Welcome back to the episode of the Startup Therapy Podcast.
This is Ryan Rutan, joined as always by my
friend, the founder, and CEO of startups.com.
Will, Schroeder will, there's a lot of talk in the startup space
about the fact that we need to stay focused, focused, focused.
Um, and while I agree with that.
By and large.
I think there's, there's a few things that we need to
consider within that, and, and there's an important aspect,
I think that's played a part in both of our, our lives and
startup careers and some of our hobbies too, that that shows
up on a pretty regular basis.
And in fact, you are just having a conversation about this with
one of our startups.com members.
So why don't you, why don't you kick off with, with that,
and let's go from there.
Well, it started the, the conversation started with
nothing to do with what we're gonna talk about today.
But what was funny was he reached out to me 'cause he got
my newsletter, which is usually the basis for how we do these.
And uh, he said, will, I gotta be honest, this sounds
like it was written by AI and I, I just thought, and
it wasn't by the way, right?
Yeah.
But the time that we're in, like, the times that
we're in, I thought it was funny that like everyone is
kind of like trying to see.
Is it real?
Or you know, whatever.
And I wrote back to him and I said, ah, no, actually this
was actually written by me.
However, however, maybe because I've been spending so much
time with ai, I'm starting to write like ai, which I thought
was kind of interesting.
Yes.
And AI was trained on some of the best writers
in the world, right?
So maybe you're just one of the best writers in the world will.
Right.
Maybe that's
exactly where I was headed with that.
So.
That's where I started.
I mean, I think that's the most likely, most likely scenario.
Yeah.
So he and I were talking, we were going through some
challenges he was having, and so for, who is it?
We never re uh, reveal names on here, but I know
that you're listening.
This episode is dedicated to you.
And I told him that we would create an episode
forum when we were talking.
And what we were talking about was the value of the side quest.
And it just so happens.
That he was a, he's from the video game industry.
Oh,
and for our fellow gamers out there, a side quest, as you
would know, is when you deviate from the main quest is your
business, your focus and you go on a different mission that
isn't necessarily connected to the main quest but could
also reveal some treasure.
Yes.
I dunno about you Ryan.
I love side quest.
I live side Quest.
I'm Quest.
I side Quest like crazy.
Right, and, and, and I feel like what we've learned in
our business@startups.com were those side quests, those
distractions as they would be called those deviations.
Have become the most important part of our business.
A hundred percent, man, they might look like a detour
to begin with, but at some point they either end up
becoming a shortcut or just the path that ends up saving
the entire run, you know?
Right.
And it looks something like this, Hey, we're doing business
A and everything you know is probably okay, maybe not.
Let's say it's okay.
Yep.
And co-founder comes up and says, Hey, I wanna try path
B. And path B is a tangent.
It's something we don't normally do.
And what I wanna talk through in this episode is how that tangent
normally is dismissed, right?
Usually it's, Hey, that's not focused.
That's not the main Quest line.
That's that's not what we're here to do.
And I think it's a giant mistake.
Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying let's
get distracted as hell.
Yeah, yeah,
yeah.
I'm saying we gotta keep our minds open that maybe
just maybe in almost every case for us, just maybe.
That side quest, that distraction leads to
a better business.
Yeah.
And that I think I wanna unpack today.
Yeah, man.
I mean, I think this is way too easily written off as
like the A DHD machinations of founders when when I
look at its, man, it's curiosity as risk management.
Curiosity.
Wow.
That's a much better way to put it.
Yeah.
We're out there just exploring and figuring out what,
what should we be doing?
But, so let's start by talking about like, what I think
you, you've called the myth of the linear path, right?
Right, right.
Like this, the linear path that fairytale that we tell
investors where, you know, in reality I see the real path
is being more of a series of right angle turns based on some
well-informed guesses, right?
Things that we gotta go explore, things we gotta think about.
For sure.
And I, I think if you didn't know how this business actually
works, and Ryan, you and I have the benefit of working
with thousands and thousands and thousands of, of founders.
So we see every path there is, but what people think the
path is, if you haven't done this before, most people are
doing it for the first time.
What you think the path is is that you have an
idea, you build product.
Product is accepted by market, company grows.
That's how it works.
And then there's a couple of twists and turns, but
that's pretty much it.
Yeah.
It's not how this works.
No, whatsoever.
No.
Like that's maybe what you think is in the brochure, but that
that ain't in the brochure.
Right.
The real path is we have an idea.
Within a few months, we realize it's a shitty idea.
We rebuild idea, we try second idea.
Yeah.
That's also a shitty idea.
And then we rebuild it and rebuild and then
we just keep doing it.
Yeah.
Incrementally less shitty
kinda, right?
Like sometimes like iterating sounds like what happens
when you mysteriously had a good idea the first time
uhhuh
and it just kept, you know, being a good idea,
which rarely ever happens.
That's the myth of the linear path that we have an
idea, we say undistracted and we just go and execute
and everything works.
That sounds awesome.
Does
and if.
If you could magically do that, do that.
Yeah.
Good luck with
that.
You know what's funny?
Will, you know what's funny to me?
Like anytime the path starts to feel like perfectly linear,
smooth, my first instinct is.
What am I missing?
Right.
I guess because we've done this so much that like
the second it's like you just keep going straight.
I'm like, are you sure about that?
Like, 'cause it never has ever, ever, never worked
out that way in the past.
So when it does start to feel like it's just on
rails, as they say, I'm like.
I, something's we're missing something here.
Something's gotta be off.
Let's take it back a step.
Let's think of how improbable it would be,
right?
That you could maintain a linear path, right?
Yeah.
Here's what would have to happen in order for this to
actually be even possible.
Number one, you'd have to have an idea that had perfect product
market fit or damn near to it.
Mm-hmm.
Now here's what's great.
You would've had to have that idea and have never
built or tested it yet.
Or put it out in the market meaningfully or
try to acquire customers.
All the things that come and somehow still hit that stride
in order to make zero deviation.
Then competitors would enter the market and investors
would enter the market and you'd have to hire lots of
people who have their own ideas, et cetera, and somehow
mysteriously, none of that would change your path whatsoever.
Like all of those things would have to fall online in order for
you to not deviate from path.
Now I say that this isn't saying focus isn't important.
Focus at the expense.
Yeah.
Of seeing what else is there is dangerous in my mind.
Yes.
I love focus.
We love focus.
Yes.
But there's a cost to it.
Focus is only noble if you're working on the right thing.
Right.
Other, how do you know it is?
Absolutely not.
It is just, yeah.
It is just planned distraction.
Yeah, play distraction.
And I think that because folks haven't done this before,
they haven't seen other path.
Like look at it this way, if you came from big Corp.
Big Corp exists now because some dude, years and years
ago, probably decades, if not centuries ago, went through this
process and got you to here.
Now that you're at Big Corp, you're at some
insurance company or bank or whatever you're at, right?
All of those things have been figured out, like all the side
quests have already happened.
Now, that's not to say at a big corp you couldn't, you know,
have a side quest, but it's rare, and I say that because a
co-founder, let's say, coming out of that environment,
they're used to the fact that things have been figured out.
There isn't a reason to go on a side quest because Right.
We've already figured out product market fit.
Oh man.
Competition and everything else like that.
Yeah.
So you go into a startup with that mentality and
you're like, Hey, why would we do anything else Uhhuh?
And it's like, dude, you had the benefit of someone else
having figured this out.
This isn't that.
Yeah, no.
Linear planning is what happens when, uh, ego's
in charge of the roadmap,
right?
Uh, right.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
' cause honestly, like, I think it's one of the most dangerous
phrase in, in startups, right?
We already know.
Do you though, do you really actually know?
Right.
Especially if, like, in your case, you're
coming from like the.
Example you're providing, if you're coming from Big Corp
or something, you're gonna go start something that's
based on the experiences that you already have.
Yes, you do know some things, right?
But those have to be readapted to the startup
environment, right.
And right.
Certainty is not a startup asset.
Right?
Adaptability is, but, but certainty, I think in most
cases is a startup liability.
'cause we just don't know.
Right.
A roadmap is just a story, right?
It's a theory, not even a theory, sorry.
It's a hypothesis.
The exploration is what provides the evidence that allows us
to turn it into a theory, but we have to go through that
exploration, and exploration comes most of the time through
all this side questioning.
One of the last episodes we did was how we're
really good at failure.
Oh yeah.
And I think this tethers a lot to the side questing, the
idea that we're willing to go try kind of everything.
Mm-hmm.
Really just kind of everything and see what
works and what doesn't.
Yeah.
Because we're really good at, at regrouping, uh, when
failure happens invariably.
But I think for a lot of folks, they haven't had to
go through that level of just jump off the bridge and see
what happens kind of moment.
And they're terrified of it.
And to be fair.
It's because it's terrifying, right?
So again, if, if you're battling your co-founder, let's say,
in, in, in this case, I'm saying co-founder wants to stay
straight and narrow and you wanna try something different.
If you're battling co-founder and co-founder
is like, I want to go in this specific direction.
And I think any deviation is a mistake.
Yeah.
There's nothing wrong with convict.
Nothing wrong with conviction and, and I
respect that, that in focus,
that's exactly it, right?
It's conviction's great.
If you've developed conviction around the
vector, that's actually going to lead to success.
But like at the stage at which sometimes we become
convicted, it's, we get convicted with, it becomes a
life sentence of the wrong sort.
We don't want that.
We gotta be really careful.
And I think it's important to think about, you know, we're
not changing our mind, we're not changing course entirely.
We're updating our model.
Right.
We're being flexible enough because to your point, we
couldn't possibly, we wouldn't have prob probably would not
be right from the beginning.
Right?
Right.
It is an experiment of process.
We have to do these things and so to me, the side quests
are, are the laboratory.
I don't think as a company matures even a little bit,
you know, from, from an idea, even the product in
market, I don't think people understand that this process
doesn't end, for example.
Correct.
In the early stages, you know, we got an A lean startup,
we got an A hypothesis, we got all these things
about an idea validation.
Yep.
And the idea was, hey, we're gonna try a bunch of stuff
and we're gonna see which idea sticks and what to build.
That's not where this process stops.
Correct.
That is one miles.
Stone.
Yeah.
But the process where we have to keep looking at what, what if,
what else, what next never ends.
And I think when it starts to end is when you actually start
to run into problems, right?
Yeah.
Where, when you actually start to run into a situation
where your competition's like, well, we'll try out What if.
Exactly it.
Right?
It's, it's, it's what we said before, right?
It's, it's when, when you know, right, when you, when you have
certainty, you think you have certainty and that can feel
very secure and that can feel, that can feel really great.
I dunno if you saw this will, but there was a, an
interesting physics discovery made this week that actually
reversed a previous theory.
Using ai.
And the, the thing that they found most interesting
about it was that the, the discovery, the fact that it
reversed an existing, kind of proven to the extent
that we could theory Yeah.
And then hypothesized and, and proved, uh, the, the real
solution to this, the findings.
When humans looked at this, they went, like, one of the reasons
this happened is, is that's something that a human would've
been Sure wouldn't have worked.
Ah, right.
Exactly.
Uncertainty, right?
So let's play this out in our world, meaning
the startups.com world.
Okay.
I wanna.
Prove a, a case where I believe these side quests
aren't distractions.
They can be, by the way.
You can absolutely just be straight up distracted, right?
Yeah,
yeah.
And
well, yes, yes, of course.
Every one of us has some level of a DH ADHD that, that feeds
that distraction beautifully.
There's plenty of shiny ball syndrome in the in,
in the founder space.
Oh my God.
Right.
Let's go back in time to the year 2012.
Uhhuh.
I remember it
well.
You and I were, were younger and more vibrant.
We were launching a company called fundable.com,
which still exists today.
And at the time, crowdfunding was a huge deal.
Yeah.
Was a huge deal.
This was like, like the era of Kickstarter, you know, in
Indiegogo back in that day.
And we decided around 2011, 'cause that's when
we were building it.
And then we launched it in 2012 that we were gonna launch an
equity crowdfunding platform.
Yes.
Where people could make equity investments on the same
way they were making reward style investments for, uh,
products just sitting around waiting for Obama to sign
the jobs act to make it.
Yeah, exactly.
Oh man.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
And so, so we're all pumped up.
This is gonna be world changing, what have you.
Yep.
And it turns out what, like 30 other companies,
it was pumped up as we were doing the same exact thing.
Oh
yeah.
It was quite a crowd at the starting
gate.
A funny aside, 'cause 'cause as I, you know this, but I,
I want to tell the audience, there was this moment where I'm
sitting across from a friend of mine in Santa Monica and
we're both talking about how pumped up we are about our new
ideas, and about halfway into the conversation it occurs
to us that we're talking about the exact same idea.
We're rolling
the same thing.
Yeah.
And it was so awkward.
He'd be like saying, I just met this girl.
She's the girl of my dreams.
Like, I'm, I'm ready to propose I bought the ring, right?
I think I'm gonna propose tomorrow.
And your buddy's like, so am I. This is amazing.
Right?
I propose tomorrow as well.
And you realize it's the same girl, right?
Yeah.
Um, anyway, so there was at least 30 other companies.
30 other companies as you recall.
Yeah.
That had the exact same idea.
Now there's a couple ways you can look at that.
Number one, if 30 other companies had the same idea,
it must be a pretty good idea.
Yeah.
Like everybody, like brainstormed it.
They talked to investors, they got investment, they,
they went down the same path.
We launched this thing and it goes.
As I remember it.
Okay.
Like how do you remember it?
Look, it went okay.
It went okay.
It didn't turn into everything we wanted to, neither in
the beginning, nor over time, like there was that
sense that, well, maybe this will mature, and here's the
really interesting thing.
So maybe this will mature.
Maybe the market will come together over time.
That was the linear path.
Right.
And so we could've just said that and we could've
just followed that and we could've said, look, this
is just, it's a new market.
It's gonna take time.
We realized very early on that one of the things
that people needed was to understand how to use it.
We built the platform and then we let a bunch of people
into a gym who'd never worked out before and they were
dropping weights on their feet would put themselves.
So we built out a personal training, uh,
arm, and that helped.
And that helped.
But the market never really matured.
And so at the same time, we were engaging in those side
quests and saying, okay, cool.
We love working with founders and equity crowdfunding was
where we wanted to start, but what else can we be doing?
And that was where the side questing began.
Right.
But of those 30 companies will, we're still around how many of
the others, if you had to, and it's the finger in the wind
here, how many of the others are still around that were, that
just stayed equity crowdfunding.
I can't name two.
And if there are more, I apologize to, you
know, a lot of this book people are our friends.
I apologize if you're still around.
It's not because I'm disrespecting the fact
that you're still around.
It's because I just don't even pay attention anymore.
Yep.
It just doesn't, it, it became kind of an irrelevant, it's
so off my radar.
And that's coming from a guy who, you know, a team here
who owned that platform.
Right.
Still do.
Which is super important point, right?
A startup without side quests is a startup with
a single point of failure.
Great way to put it.
Yeah.
Single critical point of failure.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
And we managed to avoid that.
Right.
We, we weren't sure about any of this stuff.
We said, Hey look, this is, this is one vector.
This is one way that we can be helpful to this population
that we want to help.
So let's fall in love with who we want to help, but
let's not fall in love with exactly how we're helping them.
'cause we have no idea how this ends.
Now that we do know how this ends, I'm real glad
we took that course.
So let me explain what happened so folks understand throughout
2012 we're, as you mentioned, we're loading people onto
the platform and we keep running into the same problem.
Over and over and over.
People wanna raise money from investors, but
they're sorely unprepared
yes.
To do it.
They don't, they don't understand what a pitch deck is.
They don't understand the fundamentals of their business.
They haven't done any product market fit idea
validation, literally nothing.
Right?
They just know they don't have money and they need money.
So we were like, well, where are they going right now?
To fix all those problems, to create their pitch deck,
to go create, you know, all these, these other things.
And we realized nowhere.
And so we went on what I would call an epic side quest,
where we went out and we did diligence on 200 companies in
the startup space to purchase.
And we ended up, um, not 200, 100, I'm sorry,
uh, 100 companies that we ended up doing.
We talked to way
more, it's kinda like the way I feel about how
many children I have.
Some days it's three, some days it's a hundred.
Um, was it a hundred?
Was it 200?
Was it a thousand?
Like I, we
talked over 200.
We did diligence on a hundred, which is a lot of
companies, and we purchased six venture backed companies.
And they were all within the startup space.
And what we wanted to be able to do was be able to help startups
at each step of this problem.
And so we ended up buying, uh, companies to help people get
customers to help find advisors, you know, all these things.
It was all these things, which became essentially
the genesis of startups.com.
Yeah.
Now, what's really interesting about that to me is we
didn't hesitate for a second.
It's a side quest on this one.
Yep.
Right.
Not at all.
And we had no idea how this would turn out.
It's not like, you know, we were like, oh, well let's
clearly go buy a bunch of companies and blah, blah, blah.
Who are we to do any of this?
And it goes back to our previous episode is we just
weren't afraid to fail, which is our greatest strength.
'cause we just wouldn't.
Charge into everything.
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 dayLong@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.
I want to throw another one in there because the macro
point here is that side quests are not random, right?
Not when they're done, right?
Yes.
Distractions are random.
Yeah.
They're controlled experiments that have some level of
capped downside, right.
With some intention of upside.
Just to, to make it clear that like it's not that we
were immune to considering things that probably were
outside the wheelhouse.
'cause yes, all these things definitely had a point.
But will, do you remember a moment when, for about a
week we were very excited in the office as we were
considering buying Atari.
Oh my God, I forgot about that.
Oh dude.
I totally forgot.
We were gonna buy Atari.
We were speaking of video games.
We ran, the numbers were Quest.
We almost turned video games into our side Quest.
Wow.
I totally forgot about that.
Yes, we did diligence on Atari.
Oh my God, I totally forgot about that.
Yep.
For those of you who don't neither know nor care.
There was a, a point in time, this had to
been like 20 13, 20 14.
Yeah.
Where Atari, the famous brand, like the actual, like, you
know, one of the first home consoles was going up for sale.
It was going bankrupt, essentially.
Yes.
And, and the assets were gonna go up for sale and,
and they were gonna go for ones of millions of dollars.
Yeah.
Which even back then was a lot because it was just
basically the brand, right?
Yeah.
There wasn't, I remember they owned some games
and stuff like that, but.
As children of the eighties, we were like, are you
gotta be kidding me.
The
nostalgia element alone was just like, if I had lived
one day with that business card, I'd have led a better
life in some ways, you know, just, just for the fun of it.
Right.
But it was a complete deviation.
Right.
Talk about distraction.
Oh yeah.
Talk about even
we were like, dude, this is pretty far off, off the park.
Uh, but yeah, so at some point we even considered
buying at Target.
So.
Within that though, within these, these side quests, I,
I wanna point out more than the outcome, which is, you
know, it helped kind of drive what became startups do com.
Yeah, yeah.
I also wanna point, we learned so much Oh my God.
From the Quest.
Yes.
The quest
itself.
From the Quest.
Right.
Not the outcome, not the treasure at the end.
'cause sometimes there wasn't, right?
Yeah.
The quest itself.
You remember this part?
So I moved my family out to San Francisco.
Yes.
Right.
And every day I'm reporting back to you guys of all these
meetings I'm having, I'm gonna be just meetings nonstop.
Yeah.
With everybody I can meet with.
And I, and we're learning so much from this.
Yes.
We're like, Hey, do you know, like this company's, you know,
growing at this rate, or this company's failing completely.
Or like Uhhuh, we got so much intel from this Quest.
Intel, yeah, yeah, yeah.
As to what our market looked like.
And, and Ryan, I would argue, I would argue that.
Some of that intel serves us to this day?
Explain,
no, absolutely.
Yeah.
You don't have to argue that at all.
No argument here.
Well,
a
hundred percent.
We, um, we learned a lot about what not to do,
Abe.
Absolutely.
And going in on these quests as valuable.
Yep, exactly.
I was like, not gonna go into that business.
Like businesses we thought were incredible, like Atari.
Uh, we, we were like, we talked to the founders and, you know,
we're very founder forward.
So when we talk to founders about buying their business,
we don't sit there and, and like grill them like a,
like a private equity firm with or, or an m and a firm.
We sit on their side of the table, and I've done this a
million times, particularly with the companies that we acquired.
And we say, if I'm in your shoes right now as a
founder, here are my options.
You could sell to us.
Mm-hmm.
And that might be an okay outcome.
I, I'm not telling you it's the best outcome, it's an outcome,
but here are your other options.
And by doing that, by putting ourselves in the shoes of all
these other founders, we got to, we got to get a firsthand
view of how all these other markets actually worked.
Right,
right.
And again, we were talking to lots of of funded
companies, like venture funded companies, and actually I
made a lot of great friends outta this process as well.
But a really fascinating part was we got more market intel.
As to how every facet of our business could work.
And I think 18 months, then we could have possibly gathered
through, you know, as much research as we could ever,
ever bought or done ourselves.
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
It was a crazy force multiplier in terms of, of the
understanding of the markets and where things were going,
where things weren't going.
It was incredible, man.
It's interesting, but I, I, I was trying to think
of, you know, side quests as insurance policies
that we pay for with Yes.
Time.
It's all cost us.
It was time.
And I'd argue if you can't afford that level
of exploration, you definitely can't afford to
be wrong about anything.
Right.
And so the only way you're gonna find out about things
is that exploration, right?
So it's a bit of a catch 22 there.
You have to find a way to be able to afford this
level of exploration, this level of curiosity.
Okay.
Right, right.
So if, if we're proposing a side quest to our
Ory co-founder, right?
Who who is, is, you know, say the straight and narrower uhhuh,
an advisor, investor, whomever.
I think part of that argument is simply there's a good
chance it won't succeed per se.
Sure.
But here's what I think we'll learn in the failing.
Right.
Here's what I wanna unpack and explore.
That will tell us without question, that
is not the path for us.
Sure, sure, sure.
And I think that part of the explanation is often lost
'cause it's like, Hey, I wanna try this other thing.
And this ornery co-founder is like, well, that won't succeed.
Probably not.
Yeah.
But, but here's what I'm hoping to learn in that
process that will help our current path succeed.
Or again, inform if, if this is the current path.
Yeah.
And, and I think that's important, right?
I think that that the insight, the learning, the, the,
the kind of the, the what if path you wanna go down.
I think that is the treasure, right?
I think that's the important measurable.
If other things come out of it, right, there's other
outcomes in their side, great.
But I think that the kind of the, what am I
trying to understand?
What am I trying to learn is the actual treasure.
If it doesn't have one of those, then it's probably
not a side quest, it's just procrastination.
Around what you actually should be doing.
I wanna throw another one out there, and this
is a little bit of side quest to this discussion.
One of the most popular side quests that I see with startups
is becoming a services business.
Right.
You and I see it all the time.
Yes.
Right?
It's we're trying to build a product.
Product isn't ready, market adoption isn't there.
We're doing have the customers, so we kind of spin off
this services business Yep.
To kind of just do that work for the client
to generate some cash.
Yeah.
In order to hopefully get back to the product business.
And I hear pushback on this all the time.
Well, that's not the product.
That's just the services business.
Dude.
If it pays the bills, it is the business.
Yeah, it is the business.
That's how business work.
That's duck quest.
Yeah.
That is the, yeah, the pay the bills is the quest.
Right.
How we get there is, is the question, and I bring
this up because for a lot of startups, when we talk
about that non-linear path.
They also think that income should only come from exactly
what we built and have in front of us right now.
Yeah.
Incorrect.
Because you get $2 for every one of those dollars when it's
time to pay the bills, right?
Yeah, exactly.
They're worth more.
Right.
Like if we could explain how many businesses have taken
the path of like, the reason they're there today is because
they did 20 different things to keep the bills paid.
Yeah.
You know, our most famous example, of
course is the Airbnb.
Thing where Brian Chesky famously, and, and by the
way, this story is sold.
I don't even know if it's true anymore, but for those that
haven't heard it a thousand times, the super short
version Chesky was running out of money for Airbnb.
He decided that had this crazy stunt where he sold,
uh, serial, he sold Captain McCain's in Obama owes
during those elections.
An idea how old this story is now, if I recall, like $40,000.
Yeah.
It, it was enough to keep going.
That's what I remember.
I don't remember how
much you made today.
We the on.
By the way, this is told by him, right?
So this isn't me making up the story.
In fact, it's told by him on our site, like, uh, on
an interview on our site.
So hopefully it's true.
But think of how Fri random that side Quest was.
And, and we've done whole episodes on this, how.
Making money is not a side quest.
It's like however you have to do it.
Staying alive is not a side quest.
Right.
It's the pavement for the runway.
You need it.
Yeah.
I mean, to the point now where like if somebody tells me
they're building a software, one of my first questions
is, okay, how much have you delivered as a service?
Like, have you done this for people?
Yeah.
Do you know what they need?
Because if not.
Prepare for a whole shit ton of side quests to come your
way because you're gonna have to do them all to figure out
what people actually need.
Right?
Yeah.
I love doing the service first because it teaches you
so much about, so much about what people actually need.
For me, product comes down to three things.
Proven proprietary process, right?
The three Ps of building an actual product.
If you don't have a proven proprietary process, and
if you're building software that you've never delivered
service for, you can't, you're gonna run into P four.
Which is, which just means we built the wrong shit first.
Right.
And obviously, so, so yeah, I just, at this point, I treat
service as a, not as an optional step or a side quest, but as the
very beginning of what you're gonna do to go build product.
I remember years and years and years ago, the base
camp guys like way, it was like 20 years ago, right?
They used to run these sessions, I think in Chicago that
were just training sessions.
Yeah.
And, and they would.
They basically charge an arm and a leg form and run 'em in.
And at one point they got asked, uh, the founders,
the co-founders, why are you doing this?
Like, you guys are a software company.
Why are you running these sessions and like doing
event events, business, essentially uhhuh.
And they, they looked at, it was like, it makes money.
Yeah.
You remember why we built software business, right.
This does the same thing.
Yeah.
Makes money.
So I think a lot of people though will look at these
side quests and they'll be like, oh, that's just a pivot.
I think that's a huge mistake.
I think that's a total misclassification
of the side quest.
A side quest is an exploration that might lead to a pivot.
Yeah.
A pivot is when you figured out that the side quest
is the right answer.
Yeah.
And you change the whole business.
Yes.
Right.
Yeah.
I wanna make sure these two things don't get
get pushed hand in hand.
Us going to San Francisco and looking for other
businesses is a side quest.
Yeah.
Us changing the whole business to startups.com
Right.
Is a pivot.
Right, right.
Will.
I bought lawyers.com this morning.
We're a new business now.
That's a pivot.
Right, right, right.
Shitty pivot.
Um.
If you think about it, we're sitting here on
this podcast, which was essentially a side question.
It, do you recall how this whole thing started?
Like, do you remember when we started like kicking this off?
It didn't go that well, by the way.
You're talking about the, uh, you know what, we should
auction this off at some point.
Will the three first episodes that we'll never see the light
of day, where it'll never see light of day by talking
about the weather and like it, it was all so stilted.
Oh my God, it was so bad.
We had no idea what we were doing.
Like we, we thought like what a talk show would be,
and it was just not at all.
It was done and it made no sense whatsoever.
Right.
But let me put it in this framing for our podcast, which
has how many episodes now?
We are shooting 3 27 today, buddy.
Damn.
Okay.
So that's a lot of episodes.
That's a lot of has.
One of our best conversion tools for these wonderful folks
that listen, you know, you build a relationship with us,
you get an a sense for who we are, and maybe you buy some
of our stuff, maybe you don't.
Honestly, we're gonna, we're gonna produce
the podcast either way.
Exactly.
Which is the point.
Yes.
When we.
First started doing this.
It's just something that Ryan and I wanted to do.
It wasn't, Hey, this is gonna be a great conversion tool.
Like that'd be great.
Obviously we weren't even entirely sure what
all the topics would be,
right.
We just hit record, went poorly at first.
Still learn.
Yeah, they're still figuring it out, but.
Listen, this was a side quest.
This side quest was, you know, we're, we had plenty of other
things we were working on.
We weren't short of things to do, but we took this random
side quest as the podcast and it wound up becoming like a
really integral part of our business, both from, again,
from attracting customers, but also from developing content.
I mean, it has so many legs.
Yeah.
Also, just go back to like the learnings that we took away.
From the 18 months of, of exploration in San Francisco,
all those conversations you had.
Yeah.
Think about all of the things that we have come to more
concrete understanding of and better ability to share and
talk to founders about, because we do this every week, right?
This has become more than just a part of the business
and more than part of it.
Right.
This is a part of life for me at this point, right?
I look forward to this.
Every week we do this.
Yep.
It's something important at so many levels.
And, and it's taught us a ton.
Right?
These were obviously all ideas that you had.
I had, and we've discussed.
Yeah.
Yep.
But like through that discussion, these things
become a little bit more like a product, right?
It becomes advice we can deliver.
It becomes help we can give at scale, right?
And in person and everything.
And so it's just, again, like we never would've
been able to see that.
Had we not tried it and had we not
exactly
keep trying it after the third episode because if
we'd only waited on the merits of the first three
episodes, uh, we definitely wouldn't be talking today.
Zero listeners.
Uh, it's, it's funny.
So I think for a lot of people, like they get nervous
about the side quest because they feel it's a distraction.
They feel it's tantamount to a pivot and pivot.
Pivot is different.
Pivot's like, dude, we're putting all our eggs
in a different basket.
Not to pivot
is not a marriage.
A pivot is a marriage.
A side quest is a first date, right?
Like
exactly.
Side quest is we're gonna go figure this out.
Yeah, exactly.
And so I think for a lot of folks, when they see those
side quests, Hey, let's try something else out.
They get nervous.
Understandably.
They get nervous and say, oh, we should be only
to be focusing on this.
It's like maybe, and not every side quest is a good side quest.
Most will fail.
Most side quests will fail.
Yeah,
yeah,
right?
Yep.
But again, that's okay
because that's information.
That's information because otherwise, like what I
would say, if you're not side questing and you are
at a point where like, you know, it's not working, so
we have to make a change.
Let's say, let's stick to the pivot and and side
quest thing here, right?
So we don't wanna pivot on vibes, right?
We don't wanna pivot based on the fact that, look, this
doesn't seem to be working.
Let's try this instead entirely, we can side quest
our way into evidence.
Then we can decide whether we absolute.
The side quest is how we earn the right to pivot.
Right?
I agree.
And look to put it, no.
In certain terms, it takes balls to side quest.
It does.
It takes courage to explore.
Yeah.
Right.
I mean it does.
It's easy to say, no, I don't wanna do anything else.
I just wanna focus on this.
I don't say easy.
That also requires discipline, but when you
say, Hey, I might be wrong.
Mm-hmm.
Which I think is a big part is you mentioned ego a few
minutes ago, I think to be able to say, Hey, the current
main quest right now Yep.
The, the focal point where we're at.
I might be wrong, and it's okay to have conviction.
It's okay to show up in your meetings and say, you know what?
I believe in this product so much.
I don't wanna change course whatsoever.
I, I wanna, uh, stay on it, which is okay.
Right?
Yeah.
Which is okay, but it takes a huge amount of courage
to say, I genuinely believe this is the path, but I'm
not afraid to find out.
It's not.
You and I go into a meeting and, and you know, often,
we'll, we'll say this when we're we're in this discussion,
we'll say, can we start by agreeing that none of us knows?
Yeah, nobody knows, right?
Nobody knows the actual answer.
And then there's a few ways to go and find that out, right?
We can stick to a linear path, hope for the best,
and find out what time tells us, or we can go side quest
and quickly get answers.
I think that's part of the construction of the side.
Quest for me is thinking of it in terms of like, does
this allow us to more quickly understand the, the context?
Does this allow us to more quickly get to an answer?
It again feeds back into main quest,
right?
Right, right.
You got a side quest to go get the hammer.
We need to open the chest.
That's part of the main quest, right?
You gotta, you gotta do this stuff.
The big risk here isn't in trying something new.
I know.
We, we think of that as like a, a division of focus
order, but the big risk isn't in trying something new.
The biggest risk is, is being wrong in private
and, and sticking to that.
Right.
Our job isn't to to, to defend the plan.
Right.
Yeah.
I think that's what founders get in, put into that position
a lot where we're, it's so in pitch mode all the time that
we feel like it's our job to defend the plan, but it's our
job to discover the truth.
Yep.
This is what we have to agree to, and side quests are one
of the ways that we get there.
I agree, and I think if you look at our history, like our
success over 15 years as a company, which I'm very proud
of, both the L longevity, how many people we've helped and,
and all the people that have kind of come through this
company over time, what's made us the most successful
hasn't been conviction to knowing what the answer is.
Yeah.
It's had been the openness to be able to say.
What if, what if that, what if that, and I think it's
also part and parcel with what we do for a living.
We are in the business quite literally, of helping
people ask, what if it would be a bit, yes, uh, it'd be
hypocritical if we never did it ourselves, but we do do it.
We put ourselves on the line all the time.
Every year we make big bets on totally different things,
and we see what happens.
Like we said before, we're willing to be wrong, and
I think that that takes a tremendous amount of courage.
So I think for a lot of startups, the biggest risk
for your startup is not being able to take that linear path.
The biggest risk is not knowing.
So the only way, the only way that you can de-risk
this business is by taking the plunge, by trying every
side quest that you can within reason and figuring
out which one of those.
Actually defines where you're supposed to really be at
overthinking your startup because you're going it alone.
You don't have to, and honestly, you shouldn't because instead,
you can learn directly from peers who've been in your shoes.
Connect with bootstrap founders and the advisors
helping them win in the startups.com community.
Check out the startups.com community@www.startups.com
to see if it's for you.
Could be just the thing you need.
I hope to see you inside.