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Startup Champion | 4x Founder | Live Stream Host | Amplifying Diverse Founders' Voices | Spreading Joy Everywhere I Glow | Rated Top 10 Podcasts for Startups
Listen in as groundbreaking leaders discuss what they have learned. Discover the books, podcasts, presentations, courses, research, articles and lessons that shaped their journey. Hosted by: Kevin Horek, Gregg Oldring, & Jon Larson.
Intro/Outro: Welcome to the learner.co show hosted by Kevin horic and his fellow learner co-founders listen in is groundbreaking leaders discuss what they've learned, discover the books, podcasts, presentations, courses, research articles, and lessons that shaped their journey to listen to past episodes and find links to all sources of learning mentioned. Visit learner.co that's learner with two L's dot co.
Kevin Horek: Welcome back to the learner.co show. Today we have Andy lions. She's a four time founder startup champion and host of the startup life live show. She's done a ton of really fascinating stuff, and she has a ton of stuff to share. Really good advice, John and Greg, what are you guys looking forward to learning from Andy today? Oh, God,
Jon Larson: Really looking forward to this episode first interested in our advice for startups as we're involved in that area. I'm also interested in their journey. She, she came from banking initially and got out of that and then got into the startup world and has worked in various areas. I'm really interested in her experiences and everything she has learned and what she has to share.
Gregg Oldring: Yeah, she right away is warming my heart with her passion for startups and how much she clearly contributes to the community. That's really, yeah, she's got me right there. Got my attention already, but I'm really excited to see, to hear her journey in the, because the range of things that she has worked on and seen, and the learning that she's had through all of that process, it's going to be pretty cool to see. So I'm in.
Kevin Horek: All right. I'm with the show, Andy, welcome to the show.
Ande Lyons: I'm so happy to be here. Hello everyone.
Kevin Horek: Yeah. I'm excited to have you on the show. You've done a ton of stuff and have a ton of really good advice, but maybe before we dive into all that, let's get to know you better and start off a very grew up.
Ande Lyons: Yeah. I grew up outside of Boston and yeah, throughout new England, but primarily the greater Boston area.
Kevin Horek: Very cool Boston through red city.
Ande Lyons: It really is. When you talk about history, you talk about, folks being willing to do what it takes to achieve dreams for hundreds of years. Yeah,
Kevin Horek: That's really cool. So you went to university. What did you take and why?
Ande Lyons: Well, I have a very non-traditional background. I was 18, I did not go on to college. Even though I had been accepted, I went off and had six years of what or real life experience and back I got my, what we call back in the day. Secretary went to secretarial school and I, I came out as an executive secretary and I went to go work with startup founders who had, anywhere from 50 to a hundred people. I sat right outside their door and called that my founder bootcamp. I went to school at night at Northeastern here in Boston. When earned my MBA at the only all women MBA program Simmons school of management.
Kevin Horek: Interesting. Walk us through your career, maybe some highlights and some learnings along the way, because your story is actually really fascinating and inspiring to people.
Ande Lyons: Oh yeah. Especially since when I applied to grad school, they told me not once, but twice we don't accept students with GMAT scores that well, and I said, look, standardized tests. And I do not get along. I had anticipated this Kevin and so anything in life, you have to anticipate what are going to be the choke holds in you achieving your dreams. I had enrolled in three semesters in one account and algebra, excuse me, to prove my ability for critical thinking and expository writing. I was working full-time and going to school four nights a week for four hours at night and then doing homework. I just wanted to beef up so that they knew like right now, currently I had the capability, a great recommendations. I also thought, what else are they going to want to need? I'll enroll in this intensive statistics class. And so at Northeastern.
Ande Lyons: That's three semesters in one folks, statistics, which is not fun. And at least not for this scale. I had a night, I had a 74 in my midterm when I received a note from Simmons saying, you're accepted into the grad program, provided you get a B plus or better on your statistics class. I thought, oh my gosh, how's this going to work? If I need to do a statistics to see the odds of my getting a B plus or better, but sure enough, I hunkered down and met with the professor, got some help tutoring. I came out of there with a 94 in the final. Wow. That's.
Kevin Horek: Awesome.
Ande Lyons: So, you just have to plan and you have to have contingencies and this is how it is in life. You can't just keep your fingers crossed. You have to understand what people are going to need in order to say yes to you.
Kevin Horek: Very cool. Your career, you've been a founder four times. Walk us through your startups and being a founder and what you learned along the way, because I think just remembering when I chatted with you in the past, you had a lot of people, at least with one of your startups say, you really shouldn't do that. It might actually ruin your reputation. So.
Ande Lyons: That's such a good story. I just want to take people into the fact that when I graduated with my MBA, I had to do some fancy footwork, but I got hired a huge bank here in Boston. Not because I had a fit, there was no, I mean, I'm very positive around risk and most banks are risk adverse, but I wanted you to do financial analysis on all types of industries. When you go into the credit training program to be a commercial lender at a bank, they really get you to do analysis on everything. I say that because I left that industry with a nice big bang of a dramatic exit after three years of getting through that. I would often introduce myself as, hello, my name is Andy. I've been unemployable since 1992. I fell off the wagon a few times. The first time I fired myself, the second time I got fired.
Ande Lyons: And then, yeah, it's all about startups. And I'm a reluctant startup. I didn't go in say I wanted to be a founder, an entrepreneur, these businesses fell into my lap. So in 98 was my husband. We launched a dot-com business. We raised over $8 million. What are we doing? Pre YouTube and Facebook because were providing entertainment content to college campuses through cable. Through online, there were the only ones that really able to downloadable entertainment because they were the only ones, basically with a T1 back in the day back then everything was dial up and we had a great two year run and everything was going super into the fall of 2000 and that imploded, but it w so we had built it up to about a hundred employees and then boom had to scale it back down and sold it for assets and liabilities, but learned a lot from that experience and would never, ever have said, I wish that didn't happen.
Ande Lyons: This is what I tell founders all the time. Kevin is that you will never lose starting a business. You may learn like being an entrepreneur is not for me. Or you may learn. I love this. What happens is not every business succeeds, where it has an outcome. That's interesting, but not the scale you would want. You need to stay flexible and know that whatever you've learned being a founder is the best personal development program out there for you. After that experience, nine 11 happened in our family. My husband happened to have taken. He took a flight from Logan to LaGuardia on nine 11 that morning, right beside one of the other planes that flew into the tower, he was on the Triborough bridge. When it was said he was stuck in Manhattan. We all like, oh, this is hard. It's a tough time for us, but happily, he got through it.
Ande Lyons: Okay. Again, I was applying to jobs and thinking I was going to go back into the workforce and everything came to a screeching halt. Martha Stewart said, go back in the kitchen and cook. I came up with a recipe for a wheat free granola and a good friend of mine. People could not stop eating it. I was just sharing it with people because what else are we going to do at that time? We're, I was raising two babies and a friend of mine said, oh, you need to launch this. And I said, oh, hell no. Yeah, this is really hard. I just came off a.com. Yeah. Lost all our money, 8 million in venture capital money. This is, entrepreneurship is like no way. She said, no, this really has legs. I think you could make it something with this. I said, okay, if I find a licensed bakery in my first phone call, I'll do it thinking no way was that going to happen?
Ande Lyons: I called a local caterer and said, Hey, do you have a licensed kitchen? I could use to test out a recipe. He said, no, but I just got off the phone with Steve Jacobs who owns Boston teacakes. He's looking to lease his bakery commercial kitchen. And I was like, oh, dang. But you know what? It really took off. It was amazing. So many miracles happened. I scaled nationally in less than two years and I didn't go on shelves except for specialty food stores. I focused on supplier diversity programs. I'm a, as a woman, I was considered a minority on business. I was able to get into a lot of the food service companies, which put me on campus in a corporate and in hospitals. And it was just amazing. Dana Farber cancer Institute would buy my granola and give it away free to their chemo patients.
Ande Lyons: Cause it was one of the things that they could holler, right? The taste was so good and packed with carbs and protein. So it was a great run. It was five years. I had great angel investors and what happened right towards the end of that wonderful business was my two of my primary ingredients. Kevin were hit agriculturally. These are the things that nobody, I never heard anybody talk about this. Right. If there's been a fire or a flood, this is mother nature can wipe a business out. There's so many things that we don't talk about. They can take a business down. In my case, almonds and maple syrup just hit so hard. I said, well, I'm about to raise a quarter million to go what I call the Kellogg's root in manufacturing. I figured I could just overcome that with volume. I was really ready to scale.
Ande Lyons: My current manufacturing facility got hit by a lightning storm and branch of the crowd. Oh wow. Like two days later, my husband got laid off and there we are with a seven and a nine year old in this, a certain point where you have just say, I think this is done and it's very painful. That's why I always like to recommend folks read Seth Godin's book the dip, because he talks about how as entrepreneurs, you really need to know what is, when are you going to quit doing this? And that quitting is absolutely. Oh, okay. As long as, ahead of time, what are the ingredients? What is, what is the landscape going to look at when I say, okay, enough is enough. So that was a very valuable lesson. I cried for three months after that company going down. The one you're talking about came to me and it was called bring back desire.
Ande Lyons: As a woman in a long-term relationship with my Charlie man, with children at home, I knew that one of the biggest challenges for heterosexual couples was to stay tuned in and turned on year after year. It came up with this great playful and tasteful platform called bring back desire. One of my favorite stories was I used a local pit here in Boston. It was every year I used that as a way to give myself a deadline to come up with the business plan. Now we're talking 2008, 2009, and I entered the competition just to have that as a Andy figured this out and get that business plan done submitted. I could really start pulling together the business model and I get an email and they say, you're in the semifinals. I said, well, I'm going to be talking about sex orgasms and all of this other stuff.
Ande Lyons: That's 21. Plus you don't want me at a pitch event. I was seasoned at pitching, from my other businesses. They're like, no, we love this idea. We're going to give you this fabulous mentor from golden angels, which is this great angel investment groups that invest in female founders. We're going to give you a mentor who heads up Suffolk university's MBA entrepreneurship program. And they love it. I was thinking, oh, this is wonderful. I go down to the night of the pitch event and I started introducing myself and I had really not been out in public yet talking about, bring back desire. And I'm here in Boston. We're just so puritanical. I was in fact bay and the old, in an old Victorian building and looking at me like, say, what bring, what are you talking about? I was thinking, oh no, I like, I'd never practiced this out with people.
Ande Lyons: It was just, mentors and my friends and family. And, to give back to what you had said earlier, when I was talking about this among women of my age, they said, oh no, you can't be doing this will be a career ender, but I felt so called to do it. Now I get up to pitch at this event and the last one to go, I've got, an electric vehicle battery burst, and I've got you really bonafide. Start-ups performing. They get so many questions during the Q and a, and then I get out there, up there and I do. I had a great opening and you have to understand the people in the audience were hot PCs in Boston, top in the health industry, top angels attorneys, really an incredible group of high level people in my city. When I was done with my pitch, you could hear crickets.
Ande Lyons: I thought to myself, you know what? You should have laughed. You should have just gotten out before you did this. This is awful. This is horrific. This was a mistake. I put it on the shelf for two years. Wow. In 2010, your now New York times wall street journal Oprah, they're all talking about desire and women and relationships and staying together. Excuse me. I said, okay, I'm going to go ahead and launch this. And it was a fascinating experience. I have to tell you. I, part of me, wondered if I should have had a fake name and named to play or whatever that's called, right. No, I said, I need to be the woman and mom next door talking about this. I'm telling you, I laughed for three and a half, four years. It was so much fun. It was tongue and cheek. I learned how to brand myself as my professional self and then do the bring back desire brand.
Ande Lyons: And I launched it in early 2011. I really learned a lot about online marketing, digital marketing branding in this new digital age. I started my first podcast in 2012 called after dark radio. I've had, three others since then, but yeah, it's really learned, I had great thriving YouTube channel. I'd have experts talking about sex. I'm telling you it was a really fun time. It was about the end of 2014, early 2015. I was looking around and I was so tired of seeing such awful information being put out there for founders online. At the time nobody was talking about value proposition and customer acquisition and LTV, CAC ratios and all the things that are so important when you're launching a business, they were all talking about digital marketing and your next meme. I said, okay, I feel really complete. I feel like I've helped couples around the world with bring back desire.
Ande Lyons: I'm going to go back into the world of business. I'm going to go into this lane, the startup founder lane. That's when I became a mentor at a lot of the local accelerators here, mass challenge, EAF, role MIT, et cetera. I started building up a coaching practice for startup founders. So, and along the way, by the way, folks, I also did other consulting and other smaller businesses, but these are my four primary business models and wow, what a journey.
Kevin Horek: Interesting. The thing that I find fascinating about you and your story is you've done so many different things that are almost like one eighties from each other. Sure. They have the core, like, well, you're running a business, but they're in totally different verticals. It's interesting because a lot of people always give you the advice that if you don't know the industry don't build a startup in it. I think your, a success story of somebody that didn't know that industry, but still went for it, got into it and was successful in that. You agree with that?
Ande Lyons: Listen, I absolutely because I coach people that angels and VCs really want to see a strong founder market fit and I never had a strong market standard market fit. I knew nothing about comes in 1998 or the college market. I knew not thing about food shelf, life, all the craziness around that. Certainly launching a 21 plus website that was tasteful in playful saying, but by the time I got to start coaching, now I could say, yeah, now I've got a strong founder market fit, but there are transferable skills. If you're feeling really called to launch a business and you may not have a lot of experience in that particular industry, don't worry about it. Cause you can transfer skills. You're going to learn a lot along the way. The most important quality in any founder is that you are a deep problem solver. You were passionate about solving problems and you will not sleep until you solve that problem.
Ande Lyons: You will find every halfway point every thread to find a way to make something work out. I think that's the most important transferrable skill as a founder. Thank you.
Kevin Horek: Interesting. I think that's actually really good advice. I'm curious, you had to learn stuff along the way. Are you more of a trial and error? Were you reading books? Were you asking people, how did you actually learn some of these things that you didn't know?
Ande Lyons: Well, first of all, I've been following Seth Godin's since 98. He's really one of my folks that I read everything that he puts out because he is the, at the end of the day, traction is the most important thing for your business. Marketing is the most important thing for your business and nobody knows marketing better than Seth Goden also, going to events and following people. It's the most wonderful thing about online. You can learn anything. There's a YouTube video for that. There's a podcast for that, but I do have favorite books, behind me here, great books that I've used over the years. One of my favorites is the road less stupid and that's by Keith coming ham. I have to tell you, it is one of the best nuts and bolts books out there. But again, there is experimentation. Every founder has to be ready to learn and experiment being really okay with the fact that just like in chemistry or when you're cooking, some things are going to explode or not taste good.
Ande Lyons: And so it's great. If you can get a coach, if you can get somebody who seasoned, you can get mentors on your team that are going to help you, that are industry specific, that'll really help you along the way. Those are also important. That's what I've done over the years.
Kevin Horek: No, I, I think that's actually really good advice. You mentioned earlier, obviously when, your facility burns down that you've been using and you decided to shut down these businesses, how have you picked yourself back up and try to go forward again? What advice do you give to people? Because I think that can be really challenging and also kind of soul destroying a bit. Right. So how did you rebuild? What advice you give for people to rebuild?
Ande Lyons: Well, yeah, first of all, unlike a flotation device. I've had some things that have set me back big time, but I've never quit. And so, and I've never settled. I encourage everybody no matter what they're doing in life, keep going toward your dreams, whatever that looks like. And as they change, keep doing it. We member that within every crisis, every big piece of adversity that you're crawling through, there's always a golden seed of opportunity. You just need to look around and say, and pull yourself out from being personally entrenched and become an observer. That is the best way to pull yourself back out and recover. If you've got a failed startup, which by the way many people have failed startups. There's one story after another, we don't focus enough on that. I always remind people about one of the PayPal. Co-founders, his first three businesses failed miserably, his fourth business failed, but not as miserably.
Ande Lyons: And then his fifth business was PayPal. So, it's, what are you looking for inside of you? What is it that helps you feel fully expressed in the world? That's what you're not giving up on. Sometimes, we learn from each of our businesses so that we take all that great information and we put it toward our next business. Or if you learned that, wow, I feel much happier as an employee or fall. You're going to take what you learned from your founder experience, that tenacity, that resilience, that deep problem solving skillset. You're going to take it to a company that's going to love having you on their team.
Kevin Horek: Makes that's really good advice. You host the startup life, live show, walk us through the types of stuff that you cover. Who do you interview on that show?
Ande Lyons: I launched it in April of 2020 Kevin because I was a co-host of a popular monthly pitch event here in Boston called founders live. In Mo in February of 2020, it became, we had our last pitch event at the end of the month. It became very clear in March, 2020 that everything was getting shut down in Boston. We got shut down like New York city, very early in the pandemic. I said to my coolest AIG, let's take this online. I have been doing live streaming since 2013. I knew about the streaming yard platform. I, as I tell people, I have shoes older than these two founders, and they had done a tremendous job of creating a very stable platform for live streaming to the social, all the social platforms. And that was very appealing and Aja. I had our March pitch event, five founders pitching and it went phenomenal.
Ande Lyons: In April, I said, I've got to stay connected with people. I'm going to launch this live event. I started shuffling people in the evening for the first 10 weeks, and then George Floyd was murdered. I was part of a group where I was the one to four whites and a group of 76. I got a deeper understanding of what our diverse founders BiPAP for LGBTQ plus founders go through. In August of 2020, I became committed to amplifying only diverse founders, female bi-pod, LGBTQ plus, and other abled. I've been going live every week, twice a week on Tuesdays and Fridays at 12:00 PM, E S T and interviewing founders who are in the trenches, maybe founders, occasionally I have a luminary founder who's cashed out. I helped bring in all types of tech founders or a food founder or retail. E-commerce bringing them all in so that we have representation because if you can see it, you can be it.
Ande Lyons: It's an hour long conversation around the business model. Occasionally I'll bring in experts who are going to share, how are you going to create those financial models? How are we going to use CRO or SEO to build your business? Definitely bring investors. I have some angels come in or VCs, come in and share what they're looking for and what founders need to know. Mostly it's a discussion of what we call the businessman, understanding. What's your value prop. Have you, how did you pivot along the way after you launched? What did your customers teach you? How are you doing customer acquisition? Have you raised money? What was that like for you, et cetera. As well as talking about the business and hearing these phenomenal startup stories, we get started and I find out, oh, I was incarcerated for four years and I turned things around or I was on a bus and leaving Kuwait during the Gulf war.
Ande Lyons: We thought were going to get blown up any minute. We were all singing or it just goes on from one. I had no idea about these founders when I did the interview. And so that's amazing. Then, because it's live Kevin, I get comments from the KRAS on Facebook, YouTube, and that adds magic and spontaneity to the country station. For me personally, knowing that it's not edited, I had, when I hit that live button, this is it. That's very exciting. It helps me bring home a real full experience and real present experience to the show. So it's been almost two years. I've had, I think I'm doing my 130 fifth show tomorrow. I think it is. So it's been great. I just got word that I am number 10 in the best podcasts for startups. I'm talking masters of scale is number one, guy. Roz is number five with how I built the, how I built this.
Ande Lyons: And there's no written,
Kevin Horek: That's amazing.
Ande Lyons: I don't have a team I'm looking forward to having more people join me as I get sponsors. Right now it's all about impact is how can I help founders around the world find the solutions and inspiration they need to keep going. They don't feel alone isolated and can be celebrated.
Kevin Horek: No, I think that's awesome. I'm curious, what have you learned in your personal life that you've been able to bring back into your business life, your businesses and your coaching?
Ande Lyons: Wow. Well, I've had a lot of adversity. I've had a lot of situations where I should have just hung up and just lie down and said enough. These personal experiences, as I tell people, my husband and I, we've lost businesses, we've lost babies. We lost all our money and all our hormones, but we never lost each other. What I bring to my businesses is a level of enthusiasm for the journey, for the excitement of what I'm going to learn along the way when I make a, when something goes to hell in a hand basket, let's say, for example, in the live show, I go, oh great. That's out of the way now, it's, I ha I lightened, I don't worry about it being perfect. I see it more as an unfolding and a learning along the way. For me, it's, I'm just so happy to be seen in my joyful purpose and your life's experiences.
Ande Lyons: It's those lived experiences as Arlan Hamilton says in her phenomenal book, it's about damn time that our lived experiences can inform how we move forward. It's, it's been a two way street. Entrepreneurship has served me both professionally and personally. Of course my lived experience, I mean, who says, who keeps trying to get her MBA when they tell her not once, but twice we don't accept GMs as low as yours, you just can't let people tell you now find another way to yes. I know that sounds very cliche, but it's true.
Kevin Horek: No, I, I, I think that's good advice and I think people need to take that for what you really truly mean by that, right? Because as, and that's what I love about your story so much as you've been through this adversity, you're still a very positive person and you've almost used that like no, or kind of those events to like make you stronger and push you to keep going and motivation to keep going and just forgetting what people say, whether they're right wrong or other, it doesn't really matter. You're just using it to push yourself forward.
Ande Lyons: Exactly. I'm really understanding what a successful outcome looks for you. It could be how you feel, right. Not getting caught up, letting others define what success looks like for you. In my world, I say to founders, look, if you're feeding your family, that's huge what you're employing people in your community. Wow. And you're doing global domination. That's great too. I mean, there's so much emphasis about what's wrong with that. A million dollars a year in revenue and paying some people, right? Feeding your family and creating a legacy for your children, nothing wrong with that 50,000,500 million. It doesn't have to be, you don't have to have an IPO. You can have a successful outcome, but know what that looks like for you at this point in time, because as you evolve and get better and get to another level as a founder, things that were scary earlier, no longer scary.
Ande Lyons: You're ready to take on more and then you can set again. What does success look like for me at this point in time?
Kevin Horek: Sure. I think that's actually really good advice. There anything from like art or music or anything else that you draw inspiration and motivation from? I know it's kind of similar to the personal question, but do you find, how do you get inspiration? Oh,
Ande Lyons: Listening to people. Sometimes I'll go and grab some wonderful thoughts from Mel Robbins, for example, but also I've got music. I've got my Showtime music that I played, just get me jazzed up. I definitely have my guitar riff music. I need to do that. And Tik TOK. It just doing some Tik TOK of videos of me doing air guitar with guitarists. I love rock music. That's where I get inspiration and moving the body and dancing and stories and following folks who are there to inspire. Another one of my favorites for female for women would be Glennon Doyle. So, yeah, there's just specific people out there who are really bringing great information, just looking at my bookshelf behind me. There's just turning to folks who can help me with my slots, because at the end of the day, what you tell yourself is so important and we all live with our inner critic.
Ande Lyons: If you can high-five yourself in the mirror, if you can acknowledge that the inner critic has a voice and say, yep, I hear you, Kevin. What I'd like to tell people is when you've cut that shadow side of yourself, that's telling you all that terrible, why you should not be doing this and hashtag why bother? You need to say, I hear you. Just like baking soda goes into a delicious chocolate cake. You need to blend those negative thoughts into your bed or your cake better so that you can bake it up and have a great outcome because that those voices will get louder. If you don't look at them, they will annoy you. That inner critic voice will almost be harmful to your ability to move forward. If you don't hear it and then say, don't worry, I've got this. Just hold hands with it and keep going.
Kevin Horek: Do you have any advice or things that people can try to get rid of, or at least deal with that negativity? Because it can be really hard to shut that down inside your head. Sometimes.
Ande Lyons: First of all, you've got to be gentle with yourself. You're human. You, we're going to have moments where you're going to be filled with founder. Doubt. Really important thing to do is make sure that you were with peers because your family can not understand your loved ones can not understand what you're going through. When you were hanging out with other founders, it's amazing how much better you will feel. As far as that inner critic, you've got to love that side of yourself and say, thank you for sharing, kick those thoughts off the bus, put them down, into the trash. We placed them with more affirming thoughts, even if it's just gratitude, just keep replacing them and get control over that part of your brain as best you can. This is all a journey. You build those muscles, especially the mindset muscles.
Kevin Horek: No, that makes a lot of sense. I'm curious to get your thoughts on it. It seems like even people that have been through it time and time again, and have had failure some success, they still worry about the same thing, sometimes different things, but it's not like you get to a point maybe unless you're like extremely wealthy. You don't have to, you still worry about some of the same things you did with your first business that you did with your, 10th business. What are your thoughts around that? How do you kind of deal with that and kind of just accept that there's always going to be something that you need to deal with no matter how early on or how further far in your career you really are.
Ande Lyons: Yeah. You will always have founder doubt and feelings of inadequacy. There's a great TedTalk from a bajillion air out of Australia who talks about this and I can get you the link for it. He also shares not only his story of continuing, founder doubt, but of many, three times cashed out entrepreneur, who I got his fourth business is still going. I don't know, but this work, oh my gosh, those of you as parents, each child comes with a whole different set of sole requirements for parenting. It's the same thing with a business. You're getting to have to tap into other skillsets. You can't just say what I did for the first kid I'm going to do for the second. And the third that never works. It's the same thing with the business, you're going to need to bring together a different team. You're going to have different mentors.
Ande Lyons: You're gonna have to find different ways and you're still going to sit there and go, wow. At the same time, it's those transferable skills. Those with founder hood, those are the skills of the muscles you've built to manage the high level of uncertainty and to bring tenacity and persistence, and most importantly resilience to your journey. It's a nail biter, everybody, but you, that's what you have as I'm always saying one minute, you're popping the champagne and the next minute you're crying into it. Founders often, I don't care how many times you've been in business. I've had different businesses, founders sleep like babies through the night. They always wake up every few hours crying.
Kevin Horek: Sure. No, I, I, a hundred percent agree. What other advice do you give to founders that maybe you wish they would do more of or less of? Because you must see that all the time when you're talking to them and working with them.
Ande Lyons: Absolutely. Of course delegate. If and really see this as investing, okay. It's not an expense, it's an investment. It's something to do what you don't want, like doing get team members on as soon as you can and get traction. There's I swear there's nothing changed between 1998 and today with this raising capital business, everybody's about the raise. No, it's about traction. You want a profitable and sustainable business. Get the customers on board, really understand your numbers, really understand what the LTV CAC ratio is and why that's so important to understand as a marketing return of investment and really understand what does it take for your business to grow and be profitable and sustainable. It's not easy. A lot of times founders can easily distracted, but most importantly, have someone either be part of a founder group or have a mentor who you can bounce ideas off because you often have the answer inside of you, but until you're able to talk, it really talk it out with someone who's really listening and you trust and who has a background in your category, your industry, yeah.
Ande Lyons: That stuff can not bubble up on your own. Working isolated will not work for you as a founder.
Kevin Horek: No, I think that's really good advice. Do you have advice for people on how to get traction? Because it can be really challenging.
Ande Lyons: Absolutely challenging, I guess, coming on Friday, her she's all about conversion rate optimization. That is when you go diving deep into not just who your ideal customer is, but the language that they're going to need to hear and the user experience going to need to have in order for you to turn them into a customer and we tame them and this is really hard, and this is not something you're good at hire somebody or get, listen to shows like mine or who's ever sharing this information out there in the world. See what you can do to bring on the tools and the support that you need. Getting that customer attraction as being willing to go out to the world, not family and friends, but the strangers and say, what do you think? Be willing to go, wow. Listen, for example, the founders of stream yard, since they launched live in November of 2019, they have every single Sunday night had a town hall, okay.
Ande Lyons: 6:00 PM, Pacific 9:00 PM. Eastern there, they're talking to their users. Here are updates. What are the problems you're running into? What would you like to see on the platform talking to your customers? It's brilliant. They ha they just had like episode 1 61. They have not missed a Sunday. To me, it's just constantly talking to your customers, getting that feedback and being willing to be flexible. Don't hold onto what you think the customer needs. Let the customer tell you what they need and deliver it to them and focus on always selling the problem, not your fancy schmancy solution.
Kevin Horek: I think that's really good advice. How do you balance what a customer tells you compared to your roadmap? Should they be one in the same? Because sometimes customers will say, if you add X feature or X features all sign up, but you can end up chasing your tail by constantly building for potential customers, not your real customers. Do you know what I'm getting at?
Ande Lyons: Oh, that's such a great question. Kevin, it's so important. I mean, you do need to lead your customers, right? I mean, what you're capable of doing and providing, so I'll go back to stream yard. Again, people wanted all these features and they would say, thank you and put that in there less, but here's what we're going to put out this next 60 days. Right? In taking that, and that's why understanding customer segmentation. Going deep initially into a really finely defined customer niche that you're busy making that group happy, figuring out all the problems and challenges up features that you're bringing. Being able to, once you've nailed it for that tiny sliver, which we call the launchable addressable market, then you can go into your service of a bowl, addressable market. And that means reaching out to people. Don't make the mistake of diversifying, piggyback off what you have as you bring in new products and services.
Ande Lyons: Don't try to go off into a whole other tangent. That's also really important, but we go over all of this on the startup life live show, because those are the questions we have and conversations and the founders on the show share, what they learned. Sometimes the pivot is like a spin of the car, but most often it's how you combined and blend in how you're going to serve and do those problems. At the same time, be able to have a monthly overhead that you can manage and not get too spread too thin.
Kevin Horek: No, I think that's really good advice. We're kind of coming to the end of the show. There anything else that you want to mention to our listeners today?
Ande Lyons: I just want to say, keep growing, keep learning, keep upping your founder game and find out other skill sets that you need, even if it means learning how to acquire team members or outsource folks that can help you. I'm a huge fan. I use Upwork and I go on there and I find out who cares the most about their rating, a meeting. If they've got a 97 plus success rating and they've had over a thousand jobs already, and I've worked, I know there's somebody who are gonna, who's gonna make me happy at see what their reviews are and find those people to help you.
Kevin Horek: No, I think that's really good advice. How about we close the show with mentioning where people can get more information, but yourself, your show, and any other things you want to mention?
Ande Lyons: Absolutely. You can find me@andylions.com, a N D E L Y O N S. Please follow me everywhere. I glow on social media. I'm at Andy lions on Twitter and IgG and LinkedIn. I'd love if you're called to subscribe to my channel because I'm about 30 subscribers away from reaching that magical one K number on YouTube. You can do so much more on YouTube when you reach that number, but there's so much great advice and resources that I give out on the show. You can receive an alert whenever I post a new show, by going onto meetup.com, backslash startup life live. And that's where you'll receive an alert. It's our meetup group. It's a great way for me to stay in touch with folks along the way.
Kevin Horek: Perfect, Andy. Well, I really appreciate you taking the time out of your day to be on the show. I look forward to keeping in touch with you and have a good rest of your day.
Ande Lyons: Thank you so much. I'm so grateful to everyone for tuning in and for this opportunity to share my path with everyone. Thank you, Kevin.
Kevin Horek: Thanks very much. Okay. Bye. Well, Johnny, Greg, what did you guys think?
Jon Larson: Oh, that was a great interview as though that was a great energetic interview. I loved it. One thing that comes to mind definitely is I loved her resilience and her fearlessness. I just, and that's what I thought of. I loved her story about her taking the MBA and getting told that she couldn't get in and just, she didn't give up on that as well as are her various startup journeys just found it inspirational.
Gregg Oldring: Yeah. She's so she has such positive energy, just exuding from her. It's really, I found her just of lifting to listen to just out of the gate, but she had great things to say too. I actually love the, one of the people that she finds inspiring too, is Seth Godin, who I could really relate to that too, for his book permission marketing, which was quite a few years back for me was really inspirational moment when building mail out the email newsletter business that we did. That really resonated with me, for sure. Actually, it was just a really encouraging to hear when like, people like she ran into some opposite. She didn't get into all of her hardships, but like keep went through some pretty hard stuff and continuing through that and sharing with others to inspire others to carry on too. I think that's fantastic.
Gregg Oldring: So yeah. Great interview. That was fun.
Kevin Horek: Yeah. No, I love that story too. Right. It's like, well, when you go through that much hardship and you keep going and you keep building other businesses and you keep like that to me is just inspiring itself. Right. Because you look back at some of the times where it's been like dark on your side and you're like, well, no building burnt down and just ruin my business or like mother nature. Doesn't really, you're just like, wow. Okay.
Gregg Oldring: Why did she didn't even really cut a dive into that much to some of the I'm sure. Just even being a woman then going through the MBA. Like, I, I would love to actually have a job did and somehow that conversation of what was that like going from being an executive assistant to being the executive, because that's, that whole thing is pretty, that's a big deal right there. And I think it's awesome. So yeah, I love it. She's very cool. She's she's pretty great.
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