Developing the Right Founder's Mindset to Fuel Tech Growth with David  Hirschfeld

You know that feeling when you're working nonstop, but growth just isn't happening the way you managed— imagined it will? You're stuck doing everything yourself, wearing too many hats, and it feels like you can't step away for even a second. Well, here's the thing. It's probably not your product or your team. It could be just your mindset. Welcome back to Mastering Tech Growth, where we interview industry leaders to bring you actionable insights and inspiring stories. I'm your host, Mike, and today we are talking about one of the most overlooked yet critical factors in scaling tech ventures: your founder's mindset. If you're constantly feeling overwhelmed, struggling to delegate, or finding that your startup isn't scaling as it should, today's conversation will help you to unlock the mental shifts necessary to drive sustainable growth. Our guest today is David Hirshfeld, a seasoned entrepreneur who's been in the trenches with startups for two decades now. As the founder of Techies Corp, David has helped countless founders to go from concept to scalable success using his Launch First method, a proven system that takes startups from idea to market faster without the usual pitfalls. Welcome to the show, David.

Thanks, Mike, and really excited to have this conversation. It's near and dear to my heart.

Me as well, David, me as well. From personal perspective, I really had a very, very strong mindset about the grind. I don't know where I picked up, but it was all online, all in the books. You have to work, you have to push, you have to grind. And why this topic is so dear to me is that it so overworked me. I actually ended up in a hospital with heart palpitations because I literally pushed myself over the edge of physical exhaustion. A shift in mindset was that situation for me where I realized that, you know, uh, A pure grind is just not the way to go when it comes to scaling your businesses and your dream. So before we go into topic, David, we have this question which we ask every single guest in the spirit of the show. When I say mastering tech growth, what comes to mind?

Mastering— what comes to mind is being a clinician about your business. And what do clinicians do? They test. They test everything. They don't believe in anything. They just test and measure the results and then make a plan based on the results of those tests. One of the biggest problems that founders have is that they believe in a path, which is not a bad thing to have vision. Actually, you need vision. Otherwise, why would you bother pursuing your venture to begin with, right?

Yeah.

But you can't— if you believe your vision is right and true, then you're ignoring evidence that it may, may not be exactly what you thought it was. And this is the biggest pitfall I find that founders fall into. So I love that they make themselves unwilling to pivot when a pivot is obvious, or they continue to pursue and invest in a direction where they have no evidence that this—

that they will direct—

yep, yeah, that it will work. They don't— yeah. And so it comes down to this concept of, uh, and by the way, having grit and working really hard, that's not a bad thing. You have to do that. It's just, if you're working hard in terms of a belief system and not based on hypothesis and testing, then you're very likely gonna have to work much harder to gain much less, which is probably, Mike, the trap that you were falling into at that point in your life, right?

Yeah, I love that. You need to have a vision, but you can't get married to the vision without any evidence. So anything you do, make sure you do it in such a way that you can get data back, you can get feedback and you can base your further decisions on real evidence of where you actually need to go. Does it work? If it doesn't, you pivot. Don't just base, you know, your pure investments of time and money on your beliefs. You start with that, but then you move into an evidence-based approach. Is that a correct assumption?

Another assumption?

Yeah. Okay.

Yeah, I think so. I think you— you— I think— well, I think you start Well, okay, so a lot of founders come to me, um, either they have, um, they've launched and they're, um, and they're just starting to want to scale, they're not really sure how to do it, or, uh, uh, or they're— they have an idea and they want to build this product, right? Because that's what we do, right? We're a software development shop, uh, and the only reason that I've developed this methodology around, uh called Launch First is because I just watched so many startups fail, and they fail for the same reason— that they lack product-market fit. And the only way you know you have product-market fit is that people are willing to pay for your product. You actually are getting revenue in a consistent enough— at a consistent enough level so that you're in a— and in a predictable way so that your cost of acquisition for a client, but for a customer, is roughly one-third of what that actual lifetime value of that customer is. Because then that gives you enough room to be able to invest in, put more energy into the system and accelerate and grow it faster. And if you don't have that ratio in that cost of acquisition versus your lifetime value of your customer, then there's not enough money to be able to invest back in and to scale and accelerate things. So So a lot of founders come to me and they're wearing the black robe. They are the black robe being that they believe in what they're doing. It's almost like a religion to them. And, you know, and they're espousing their beliefs to everybody that's, you know, either in their sphere working for them or potentially going to be interested in using their product. Okay. I gently peel that black robe off over time and try to wrap them in a white coat. And shift their mindset from this belief system to the idea that everything they believe could be wrong. And that's okay if it is, because if they're testing, they'll get results that start to show them exactly what they should be doing. And then they'll start moving in that direction. And once they find a pattern that's working, then, then build playbooks around those patterns so that you can start to scale and bring more people in without having to train everybody. As an independent agent and hoping that they can achieve that level of success that you've been able to achieve in this repeatable, predictable process.

Okay, let me ask this then.

Yeah, go ahead.

So many founders unknowingly hold their startups back by staying stuck in a mindset that no longer serves the business needs or the business growth, which you just sort of explained. So according to High Edge Performance, founders often exhibit obsessive leadership style and autocratic decision-making, which can lead to poor decision-making and strained team dynamics. So can you share a story of a founder who struggled early on because they were stuck in the wrong mindset? In, in that autocratic decision mindset?

I'm trying to think of a good story specifically about the autocratic mindset, but I can talk to you about some, uh, uh, because I've worked with a little over roughly 90 startups over the last 18 years, um, and I had my own startup prior to that, uh, uh that went from, that went from just a concept with the idea that we, my partner and I, could put a product out in logistics, route distribution, inventory management. And this was 30 years ago. And then be able to start to get some customers and build an annuity. And we actually had no intention of building this into a full-fledged software company. We thought we'd just create a product, put it out in this particular niche market and generate an annuity and get our feet wet with, you know, running a small software company. And it grew into— it grew despite every effort on both our parts. It grew anyway. And we ended up with 800 customers in 22 countries and then got acquired by a Canadian firm, publicly traded firm. And I ended up being VP of products for them. So In that case, I didn't have any belief system. So it's actually, it's a good story only because it was my own journey, right? And I've got the opposite journey that I went through a few years later. But I didn't have any belief system or expectation. It wasn't a passion. It was, the idea was to create a software product that could generate some revenue. That was my passion, not the particular industry or belief in what, in the industry. And so everything was a test. Putting the product out. At the time, it was advertising in a particular trade magazine that got our foot, our feet wet, and then going to trade shows in this particular industry because the trade shows are huge. And then everything was a test. We had an idea, we went and tested the idea, and it was inexpensively as we could. We'd start to get results and see what was working. We just kept building on that. Now, the opposite situation. Several years later, I started another software company in an industry, a business-to-business type of network that I was involved with. And this one, I really believed I had the right idea. So I fell into this trap that most founders fall into. I believed in the idea of I wanted to raise money so that I can grow and accelerate. I didn't think I could generate enough revenue just from my customers, even though I was getting a growing customer base using the product for free and they were very committed to the product. Um, and then I wasted almost a year trying to raise money. I was offered, uh, uh, a good raise, but it was at what I thought was too high a percentage. And so I didn't take it, but then I didn't get another offer. I ended up running out of money. For that venture and ended up, um, abandoning that, where it could have been a very successful business in that industry. So that's the opposite example of having the wrong mindset. And then I started my current company, Techies, um, and I've worked with roughly 90 founders since then, and a few of them very successful. Um, the vast majority of them fail, and they fail for the same reason that I failed with my second company is they wait way too long to start to generate revenue from their customers and they're overly dependent on investment, or at least the investment mindset. And that's why I started— came up with this concept of LaunchFirst, where we actually start to generate revenue from clients even before we have a product that they can start to use. Okay, we call it sales.

So what What, what are the signs then of, uh, of a mindset that, that's holding you back? So in, in your story, the second one where you believed in the product and you effectively overcommitted to raising money and, and wasted a year instead of putting that energy somewhere else, that, that the founders you worked with which experienced the same one. So that, in my view, that would be, uh, you know, this founder syndrome that you sort of go like, okay, I think I know what we need. We need to raise money. And you just put all that energy in and then, you know, clearly a wrong path to take. What are the signs of like a mindset which does not work well in that, you know, early stages?

In the early stages, not being in front of customers or potential customers all the time. That's one. So if the founder is spending all their time in the product and in the, um, in the branding side and product development side and not in front of their customers all the time, that's a sign. I always, I always say a founder, um, they shouldn't love their product, they should love their customer and be committed to mitigating their customers' problems. The founders that stay focused in that area and look at the product as just sort of the natural thing that the conclusion from all of the, from the market telling them what the problem is and how much the problem impacts them, those founders find a consistent path to success and scale. The founders that stay focused on their product are very often building something super cool that nobody is— either nobody will buy, or that they're not putting out in front of people in such a way that there's enough volume to be able to sustain the business.

I love that. I love that, David. Um, be in love with your customers, not your product, right? I mean, sounds counterintuitive.

Yeah. And have passion about the problems they're struggling with. Yeah. Because that's the only thing that matters.

Yeah, ultimately your product is the ability to solve the problems your customers are having. So you want to be in front of them, you want to have conversation with them as much as you can. If you're a founder, you don't want to get stuck into the trenches of pure development, pure, you know, marketing. You want to be just talking with the customers as much as you can.

Exactly, exactly, exactly.

Okay, I love that.

Yeah, in front of your customers talking about the problem as much as possible. And you— and not talking about your product when you're in front of your customers. Talk about the problems because they don't care about your product. They just don't care. They care about the problems that they're struggling with. So if you really understand this problem statement at a root level— and that's different than just a generic problem statement, but a problem statement at a root level has a threat aspect to it, to that person, that the stakeholder that's making this decision. They are afraid of something. I know selling on fear, it sounds like, oh, this is the old way of selling IBM, fear, uncertainty, and doubt, you know, from the '80s and '90s. But the fact is that everybody's motivated by trying to mitigate the things that make them uncomfortable. And the more uncomfortable they feel from something, because it personally impacts them, or at least they perceive it does. And then the more it costs them because of that thing. And those are two independent numbers that we, that we quantify. Because you can have something that has a huge perceived impact to you, but the actual cost when you break it down, it's not that much. You might be able to get their attention, but you can't charge a lot for the product. And the alternative is true. You could have something that has a huge cost to a particular niche industry and stakeholders in that industry. They don't perceive it as a big impact because everybody in the industry is struggling with the same thing. This is just part of what it means to be my position in this industry. And so what, you know, you're not going to get my attention very easily. So even though you could charge a lot for it, you're not going to be able to get people's attention. So what you So a founder's number one job is to figure out who is that early adopter niche with that stakeholder or, or late stage additional adopter niches and who are the stakeholders that have a high perceived impact to the problems that you're, that you're addressing and a high cost so that you can get their attention. They'll lean forward and start to talk about the problems at the root level that they can relate to. And you can charge a lot for your product because your, um, the value proposition is so high.

Okay, I love that. So as a summary to our listeners, you know, ask yourself if you're a founder, how much time you're actually spending talking with your customers. If, if, if the answer is I don't know or, or low, increase that number. That's what we're saying. So High Edge Performance Magazine notes that failed product launches, not one, not two, but a founder who constantly fails launching products actually does have founder syndrome, which is reflecting of deeper mindset issues. So let's say someone listening and goes like, ah, I tried a couple of times. What you guys saying makes total sense. You know, I get into trenches, you know, I'm coming from developer background. So I feel like the value add is for me to develop. I neglect the customers and none of my product launched well or, you know, is growing. So if I get that realization, right, how do I pivot? Like, what do I do? I know the recipe. Let's say I need to talk with the customers, but if it's a mindset, it's very likely that I will gravitate at any given high-risk situation. It's very likely I will gravitate to my comfort zone, which will be I'll just go back to development. You know, as an example. So how do you really work with yourself to change that mindset to actually have a positive impact for the business growth?

Well, it's good if you have a coach that is holding your feet to the fire in terms of making sure that everything you're doing is tied to your financial bottom line in terms of all the, you know, that it all feeds into a plan. And that you— that, that's important because I think because you're in that mindset, there's some reason why you ended up there, right? And it may just be your tendency. I've worked with some founders that cannot get out of that mindset no matter how many years they keep trying to pursue a particular business. One in the healthcare industry that kept pursuing products based on their belief that these products were going to be successful in their industry because of a couple conversations with potential customers. Not where they weren't living in front of a lot of customers all the time and validating not only the problem but the value to them and their willingness to mitigate that problem. Because you have a lot of different factors that play into finding a really good market niche and path, right? One of them is that the— you've got a sales cycle that's reasonable given your, um, uh, your financial wherewithal. Um, one another one is the stakeholder that needs to make this decision, their ability and willingness to commit the funds to mitigate their problems, which means buy your product. You might have a product that people really want, but they're not in a position to buy it, or that people really want but the sales cycle is just so long and you don't have the financial wherewithal to make the marketing investment. And so you need that, you know, it's a constant battle of measuring and reality checks. Founders that really struggle with that, they don't, it's not fun. It's the stuff that I say is the hard stuff. It's not the fun stuff. I mean, it may be fun if you're, if you really like to test and to collect data and, you know, and see and be able to measure. And if you get into that mindset, that is fun. But most founders, the reason they got into this business wasn't to do that. They got into the business because they have a belief in doing something that's going to improve people's lives, eliminate some kind of problem, whatever it is. And they believe that their idea, there's a gap and their idea is going to fill that gap. Um, uh, and if they— so my question to any founder that's really struggling with this is, how much time do you spend in front of potential customers and existing customers and potential customers? And if it's not a big portion of your time, then, uh, you're probably stuck in this mindset of just trying to push your business forward based on your belief system.

So I'm gonna define this as, um, as two different mindsets, right? So we got— or modes rather than mindset. So you got this, uh, you know, founders mindset or founders mode where, uh, you know, you're really visionary, you are heads in the cloud person, you constantly come up with new ideas and you believe all of these ideas are great because again it comes from you and, you know, you like this feature, that feature, right? So that's a founders mode. That's a very good kickstart mode, right? That's something which will get you going. You'll be concentrated on getting something out. But at some point, you have to transition to a manager's mode of what we just talked operationally speaking. You have to collect the data, you need to make decisions, you need to account for execution and processes and things like that. So, so going from that founder's mindset to that manager's mindset, what you just said, David, is that not everybody can make that leap or that change. So if I'm a founder and I'm struggling with this, I think the worst what can happen, you actually CEO of the business. So you probably maybe want to hire someone and just be in different space for the business where you utilize your, your strength. It's like, let's just say I cannot change my mindset. I am who I am. I'm still a founder of this business. What is the advice you're giving to me, David?

You know, it's interesting that you were talking about, you know, about the kickstart, you know, the startup to get something started. Most people believe that you need an MVP and a pitch deck so that you can go raise money. And that process takes, you know, 4 to 8 months depending on the product and where you're at with your understanding of your business and how you're going to raise money, right? Now, look at something like Facebook, and I'm not ever suggesting anybody should be expecting that they can launch the next Facebook. You know, those are 1 in a million, or maybe much higher numbers, right? But Zuckerberg had this idea, and by himself, he built the first version of Facebook in 4 or 5 weeks and put it out at Harvard and to test to see if people like this concept. He didn't spend 8 months and try to raise a ton of money. And then when he did, when that happened, literally that's all he did was see customers' reaction just because the product itself was, was so— it spoke in terms of how people were using it and what they cared about. He wasn't trying to generate revenue from the original product. So that was a little different. Most of the clients that I work with are all in the B2B space where the products are all about generating revenue, not trying to build some kind of advertising model. But my point there is In 6 weeks, he had his first version that he could go out and test with no cost involved because he was just, he did it himself. Look at the Snapchat guys or not even Snapchat, the, oh my God, Tinder, the dating product. They, those guys were involved in a in Y Combinator accelerator, they were gonna build a payment system. This is my understanding of their story. And they decided, one of them, one of the guys there wanted to help his friend, the other founder, connect with women because he was a bit uncomfortable. And so they came up with this concept of swiping to make these connections with people. And they did this as a side project in like 4 or 5 weeks. It was a super simple version of it and took it to their local fraternity and gave it to them. And those fraternity brothers gave it to their sorority sisters. And then all of a sudden everybody was hooking up as a result of this app and it just took off. So they had a very— they were in front of their potential customer, right? And they had a way of testing if this was something that the market even wanted or not. And they got immediate results and they were constantly in front of their, their customer as a result of product is pulling in. These are a couple examples of it, of how if you've got that mindset where, where you're looking for a quick way to produce something simple that will, you can use to test that will give you concrete results one way or the other. Then you're in a founder's mindset of success. If you feel like you don't want to put anything out into the market until it's good enough because it represents you from a personal perspective, then you're in the founder's mindset of the 98% failures. So, you know, that's why I say put on a white robe, put on the white coat, And test your assumptions, constantly test them right from the beginning. It doesn't have to be— you don't even have to really shift into that manager mode after the vision mode early on. If you're stuck in the vision mode, this is how you get out of it. You know, as you start looking for things you can test in a concrete way very quickly and start to make everything about that. And how does all of those tests relate to how the business is going to grow from a financial perspective.

So if I'm making the shift, you know, I'm founder, I got something, I'm talking with the customers, you know, success is coming, uh, I'm getting a lot of data, so I now need to think about automation, compressing some of the processes, you know, hiring a good executive team and, and all these other challenges which come in and, and, you know, effectively pushes you into a lot more a manager mindset, like you need to start managing business processes because you are a founder, you're likely a CEO by the title and you own the business. So you have to make that transition. While I'm making that transition, what are the struggles I'm having, like, you know, emotionally or in some other ways? It's like from your— from your experience, Dave, is like some stories maybe where exist where people you know, just go like, I don't know how to read this data, you know, it's just annoying. Should I just hire someone and delegate this to someone? It's like what I'm feeling during that transition from founder to a manager mindset.

So, uh, the first thing is you learn to delegate, right, and give up control of certain things. So Let's talk about, um, um, product management is a good one. At some point you cannot be responsible for your product, not if you're going to really grow a company and scale up. At some point you have to have other people who are responsible for, um, for the planning of the product from a feature perspective. From the development side, from a technology delivery perspective. You have to have somebody who's— you can delegate the finances to in a CFO role. You have to have somebody you can delegate the marketing to from a CMO role. And these are— so at some point you have to just say, look, I I am going to be the bottleneck. Michael Dell of Dell Computers was interviewed by Forbes Magazine like 20, 25 years ago when he was really at a height of his acceleration. And he said, and the interviewer asked him, what's your secret sauce? And he said, it's really nothing secret about it. I look for the bottleneck. I look to see where my business flow is, is crippled or kinked, because the business would grow if I didn't have that restriction. And I focus my energy on that restriction. So which means like, if you think about a pipe, right, it's tight in some spot, and that's going to determine the amount of water that can flow through the pipe, or fluid, right? So he basically finds that thing and opens it. As wide as you can. And now there's no restriction. And so what happens now that everything flows into whatever the next level of restriction is? And a restriction could be at the front of it, maybe feeding the system is not— you don't have enough energy feeding the system. So once you have enough energy and you're flooding the system, it's all going to come to a stop and wherever the next restriction is. So if you think in terms of, okay, where, where are my restrictions? That tells you, um, that tells you where you need to put your energy and very likely where you need a key person that takes responsibility over an area of your business. So, um, then it get— then it all has to do with then put it, you know, test it against your financial model and see whether that makes sense with the idea that that position is going to be effective. And project it out in that respect. You know, from the standpoint of hiring, that person is going to yield this, therefore in another year I would, you know, I can expect— because obviously when you hire a key person, now you've got a big drain financially in your business, especially when you're in the early scaling stages, right? So, and if you're not, if you're trying to do this without funding, that makes a big impact. If you're, if you getting funding, then you have probably have the money to then start to build that management team much faster. But without it, then it's a matter of, okay, yeah, now suddenly cash flow is going to be tighter, but it's going to open up this channel. And so it's literally going to result in an investment that's going to yield in a certain period of time, which then is going to give me the ability to hire more key people. So that's the organic growth kind of approach.

I love that. And a very good shout on the bottlenecks. So I am a founder, I'm transitioning, you know, to manager. So I'm looking at my roles. I'm starting to identify what I need to delegate, what I'm not doing that well or something I don't like to do at all. I'm trying to hire the best people for that. So I'm delegating that control away and then I'm looking where the business stream flows are getting bottlenecked. Is there a framework or methods you personally use or teach founders of how to discover bottlenecks or how to look at them? Or is it just purely of like, hey, what's not working, guys? And just looking what the employees are saying.

Um, uh, you know, some founders just have a really good instinct for it, right? But those aren't the founders that are struggling with mindset either, right? So, uh, Um, uh, it's very similar to what we do with the whole niche analysis thing. We basically create a grid, you know, create spreadsheets, um, where you have it— it's a matrix of here's all of the areas of my business and their effectiveness in terms of, um, flow. And here— and then we prioritize, like, from a, um, from a volume— from a cost perspective, and what it was— what it's going to take to to automate or improve the flow or to bring in a key person now that can address and build, build out that area. And when you list them all out, you prioritize them both in terms of their impact on generating revenue for the business as well as what their cost is to you in the business and how much it would cost to mitigate whatever that restriction is. It starts to become very obvious where where to focus your effort.

Okay.

Based on what your cash flow— and yeah, so it's a, it's a pretty simple process, but it's very deliberate in terms of understanding all aspects of your business, uh, and then continually updating this, uh, you know, going through this review on a monthly or quarterly basis.

I love that. I would probably throw as well a value stream mapping into, into the mix. That's something I did professionally as well in my employment. It's, it's a well-known method of, of just getting the stakeholders involved in whatever is the value stream of your business. It could be, you know, the whole business or subsets of businesses, and you will have key stakeholders within that value stream map, which could be different departments, you know, different roles, and just sort of talking about how the process items go through that value stream mapping, capturing things like, you lead time information being complete and accurate, process time, how long it takes to do, and just having all that map. And then it's very easy. You go like, here's a big lead time, here's a big process time, that's a clear bottleneck. And then you can create some initiatives around managing that well.

And then you say, if now if I reduce my lead time and I, um, um, uh, if I fix that, how much does that feed the business in terms of growth, right? Because that's an independent number. You can say this is my— this is the value restriction in this area, but it doesn't say, okay, now I— how will that feed the scaling model? Yeah, um, when I— because I may now eliminate that problem and it's a small impact on the scaling model, whereas another one that may be slightly less in terms of value, in terms of the immediate, has a much bigger impact in terms of growth and scaling. And so understanding all of those factors, I think, is really important.

Yeah, 100%. Whatever is the definition of the improvement you, you want to understand— I mean, it's a hypothesis you're raising at that point in time. You go like, if we improve this area, you know, we're thinking that that's going to be the positive impact. So there's a hypothesis you're making, of course. But, uh, yeah. You did.

How do we test that hypothesis? Exactly, right?

Exactly.

So, um, uh, uh, oh, I just lost the thread, which I thought was like the most important thing I was going to say in this whole thing, right?

It's all aligned to revenue. That's the most important thing. As, as long as we're making more money, it's— we're doing it, right? That's the most important one.

Revenue and that, uh, and the We're making more revenue. And in the process of doing that— oh, oh yeah, I remember what I was going to say. So in all of this, one of the things that is a cultural thing that, that a lot of companies don't have, but it's a huge factor for being able to scale and grow in a predictable way, is look at— is, is an automation mindset. And now I used to be, I used to call this automation chaos because there's so many places you can automate inside a typical business that are manual processes or may not be completely manual processes, but they're kind of archaic and slow. But now it's AI chaos because we're using AI not only for doing workflow automation, but for eliminating, completely rethinking how the business operates in many ways because AI gives us the ability to do things we just couldn't do before. Like personalization in mass is one of the biggest ones for me. Like if you think about direct marketing campaigns to people, for example, whatever direct means to you, whether it's through LinkedIn or through account management, whatever. Um, with AI, you have the ability to both gather and process a lot of information and then craft outreach to people that is, that is personalized, that makes it feel like you really understand who they are and what matters, and where every single outreach is customized to the individual. And that's, that changes the mindset of, from a marketing perspective, or, uh, how you even think or approach your idea about, about reaching out to customers or reaching out to potential prospects, staying in front of the market, things like that. So, so from an AI— so back to what we were talking about, if, if you have a— this concept of exceptionalism, every— I want every person to think in terms of how we can improve our internal workflows and processes and how we deliver things so that we become exceptional. And by being exceptional means I have all the artifacts and evidence of the things we do on a daily basis in terms of tracking and delivery and operations at a level beyond what other companies do. And we don't ever feel we're good enough, so we're always working to improve that. Um, when you have that mindset and the scaling starts to become automatic because every department's scaling automatically because it's just built, it's built into the culture.

A cultural mindset is, is it more like a business value definition? Like, you know, if you come to work for our company, one of the values we have, you look at anything you're doing and you ask a question, how can I automate this? So If you hire for it, ultimately you get all employees respond to it like that, right?

Right.

Okay.

Right. How can I automate it or how can I improve what we're delivering, uh, uh, using technology? Uh, and maybe it's, maybe that improvement comes with, uh, manual methodology for it where you figuring out what the right workflows are and you're doing this manually to see that you can achieve something better than what you have. We've done this in our project estimation side. We've done this in many different areas, but one that's very discreet is project estimation. The project estimations that we do, that we create for potential clients, are incredibly elaborate and detailed as compared to 98% of the software company. I know that because I speak with a lot of founders of other, um, soft custom software development shops. Um, but that's not something that came quickly. That's something that we worked at over years and just continually improved and improved and improved, um, our methodology. And now we are building an AI model to automate this estimation process because it's costly and expensive. But we couldn't have done that if we didn't understand how to do this in a, in the, at the level of detail to begin with. That's just an example. And that, those types of, I have many in my own company as well as I have many examples like that from my customers.

I, I actually love, I, I love that. So the, the founders often who successfully scale, they use some type of like proven strategies or framework you know, to, to guide their leadership decisions or leadership evolutions. And, um, the research paper called Build In suggests that implementing structural frameworks like regular team check-ins, clear goal settings, and, you know, as very common examples, actually aids that, uh, transition from this founder mindset into that manager mindset. So from your perspective, David, do you strategies or frameworks where you sort of come in to help the businesses and you go like, look, like in this particular case, here's a framework or here's a method you will follow or we will follow to achieve certain results. Like, is there a go-to when it comes to you, you know, helping founders with some frameworks or strategies?

Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, again, what we do is we're a custom software development shop, right? And, and we have many year relationships with our clients, um, um, because we very often become their outsourced, uh, their outsourced IT as well. Um, and we manage the software and, you know, from release, release, release, right? So, um, but there are framework— and the reason I bring that up is because Um, uh, our job with our clients is not to help them become more scalable and efficient from an operational perspective, except in the context of the technology. Uh, however, because we're involved with our customers for such a long time and very often start with them at the nascent level, um, with launch first, helping them find a path to revenue before we even start to develop the product, um, uh, we have some very simple things. And most of the time, these simple things come out of what we're doing in our own business to grow and scale, uh, uh, that help our clients. Um, you know, the EOS operating system is a really good one, but that's a big commitment to implement it, and, uh, uh, not everybody— and so for something much more achievable and consumable from a Perspective is ask yourself, okay, do I have a playbook for a particular operation in my business or playbooks, you know, from an operating perspective, from a development perspective, from a planning perspective, from like status reports, like we do weekly status reports with our clients. Is there a playbook? Can you create a playbook around them? Each of these things? If not, why can't you? What is not consistent and, and well-detailed in terms of how the workflow operates? Why is it not done consistently enough where you now should be able to document a playbook? And then eventually when you're ready to hire, to bring somebody else in, that's going to be doing that job, give them the playbook, support them with training as well, but give them the playbook so they have something they can reference to that explains in all the different cases exactly what to do at each point in this process, and here's the variations that you may run into, um, uh, so that you can easily bring more people in to scale your business. Do you have— do you have playbooks in your business? If not, can you create playbooks around each of the different areas of your business, um, to the point where now you could— in enough detail, you can hand that to people they could come in, use the playbook, and mimic or mirror what you're currently doing as you double or triple in size in different areas of your business. If you're not, why can't you create the playbook? What is, what, you know, is this all, what's the word, is this all now, is all of your intellectual property stuck in the heads of all your employees? That's not a good place to be.

Yeah.

You want them to be huge investments, right? Especially the earlier employees. You want to have people that are really committed, that know your business and know your products and are smart, but you don't want it stuck in their head. You want it— you want a way to be able to document all of these workflows and all of the intellectual property because that is where value in your business is created.

I love that, David. So effectively what we're saying is that online, and probably if you talk with ChatGPT, you'll get some business frameworks, uh, methodologies, books written about certain areas and certain business processes, how you can go about it. But what we're saying, you don't need to onboard these complexities at the very first level. Just create a playbook of how you get things done. Understand that first, and then, you know, look at automation or potentially look later into some defined methods or frameworks to actually scale that. But the very first thing you should be doing is being able to write down a playbook which is shareable. You can teach your new employees about this. Someone can take it, look at it, and potentially convert into an automated or semi-automated workflow.

Right, right, exactly. And yeah, it's, uh, uh, and let me give examples if people don't really understand what playbooks are. Uh, okay, so you should have a playbook for your entire business, how it operates. But that, you can't start there, usually end there. Uh, you'll start with, um, things like how we do our estimates. There's a playbook for that. Um, how how I do outreach to when I'm doing, when I'm podcasting, right, doing interviews with people. There's a playbook for how, how we schedule these interviews. That way, if I have a director of operations that's going to start doing interviews, we have a way of getting her scheduled into these podcasts so that how we do outreach to customers, how we establish referral partner relationships with people. We literally have playbooks for these things, how we do our daily standup meetings for agile development, how we do our, our invoicing for our customers. We literally have playbooks for each of these things, all the workflows, all the nuances. And then you can start to build up, and then they can all be together in a bigger playbook that references the smaller workflows. Because when we bring new people in, how we onboard— we do a lot of work with software projects where there's a lot of compliance in law enforcement, in healthcare, and we have a lot of compliance. And those— that compliance requires diligent workflows in terms of reporting a bug or, or making a feature request. And what are all the workflows from that point until it ends up in production? Uh, and the reason that's so important is because there are, um, audits that happen from third-party auditors, and they need to see 6 months of evidence, uh, and, and pick any any one of the things that was reported earlier during that period of time, and they have to see how it followed the workflow that's documented as a compliant workflow. So if we don't have playbooks around all this stuff, how do we bring new people in? So we even have an onboarding playbook, right? And, uh, for how we onboard people. And then we've created a, a website specifically for our new hires on how they what the things they need to do so that they get up to speed, get the training they need, everything else, right? It's the stepwise process so that, you know, these are all the things you do when you're positioning yourself to grow and scale.

That's a, that's a very good shout. When you are talking about the compliance and audit and 6 months of evidence, uh, my own business experience came to mind around gaming and, uh, Yeah, all the processes of getting something out in production requires, uh, in many cases, regulatory approval. So you can't even just go ahead and release stuff because it's all, you know, financial markets and, and gaming. So all of these things requires very, very due diligence, uh, and compliance, regulatory, document-driven playbooks, right? Just a side note, um, so I'm just thinking about small startups, David. So I'm like, I'm a founder, you know, I'm listening to you guys talk and I'm like, you know what, it's me and two couple of my mates and we're building something. So at that point in time, I imagine these playbooks would have no value added to the business. So when it comes to maybe size or like a headcount or something like that, like at which point in time we are transitioning from that founder mode to that, you know, manager mode and we start thinking about these things like plus minus, like from your experience, when is that, when I should be thinking about that shift? Is it real details which comes in play? Like we talked about, like, you know, it's just too much and you need to start delegating. That's like maybe potentially one of the signals or if I'm projecting the future and planning towards the future, you know, maybe I raised money and I'm like, I'm going to hire 12 people. At that point in time, you're like, okay, well, someone's going to be creating these playbooks. Like, is there a point I could recognize when, when, when I should sort of plan and execute upon that?

Yeah, this is— this one is easier. So, and it's a really— Mike, it's a really great question. As soon as you have a workflow that you're getting predictable results that are good, good enough, the kind of results that you need. For example, you, for example, if you're going to do pre-launch sales, we start right at the very beginning. By basically scoring each stakeholder's impact to each of the potential root problems that we believe we're solving and each stakeholder by niche. So we end up with this matrix that's scored and we do the same thing for cost, right? So that's a playbook that we've created right at the very beginning on how you go through this process. As soon as the founder, and then the founder is going to do some interviews with individuals at each of those niches, maybe one or two if that's a niche they're not familiar with. If they're really familiar with the niche, they may still do an interview with somebody at StakeholderNet just to confirm that other people in that niche, um, uh, corroborate what they feel they already know. Um, but usually you're marketing a solution to a pro— a, a solution that has many different potential niches, and the early adopter is what you're looking for. It may not be the niche you're most familiar with, so you have to do a few interviews to make sure that you can validate the pro— the— and score this accurately, right? Um, so as soon as you've got that, then, uh, you can figure out what the messaging, the price, and that you should be charging. And then you go out and test the market, and if it works, um, and you're starting to get— generate revenue from sales even though you don't have a product, then we start building a product. But now we have a playbook we can put into place in terms of how to, um, continue doing these pre-launch sales to help fund development. That's a very— that can be 3 months into the business. So as soon as you have a repeatable process that works, that, um, that you can use to scale with. In other words, scale meaning now I can spend more money in this area to do more of this, may require more than one person to be doing it where right now one person's doing it. That's when you want to create the playbook. It can be right at the beginning. It might— and you'll just continue to identify these workflows that are effective once you've tested them and you've got proof and and predictability. And predictability means now if I spend more money in that area, I should see an equivalent return in terms of what we're producing, whether it's the sales or whether it's development or whatever that is, right? And that, that's when you create the playbook.

That's a good shout. Yeah, you could be just you alone getting some success if it's a repeatable process, which, uh, which you're getting that success upon, you want to have a playbook because you can then potentially delegate the whole process to someone else and, you know, look to expand business to new markets or, you know, new verticals or whatnot. And when we were talking about this, David, what came to my mind, it was like if anyone is using like virtual assistants, you know, the playbooks are, you know, godsend because you're going to be hiring someone somewhere in Philippines or, you know, India, Ukraine, Mexico, any of the markets where we can get virtual assistants and freelancers. And you will delegate some of your responsibilities as you would into, you know, to new hire, hire a new employee. And, uh, because they're not with you in an office, you know, giving them a playbook, really spending quality time with them explaining how they're going to be executing that playbook it's just going to be necessary to actually get these virtual assistants to do what you, what you need them to do. If you're not going to have that playbook, you will struggle. They will do things, they will fill the gaps with the biases or their own understanding, and it's just going to be a lot of back and forth and a lot of your energy to re-explain things. And that's what came to mind when we are talking, because I remember that I had that issue with, uh, with virtual assistant where I didn't have playbook. I sort assumed that the task is very easy to understand, wrote an email. Took me weeks to, to get to the point where it was actually a value add to me. So that's an experience I know from my perspective.

So exactly. And some— and sometimes, and sometimes when we hire somebody to do one of these jobs, maybe the playbook— they're going to end up creating the playbook. We'll train them because right now it's, um, I can't think of that phrase when the, you know, it's an intellectual, you know, we don't have it, our process documented, but we have a process that's part of the intellectual property of our company. So then we bring somebody in and we train that person to do that job. And once they're competent at it, then we ask them to document the playbook. So I'll give you a, this is a really, this is a good example of of how it— how I work with sometimes with customers in terms of doing workflow automation. So let's say somebody wants to— and, and I'm not saying this to talk about, you know, to— this is really the whole playbook concept, right? I have a customer who runs a really big business, a business networking group with thousands of people in it. And he's, and it's a, it's a decent-sized business, but certain aspects of it, like preparing for his, his weekly networking meetings, he has always done manually. This is about going back about 4 years, and I was talking with him about doing software in other areas to help make it much easier for members to be able to capture connections with people that are really relevant to them and And he said to me, I can't think of any of that because anything that adds any more time to my Mondays, um, I just can't even consider it. And so I pushed my document aside and I said, okay, tell me about your Mondays. So he spends all day Monday combining all this information from the people that are going to be going to the Tuesday event, um, uh, that are members, that are guests, that buy tickets to it, um, and it's coming from different sources. Then he has to pull in their personal information so he can announce everybody. It's a couple-hour meeting where he announces 70 different people, and it's just so well orchestrated. But it's literally brute force. He's been— he had been doing it for— at that point, this is, um, 8— he had been doing for 8 years every Tuesday. Um, you know, he's just a machine, and he knew exactly what to do in every situation. But he, he said, can you automate that? I said, yeah, we can automate this process for you. Is— I said, so tell me what— tell me how you do it. And he told me. So a few weeks later— this was not a complex project, um, in the sense of the amount of work that was necessary to automate this for him, um— and I came back a few weeks later with, um, this workload. So let me show you. And he says, that's not going to work because it doesn't take this into consideration. I said, okay, well, you didn't tell me about that. Um, but no problem, we'll go ahead and, um, do that. And like a couple weeks later, and he says, okay, um, I can see you, it addresses that, but whenever we have this circumstance, this is going to be all messed up. I said, okay, well, you didn't tell me about the circumstance. And it was like every 2 weeks for about 3 months when he kept dribbling out these nuances to this workflow, which is, this is very often how it works when you don't have a playbook.

Mm-hmm.

Um, By the end of 3 months, he had dribbled all of it except for maybe a small fraction of a percent of the nuances. And we tested it and he uses it, been using this every single Monday now for the last 4 years. And it takes him 15 minutes now to do his Monday. It was a 7-hour process for him before.

That's a great success story.

And now it's documented and it's documented in the code, right? Because the code is the playbook, which has all the nuances. In that case, he's never going to bring somebody else in to do this for him. So the automation does it, does it for him. And now that freed up every single Tuesday. Imagine how much time that is in a year, right?

Yeah.

Full, almost a full day every single week for 50 weeks a year. So that's what it's like getting people, getting that playbook documents. Sometimes it makes sense to bring somebody in. Train them how to do something. If it's an important task from a scaling perspective, like you're going to have more people like that, and then have them documented. Because in the process of them doing it, this, you're going to be explaining to them all the nuances as they come up, which they'll then document and be creating this playbook for you.

All right, so one thing which we want you to take from this is write the playbooks. Don't, don't neglect it. Write the playbooks with as many details as can keep them updated. If you're scaling up, they will come in handy 100%. That's what we're saying, right?

So, um, that's a simple question. If you are going to hire somebody into a position because you're growing, and this position is doing a job that's already being done in some respect, how are you— that— how's that person going to learn the job if you don't have this playbook documented? It's going to require are the person responsible for them, for that person, whoever they report to, training them how to do the job. And then how does the next person that comes in— it's probably going to be that person that got trained or the manager— and spending all their valuable time training, which is— there always is going to be some of that, but you want to have as little of that as possible and get that person into a productive role as quickly as possible with the resources they need to be able to handle the nuances that come up with the job because they can just look it up because, you know, if they study the playbook, they should know most of it, but, you know, not remember it all right away. But it's instead of using the manager or using another person and reducing their productivity to learn these things, they'll have the playbook to do it with. One more thing on playbooks. Have some accountability mechanisms in place to make sure they're following the playbooks, a way of documenting the work that they're doing. That should be automated. You don't want to make people hate the job because they have to document everything they're doing every day, right? So have some way to be able to get a report on their effectiveness in terms of following the playbook, because if you don't have that, then you don't have any idea if they're, if they're living up to the level of quality and exceptionalism that you built into your business that's documented into this playbook.

Okay, I'll take us back to the mindset, David, but the playbooks shout out as a very valuable— I'm sure our listener is loving this as well if they're not doing it. There's so, so, so many values which comes out of a simple process such as playbooks. So Founders who embrace a growth mindset tend to develop certain habits that reinforce their success over time. And according to Blue Box Global, who outlines that successful founders often engage in continuous learning, seek feedback, and view failure as learning opportunities, effectively embodying the principles of a growth mindset. So what are some habits of founders from your perspective, uh, which should be embraced if they want to grow their mindset?

Okay, so that's the first one, is they embrace failures as a learning— as a learning opportunity. But even more than that, founders that are really successful don't think of failures I don't think of them as failures. They think of them as tests. This test didn't work, so that— what does that mean? Uh, right. So, and, and they have— okay, this is a really good one. So there's a, a, a podcast called The Happiness Lab, uh, that's run by— and I can't think of her name right now, um, she's a professor at Stanford, um, and this podcast started because she started teaching a class on happiness. She thought— she's a psychology professor. And so the concept that there were so many students that had problems with happiness so that she thought that she would teach this class on core concepts around happiness. And it turned out that she had people standing out in the hall the first time trying to listen in on this lecture that weren't even in the class. And then she started a virtual class. She ended up with like over 100,000 students signing up for this virtual class. Anyway, so she gets on all of these really top thinkers on the concept of happiness. It's a really, really, really good podcast. Anyway, I bring her up because one of her podcast episodes was on this concept of positive, the power of positive, the myth of the power of positive thinking. So this myth of power of positive thinking was born out from some book that came out in the '60s. And then it just sort of took off as this viral thing. And so founders think that if you just drive hard and keep thinking positively about what you're trying to build and the product, and you have this kind of black robe mentality, that you'll find— you'll force your path into success. And what she— her guest showed was, and they had done a study of successful CEOs who were successful in multiple businesses, um, and, and extremely successful, that none of them had this concept of power of positive thinking. Not a single one of them. They were all somewhat high-anxiety people that were worried about everything that could possibly go wrong in their business. When you ask them why were they successful, they would all say, I was just in the right place at the right time. I got lucky. When you scratch the surface even a little bit, what you'd find out is that they are brilliant contingency planners because they're always afraid something is going to derail their business. And they imagine what all those things are. And then they start to think, what will they do if that happens? And they put together these elaborate contingency plans on all of these potential things that might happen. Like, for example, what happens if there's a war breaks out in Europe? What happens if there's a pandemic? What happens if all of a sudden we go into inflation? What will that, you know, whatever the thing is that, how would that affect our ability to continue to prosecute our business and grow? And how, and if it has, if It's possible that that could have a significant impact. What do we do to mitigate that if that happens? And they think through all these things so that when any one of these things happens, they had a plan already in their mind and sometimes well documented on, okay, this is our new workflow too, because this— because we had foreseen that this might happen. And so we have a plan on how to address it. And so when you ask them, why were they successful? They're thinking, well, all the things we planned for happened, you know, we had planned for the things that happened, so we were kind of lucky, you know. But it totally obfuscates what their real path to success— again, you know, they didn't believe in anything. They were— they had white coats on all the time, and they were always worried about everything. So they're high-anxiety people. Their power-positive thing has nothing to do with— with maybe rare exception— has nothing to do with being a really effective, successful, uh, serial CEO.

So what we're saying, develop a habit of writing a business continuity plan, thinking about mitigating your risks coming out of that business continuity plan. That's a good habit for, uh, for a success— successful path, right?

And not the obvious risks, but even things that might not be obvious, right? So a lot of founders think that they'll be the first to market and, um, that it's unique and this is going to be important. Uh, might be important if you're— if you end up being lucky enough to have created the next unicorn. That's going to be a multi-billion dollar thing in a few years, but that's so rare.

That's one in trillion, basically.

Yeah, that's so small. And, you know, of course the media has made everybody think that's what they should be pursuing, um, but really successful founders, that's not— they're, they're looking to build a business, right, that's repeatable, that's predictable, that they can grow by putting more energy in the system, um, both in terms of producing more as well as identifying new markets as it makes sense to, not, you know, but they are very focused and very, um, and very channeled in their execution model, especially when they're early. Founders that are really successful figure out what works right through testing, through doing analysis to figure out what they think is going to work, what market's going to work, what the problem statement is they need to focus, and then they test it until they've refined it and they can get a repeatable successful model. And then they stay in that channel. They don't get distracted by all these other channels, which is easy to do. They stay in that channel and maximize that channel until that channel is producing enough energy for them to now invest in other closely related tangential channels that they can now go through a similar kind of testing process at accelerated rate. Not completely new products in different industries, which I've seen founders do that over and over again. They say, oh, I'm in healthcare, and they go after completely different business in healthcare because they say, well, it's, you know, it's related to what we do, and maybe in some vague way it is, but, and, and it just prevents them from being able to really build on and leverage the success that they've already had.

I love a few things here, David. I mean, one is of course the everyone chasing those unicorns, and you're 100% right when you say the media and how information is fed to general public puts the founders in this mindset that whatever they're creating right now somehow is going to be worth billions in a couple of years. They're going to exit at the, you know, hundreds of millions, and they're going to live happily after, you know, after that. And reality is that's there's like such a low percentage, like 0.0001, which actually that happens. The majority picture is that 80% of them fail. 8 out of, you know, 10 startups literally go nowhere. So that's one. That's just, just to solidify that message that don't think you do building a, you know, a unicorn rather concentrate of proven methods which allows you to launch, find success, and then scale your business. Which leads me to that question. Realistically speaking, what timelines are we talking from? I built something which people need and, you know, I have some evidence because I have some clients too. You know, I have a business where I'm hiring 10 to 40 people and it's a million yearly revenue business? Like, what, what is the realistic timelines one should expect?

Yeah, there— it's very hard to quantify that, um, because it's not a simple formula. Um, so for example, and it also depends on how you're funding that growth. Um, uh, I have a client, uh, another client in healthcare who has something that is dramatically needed in healthcare from a broad perspective to be able to take care of vulnerable populations. And he has just been masterful at building his advisory team. It's him and his COO, and they've built this powerful advisory team who are also all investors, individual investors. And as a result, They've been able to land in just a couple of years, huge contracts with healthcare organizations. And they just raised $5 million from one of these healthcare organizations to basically to fund and accelerate their growth. That's one model. And they will probably end up being in a, you know, a billion-dollar company in another 3 years. I don't, in terms of valuation, as they more and more raises. But that's the— but the— because the value proposition and the potential market is so massive for what they're doing, um, uh, and they've got— and their partnerships are so strategic.

Would it be like a unicorn definition, David? Like, would we put this company into very rare to happen situations, or, or what you're saying, that, that the VC investment-driven growth like that is actually quite common?

That's not common. That's the— that's a— happens to be a founder and also has healthcare, national healthcare gravitas, um, who is in an area of healthcare that, um, uh, so he's able to bring together and leverage a lot of these complex pieces to pull together to create a value proposition that would be very difficult for anybody just trying to create a product like this in healthcare to do if they weren't, if they didn't have his kind of reach and in specific expertise in a certain area. And he happens to also be tremendously articulate and orator, you know, an orator that is really impressive. So people are very impressed very quickly with him and what he's trying to do. And, you know, we built something that he's now got evidence that it is something that he can deliver. That's an unusual situation. Most founders, most founders, the ones that I see that are typically going to be successful, of course, they're much more of a manager mindset right from the early stage. But in particular, they're in an industry already struggling with a problem that they struggle with daily, or if not daily, weekly. So it's always top-of-mind problem, um, and they can articulate how much this problem impacts them personally, um, and why it impacts them so much personally. And they can articulate the cost to them, how much it really costs them for this problem. And they happen to be in a position in an industry, no matter what industry and no matter what position, where they can where it's an industry full of people just like them struggling with the exact same problem that they're struggling with, and they have reach to that community, some reach to that community, so they can validate that other people are struggling in the same way and feel the same kind of perceived impact that they feel, or similar. That is the foundation for a successful business. If that founder has a manager mindset like you've been talking about and is diligent or process-oriented, then they actually have a decent chance, maybe a 20, you know, a 2 in 10 or 3 in 10 chance of creating a successful business. And when I mean successful business, and they're fearless, they're not afraid to go to their customers, ask them about their problems, put something nascent in front of them that doesn't solve the problem yet but can elaborate on how it will and ask them to buy it in advance. So this is important. If people want to fund their business from— invest from outside investors, that is a path and it's not a wrong path, but it's the path that's been promoted by VCs. And a VC a VC firm is going to see 3,000 pitch decks for every 30 investments, companies that they invest in. And out of those 30 companies, 3 of them will— 2 to 3 of them will be successful. These are VC-funded companies, successful as in are growing and scaling. There'll be a few that make revenue to survive but are not— you wouldn't consider successful. And 70% or 80% of them fail, uh, depends on when you look at those statistics and what that percentage is. So that's VC-funded, uh, startups. It's still a high percentage fail, uh, but if you're trying to get money from a VC, which very often starts with an angel investor or, or friends and family, um, uh, those are your odds. They're very, very low. If you're producing revenue and your revenue is growing and scaling really fast, um, and you have a good team around you already, then your chances go up dramatically. Um, give up a lot. You're going to get that funding, you're going to give up 20 or 30% of your business to do it, to get $1 million or $2 million. Or you can do, uh, or you may have already given up 10 or 15 or 20% in your seed or friends and family route. Okay, to raise $500,000. Or you can go out to your customers, potential customers, and do the hard thing— ask them to buy in in advance. Come up, figure out what that value proposition is, who that early adopter is, where they know they have to buy this product once it's available because how much it's costing them and how big the perceived impact is because of this problem they're struggling with. Find out who— figure out who that is. And then go out and ask them to buy the product early. Give them a high enough value proposition. It might even be a lifetime license or, you know, free implementation or whatever the high value thing is that's the trigger for them. Because if they give you the money that you need to the year, year and a half, 2-year license fee in advance, they get the lifetime license and free support and implementation services forever. You're giving away an immeasurable fraction of a percent of your market if you sign up 20 or 30 or 50 or 100 of these people and generate $500,000 or $1 million, $500,000 or $1 million from pre-launch sales. And, uh, uh, and you still have all your equity in your business, and you have all these committed beta customers. Whether it's an existing company putting out a new product or it's a brand new company, this is how, uh, how companies should launch products. If you can't sell your product in a pre-launch model, there's probably a problem with your business plan or with the product that you're trying to sell. And it's a really good acid test for whether this is the right product at the right time in the right market, or whether you need to pivot to something else. Um, uh, and you just keep testing until you realize it's the wrong product, or you find that path to revenue. In a predictable way where you get that 3-to-1 ratio that I talked about earlier. And now you've got a business. So the— you're coming from an industry, you've got a problem statement that you're— that you have a cellular connection to, right? And you can reach other people in the industry and validate they have the same kind of connection and go out and get those people to buy into your business early, um, not buy your business but buy the product, right? And get a high enough value proposition that it's— they don't want to miss out on the opportunity because it's too big a problem. They know they're going to need it. Uh, now you, you've established yourself as having a revenue model and growing customer base. And if you do want to accelerate through investment, having a discussion at that point with an investor is a completely different discussion because you've got a growing customer base and you don't even have a product on the market yet.

Okay, so here you go to all the listeners: the percentages are low that you will raise the money in the beginning. You want to establish something like a revenue module. You want to prove that you have something people want. That increases your odds. That will still take time, you know, likely a year, if not 3 years, where you, where you reach that point. Different success metrics, uh, for different angles. But ultimately, if you're on a boat with a tech startup and you're building something, your founder's mindset brought you there. Don't forget the signs and the mental shifts you need to do to go to the management mindset to continue scaling on the success path. So David, we gave some actionable tips here. I'm sure people listening realize the value you could provide. So if they want to get in touch with you, learn more about your First Launch Method, how would they do that?

Okay, um, so you would Find me at tekys.com, or you'd find my company at tekys.com, which is T-E-K-Y-Z. I'll spell it again, uh, because it's not how you would think of Tekys, but T-E-K-Y-Z.com. Um, you can email me directly at david@tekys.com, and my name is David Hirschfeld. You can look me up on LinkedIn. I'm easy to find on LinkedIn. Uh, um, And you can also listen to my brand new podcast called Scaling Smarter. It's on Apple and Spotify. It's just brand new though. So give it another week or two for more episodes to show up. But Mike, I really appreciated the time and the questions were excellent. And you're really, really good at drawing out specific things based on the stuff that I've talked about, and I really appreciate that.

Thank you, David. For our listeners, for your easiness and accessibility, just scroll down to the show notes. You'll see all the links to find David, and we're probably not gonna add your email to the show notes, David, because you're gonna get a lot of spam, so we'll skip that one. Um, but when it comes to the links to the website and your LinkedIn profile, it's going to be there. It was excellent, David. I really love What we just gave here for the listeners, there's some tangible, real actionable items to take out. And as minimum as I hope we raise some real questions in people's head. What mindset am I? Am I in my founder's mindset? Am I transitioning to leadership? Or, you know, am I growth mindset in general? Maybe I'm stuck. If we raise some, you know, questions like that in your mindset, the episode delivered. Thanks everyone, and as always, until the next time, stay safe and see you online.