think about it, like, I, like, Good Will Hunting's gotta be 20 years old.
So anyway, so for people who have never heard of this famous movie. It's gotta be
Ryan Rutan: a little older than that, but okay,
Wil Schroter: yeah. Damn, damn, damn. Anyway, um, [00:13:00] so, the whole premise of the movie is that Matt Damon is like this schlub, he's like a janitor, but it turns out he's a total genius, he's at MIT or something like that, and he's writing like, trigonometry on the, on the board at night, and they find out he's a genius, okay.
The idea is that there are these diamonds in the rough that if you could just pull them, polish them, they would glow brightly, right? My theory is that within the staff, we have to find those diamonds, which makes asking them to do things they've never done before for the first time. Putting them in positions for things that they have no business being in.
Ryan Rutan: Yeah, saying yes when they want to do things they've never done before. Seeing them excel. Again, in a corporate environment, the, the, the. Logic there would be, look, you got to go one rung on the ladder at a time. In a startup company, if somebody's asking to reach up three, four rungs on the ladder and try to do something they've never done that's above their pay grade, above their experience level, whatever it is, you can give them a shot, right?
Like endlessly, right? You can't let everybody do something that's not their job, but you can, you can carve out some time to let [00:14:00] people do things and give them a shot, right? The startup itself is taking a shot in the dark. So who would we be as founders? Like how much hypocrisy would be packed into that sandwich?
Like, I don't want you to try anything you've never done before. Isn't that what we're here to do as an entire organization? Yeah, true. But anyways.
Wil Schroter: Yeah. Well, okay. So, so play this out a little bit. So in my experience, this is my, my mileage with my goodwill hunting theory. It works one out of 20 times every time, right?
Holding one on, just to be clear. Right. And so typically though. It's not just that, that founders have such a big heart and they really want to see people succeed. Of course they want to see people succeed. What it's also is we don't have a choice, right? This is the only developer I could afford, right?
That's the only CFO I could afford. Right? So I'm going all in cause I don't have a choice. And here's, what's fascinating about that to me. You and I had this unique ability early in our careers. Um, to put ourselves in a position where we could test our own goodwill hunting theory. And that's [00:15:00] kind of what founders are doing, right?
Um, they're testing their own metal, their own capability. Making the bet on themselves. Yep. Yeah. And you know, I think on the last podcast before this, I talked about how, uh, you know, we're, we did like our lily pitch or something like that and how I was like way out of my depth, right? As a 20, 22 years old or something like that, doing like a quarter billion dollar pitch.
And what was fascinating to me is that at the beginning of that year. You know, I was selling websites for, for food, right? You know, exchanging my services for food and being pretty excited about it. In the end of the year, we had a quarter billion dollar contract, which sounds bananas, and it is. What I'm trying to say, though, is I put myself in a position where I could stretch myself to see how far I could go.
And it turned out it worked. It turned out, like, at 22, I had most of what I needed to do what I needed to do. Now imagine alternate universe of Will, which I imagine quite a bit, who was still working at Best Buy. Making like 10 an hour [00:16:00] in the geek patrol or whatever it was at the time, right? Like, like I could have just as soon been that guy.
Ryan Rutan: Been hanging out with those sweet Bose speakers though, man. It wouldn't have been all bad. It wouldn't have been all bad.
Wil Schroter: But yeah, but like seriously, like it could have it could just have soon been the opposite had I not said yes, in this case to myself. Right? And by virtue of that, all the things I said yes to.
You know, something that's really funny about everything we talk about here, is that none of it is new. Everything you're dealing with right now has been done a thousand times before you. Which means the answer already exists, you may just not know it. But that's okay. That's kind of what we're here to do.
We talk about this stuff on the show, but we actually solve these problems all day long. At groups. startups. com. So if any of this sounds familiar, stop guessing about what to do. Let us just give you the answers to the test and be done with it.
Ryan Rutan: Yeah, it's funny. I think that one of the, one of the challenges we have around saying yes to the thing is that we, we tend to treat those as like a much bigger decision than they, than they really are.
We [00:17:00] say. Yes to a customer, for example. We say yes we can do that, and then we don't do it. Will we be the only time that person's ever been disappointed in their life? Will that be the only time we, is that the only reason we could fail with a client? Like, we say yes to things we've already done, and sometimes we screw up projects.
Right? It happens. I'm sure you had projects that didn't go to plan. I certainly had websites and build outs that didn't go to plan. Not because we'd never done it before, something else came up, something happened, shit happens, right? And so I think the, the thing when we're saying yes to something we've never done before, the uncertainty of it scares us and somehow we attach, at least I did, this permanency to it.
Like if I say yes to this and we can't do it, it's game over, rarely, right? Rarely is it game over, right? If we tell an investor that we're going to hit 50 million by, by year five and we only hit 30 million, is it game over? Do they come back and be like, hey, by the way, I recorded that presentation you gave to me.
And you said 50 by year five and it's only 30. So give me my money back right now. Right? You can't do that, right? It's against the action. [00:18:00] If we tell our team, yes, you can try to punch out of your, your, your weight class, we will let you develop a feature when all you've done so far is code Q and A. And it doesn't go well, that person's not CTO forever, right?
They had one project. So most of these things can be rolled back and they're not permanent out. I think that's something that you just really have to keep in mind. There's no real permanency around saying yes to these things and say yes once and say no every other time after that, if you want to. Feel free.
Wil Schroter: I agree. And also, uh, to your point, we have this idea that it's a one way street. We make this one cataclysmic, you know, decision and it goes wrong. And then at that point, for some reason in our minds, we can't make any other decision after that. It's just like everything flows one way. And to be fair, that's like a pretty logical way to think because people only think in the abstract of what's present.
It's hard for us to think of like things in the future that can have lots of variable outcomes, but. I think for most of us, um, this idea of [00:19:00] saying, and I'll figure it out is very foreign, is very foreign. I think for a lot of people, they look at it like, what do you mean figure it out? What if I don't figure it out?
Who cares? You'll make a
Ryan Rutan: different move, right? Like what if you do, right? That's not what we're here to do. We're here to figure it out. I mean, there's plenty of examples of this, right? This is, this is, you know, big, big companies you've heard of have done exactly these things. If we go back in time, Dropbox, for example, Dropbox started marketing their product when it was just a concept video.
They had people signing up for the service when all it was was an explainer video. They had not figured out how to do the file transfer, any of it, right? It was just an explainer video. That was it. They started getting signups based on that. It's enough. It was enough for them because why go and figure out the technical build if nobody wanted the damn thing, right?
So we have to say, yes, we have this thing. It can help you transfer files. It's great. Um, and here's what it looks like. Are you interested? Yes, I'm interested. Cool. We'll go build it now.
Wil Schroter: Here's what it could do. Yeah, here's what it could do. And Drew Houston could have looked at that and said, Hey, um, I have no [00:20:00] way to build that.
Okay? That'd be one thing. But if he was like, Hey, if people are interested in this, I could build it. Maybe I'll build it and it sucks. Right? To be fair, maybe I'd build it and it sucks. But But, um, it doesn't mean I can't try. It doesn't mean I can't take a stab at it. And if it goes wrong, I can do right by people.
If it goes wrong, I can go back and either give them their money back, build them a different product, um, you know, delay another launch. I mean, there are other ways to get to the outcome that isn't abject failure across the board.
Ryan Rutan: Yeah. And when you're talking about a product at that point cost dollars per month, um, again, I think people's disappointment had it gone completely the wrong way.
It would have been fairly limited, right? So we have to keep that in mind. Moving on to like, uh, another example on the investor side, right? So I, cause I think this is one that the people really, really struggle with because it feels big, right? And in some cases, these are kind of the most, you know, they're not bald faced lies, but these are some of the biggest claims we'll make with the highest consequences, right?
Because we're, we're pitching for funding, um, go back in time again. Bezos, right? He had, he had a little [00:21:00] platform he went out to raise money against that sold books at the time. If, if you recall, the pitch of the time was, and eventually it will become the everything store, right? Now it's an online bookstore.
It will become the everything store, right? He was pitching that from the beginning. It took him a decade to get there, even having like more than, much more than books on the site. But, he was projecting that from the beginning. I believe that if we do this part of it right, we can get here, and that was a big part of why investors got interested.
They were like, online bookstore, okay cool, online everything store, lot cooler, be more interested in that.
Wil Schroter: Also, if you recall, for all of the 90s, he was the laughing stock because that company never made any money, and the idea was that it would never make any money. Um, and ironically, it really didn't until he went into a totally different business.
Which was their web services, which made all the money, right? But, but that's sort of the point, like you figure it out, you find other ways that you can monetize right in, get out there now, it doesn't always work. Right. That is literally the nature of startups. And I think for you and I, Ryan grizzle veterans that have been at this forever.[00:22:00]
Um, it's, we kind of forget. That when people are stepping into this for the first time, even their first few years into it, it takes some adjusting. You know, that sucks. That's us coaxing people throughout the week when we talk to all the founders on our platform saying, I get it. This sounds scary. I get it.
You know, um, saying what you're about to say sounds batshit crazy. But guess what? It might actually happen.
Ryan Rutan: You know, it's funny. One of the, one of the places I see this manifest, it's not exactly the same thing, but it's around, it's around founder led sales. Right? And when I'm leading those, the, the customer workshops on, on Monday and Fridays, founders in the accelerator, one of the things that comes up all the time is like, I just really don't like doing founder led sales.
Why? Because I have to tell people things I'm not really sure of yet. Right? It's, it's making claims, right? It's trying to push people across the line, trying to get them to say yes to your product. Right. On things that maybe haven't ever done before. Maybe you have, but you don't feel really comfortable saying it.
Look, do you believe that if they buy from you, they will be better off? Yeah, of course. Do you believe that your solution adequately meets their needs? Yeah, of course. Do you believe that they're going to [00:23:00] pay you less than the value they give back? Yeah, of course. Then what's the holdup here? If you believe all those things and you believe you can make it true, Then it is actually your duty to get that person to pay you because they're going to be better off after they do it.
Right? And the same thing is project things and startup founders, whether that's to our customers, to our investors, uh, to, to our staff, it's incumbent on us to do that calculus first and be like, is it reasonable to believe this could come true in a reasonable amount of time? Right? You know, you were telling a story about, about the, uh, about the, the conversation that you were in where, you know, you guys answered simultaneously in opposite directions.
Um, we sort of had an implicit agreement early on at Starfish. com between Elliot and I with, with consulting was like, look, man, go and tell people what you need to tell people to get them excited and get them into projects. As long as you truly believe that I can get it done within like a two week period, because that's, that was our typical delivery time, right?
As long as you believe I can do it. Um, and you're not stretching that belief and, and, and pumping me up more than you should be. We're cool. Right? And I knew that we were going to go out and tell people we could do things we've never done before. Right? When you have the right [00:24:00] attitude and the right energy and the right team, that actually feels amazing.
So I think that's something else I don't want to gloss over here. This isn't always uncomfortable. There are times where saying yes to something you've never done before will start to feel really incredible. Particularly once you've said yes a few times and failed, and said yes a few times and succeeded, all of a sudden you realize like, look, there's not as much at stake on the downside as there is on the upside.
Because again, if we never try, if we never stick our neck at it 22 year old Will had never said yes. Yes, to something he, to a room he never should have been in at that age, right? Like your patent haven't even expired yet. You couldn't have been sold as generic at that age. Um, I couldn't rent a car.
You're working with one of the biggest pharmaceutical companies on the planet, right? Yeah. Never should have happened, and it did. And that's
Wil Schroter: how you got where you are. You bet, you bet. And, and, and also, as I'm watching this with, um, you know, the next generation, when I say the next generation, I'm talking like, what's next?
Like our daughters, right? This past weekend, uh, my daughter was at a craft fair. She's got a business where she's building bracelets now. She's like her third business now. Um, and she's building bracelets. And she's been [00:25:00] working so hard because, you know, summer started. So she's got the whole summer to work on this.
And every night she's building these bracelets. She's building inventory, right? And then on Saturday, uh, she had an all day, um, uh, crafts fair that she attended. She set up her booth and everything. And she's selling her bracelets, right? Going into it, she's like, Daddy, I've only got like, like 60 bracelets.
I'm like, how the hell do you find time to make 60 bracelets? Right. Uh, and so, uh, she's like, only have 60 bracelets. Like how many elves are living in our basement right now? I know it's unbelievable. And I'm like, what happens if I sell out of all these? And I'm like, sweetheart, that's the goal. Like that's, that's what we're trying to do.
Yeah. That's a high quality problem. We celebrate, we go home early. But, but she's so logical. She's like, but people are going to come to my store and they're going to want products that don't happen anymore. I'm like, yes, sweetheart. That that's when you, that's the goal. Pre order for the next batch.
Ryan Rutan: Yeah.
Wil Schroter: Sell all of them. And she sold most of them, which was amazing to watch. And just, just one epilogue to that, which I thought was hilarious. You'll appreciate given the time. We took the amount of money that she made. She made like a few hundred dollars. It's actually a lot. I mean, relative to what she was selling.
And, uh, and I put it in a chat GPT. I [00:26:00] wanted to show her something. I said, if summer takes the, the, uh, amount of money that she just made, And puts it into a fund that compounds at the same rate of return as the S& P 500 last year, which was insane, right? It's like over 20%, right?
Ryan Rutan: Yeah, you picked a pretty good year, but for the fun of the math, yeah.
Wil Schroter: Yeah, exactly, right? How much money would she have when she retires? And I can't remember what the number was, but it was like over a million dollars, right? It's just this amazing compounding whatever. In her head exploded. The power of compounding math and youth, right? When you combine
Ryan Rutan: those two things, my god.
It's
Wil Schroter: unbelievable. And then she was like, dad, I need to sell more braces. That's exactly the answer. And you have to say yes, you have to push, right? You have to do more. It's so fun to watch. But I think it's also so fun to coach, to tell people that here's what you can do that you've never done before.
Because think about it. Almost every job that we have, or the path that we have in life, is this on the rails, guided path, right? There's no version where we [00:27:00] take a fourth grader and put them in twelfth grade and say, figure it out. I mean, think about it. Everything is so incremental. Everything is so guarded.
We're so worried about you failing that we never get a chance to push you further.
Ryan Rutan: And we don't allow you to reach for it.
Wil Schroter: That's what I'm saying, right?
Ryan Rutan: Right. It's not allowed. Right. To defend against the backslide, which again, like in startups, like the risk of the backslide is so small. What are you risking?
It hasn't done anything yet. Like, they get so worried about backsliding to zero and I'm like thousand dollars MRR, which look, I'm not, I'm not sneezing at a thousand dollars MRR. It's a thousand dollars more than they had when they started. That's amazing, but we're talking about a 1, 000 gap there, right?
I think sometimes we blow these things so far out of proportion, like failure is going to be epic. When you put it in those terms, like failure is a 000. Right? Like, it's 1, 000. It's a part time minimum wage job to make up that delta if you needed to. So, I think we have to be careful about, um, putting too much emphasis on [00:28:00] the backslide.
Sorry, back to, back to high school.
Wil Schroter: Oh, no, all good. I, um, but we're also competing fundamentally with other startups that are willing to say yes. And so that's what we talk about when we talk about putting your pitch deck out there in your financials. And you're saying, Hey, in four years, I'm going to make 3 million.
And like, okay, cool. You're competing against pitch decks that are saying in four years, they're going to make 50 million. Right? Remember that this isn't, you're not working in a vacuum here where we're just about your business. In this case, you're competing for capital, but also where you're competing for customers.
If you're competing with customers against other startups that are willing to stretch, that are willing to kind of push themselves, you're going to lose. Right. Saying no to everything in an environment of yes, you will lose by definition. Right. Unless you're a financial services company, in which case.
Yep. It's a big part
Ryan Rutan: of how we got business early on, right? We said yes to people that other people were saying no to. And we're like, we will figure it out. We will work hard. We will work harder. We will help you figure out how to raise funds for this slightly less than traditional or obvious fundraisable business, right?
Wil Schroter: Yep. It's also [00:29:00] a muscle that you build, and I think this is important to touch on, right? For 30 years, I've been saying yes to things that are way beyond my capabilities. Way beyond my, and not just in business, in personal life and everything else like that. Just tons of stuff that, like, I have no business getting into.
Again, with the house, I'm doing architecture, 3D modeling, 3D rendering, carpentry. Like, who's gonna
Ryan Rutan: say I
Wil Schroter: was
Ryan Rutan: I was picturing that really complicated 3D model that you built in SketchUp over a two year period. Yeah, like, you had no business doing that, but you did it. And now that thing is going to pop out of the ground over the next year.
Wil Schroter: Well, it's wild to watch. Uh, and so I look at this and I say, that is a trained muscle that I have. I have a trained muscle that says, there's just things I haven't done yet. And it is interesting. We're having a conversation with Noah, our creative director yesterday about this. And we were talking about, you know, the, the forces of AI and creatives are obviously pretty up in arms about AI.
And he's talking about, ah, you know, it's going to replace jobs and it's going to take out creativity. And there's some truth to that. But I said, you know, but it's also going to create an extension. [00:30:00] For people to say yes to things they haven't done yet. AI and you and I are in the same boat right now with ChatGPT and tools like this.
It's like my right arm right now. It's unbelievable. I I'm in AI four hours a day and now every single thing I can think AI can tell me how to do it. And I think about that saying my innate ability to say yes to everything and figure it out. Just got supercharged because now I don't even have to wonder how I'm going to figure it out.
I just need to know what I need to do, and AI is gonna, is gonna instruct me and guide me and walk me through how to get it done. It's unbelievable. I mean, the, the, the world that we're in to be able to do this.
Ryan Rutan: Yeah, no, it's incredible. No, I, yeah, the ability to say yes just went up exponentially. That is for sure.
Wil Schroter: Unbelievable, right? Like, there are so many things that I was, uh, Incapable of doing advanced math would be one of them, right? But now if i'm doing super complicated things again Like when people hear that i'm building a house ryan You could back me up like every freaking detail to this house, right?
Literally
Ryan Rutan: every single [00:31:00] detail i've watched this guy. Yeah Detail
Wil Schroter: like uh, i'm i'm doing um load calcs for all the electrical of the house. I'm i'm Wiring the entire house like top to bottom creating what sub panel structures there are you name it, right?
Ryan Rutan: That was my my favorite of your GPT adventures of late was having it conduct the calculation Based on average race and load and code in in Ohio.
It was
Wil Schroter: Yeah, it's perfect. Right, but that's my point. Like I wouldn't ever feel comfortable saying yes to that But now when I talk to, well, and the, the burden
Ryan Rutan: of actually doing it would have been so high before that it wouldn't have even made sense because it's, you could have said the reason you would have said no to it was it wouldn't have made sense.
It would have been so much less efficient than paying somebody who already knew. So if you had to go learn all of that and then do the math and the work, right, to come with Kelly, it doesn't make any sense. But when you can shortcut those processes and, and take away the heavy lifting piece of it, then it totally makes sense, right?
Saying yes to that now all of a sudden makes sense, which is crazy, right? Because I think it's, it also forces us to reconsider a lot of decisions. To your point [00:32:00] around, you know, it's a muscle that you build, I've had to untrain a bunch of muscles because of things like this. Yep. Right? I've had to start to say yes to doing things differently that I've done in the same way for 10, 15 years because all of a sudden there's a reason to say yes to doing it different.
Wil Schroter: I'm in Excel all the time or Google Sheets, right? And there's always been like, like a million formulas that I've always wanted to be able to create, like really comp, really complicated formulas, right? And now if I think it like, Hey, You know, my projections or my models should be able to do this. Hey GPT, write me a formula that does this and explain to me how you did it.
And I'm like, oh, damn, that would have been useful 30 years ago. Right? And in five seconds, I have it, right? Like, my point is, like, that muscle has so much applicability in so many things that you do. I apply the yes muscle, right, to everything. I'm like, screw it, let's just figure it out. Sometimes it, it Bails in a colossal manner, right?
Just to be clear, it, it doesn't always [00:33:00] work, right? But it works enough that when you get good at it, it's kind of a superpower. You know what I mean?
Ryan Rutan: You know, it's funny, man. I, I have this, I, my phrase is we'll figure it out. We'll figure it out. We'll figure it out, right? I use this all the time, right?
Because I believe that we will. Now, what I didn't say is we'll make it work. That's different, or it will be okay. That's different, or it will be great. That's different. Right. So my, my wife didn't love this phrase for a long time. She was like, you always say that we'll figure it out. And he's like, and it doesn't always work out.
And I said, yeah, I didn't say that. I said, we'll figure it out. It's very different. What I meant is I figured out it didn't work. I figured out that was bad. I figured out this does work sometimes. And, and so I think once we got that clarity around that and she just understood that like I'm always going to be willing to say yes and try and accept the consequences, that's fine, right, and so like once we got to that point I think it became a lot easier for her to tolerate my, we'll figure it out, which I think at some point she just started to take as He's not really thinking about this.
He's just going to like throw himself at it and see what happens. [00:34:00] Right. Highly wrong, except they're not thinking about it.
Wil Schroter: Yeah, and look, there just aren't that many things that you can say yes to that are so unforgivable in the outcome that there's no way to fix it. Right? There just isn't.
Ryan Rutan: It's being a coin, man.
The
Wil Schroter: backslide
Ryan Rutan: is just not that severe, right? When you compare it to Right? We talk about this a lot, Eman, like in, in terms of like ad costs and stuff like that, trying to figure out like, how do we, how do we make this work better? How do we do this? Like, look, you can only minimize your ad cost so much. You can only go from wherever you are to zero, right?
That's pretty finite. Your revenue can go way up to the other side, right? So what we want to do is maximize for upside. You can only cut so far before it's not working, right? You can't keep saying no to doing more. At some point you have to say yes to that. And make it work. It will figure it out.
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